THIS IS WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE LOOKS LIKE!

Images of fires in Oregon

This Is What Climate Change Looks Like! 

These horrific climate fires are so devastating. Right now there are 38 active fires, more than 500,000 are evacuated, and nearly 1,000,000 acres have burned in Oregon. There are many people we know who are evacuated. It’s so incredibly surreal, scary, and sad. 

Ron and I have been needing to keep the windows of our home in Vancouver WA closed, but it’s still smoky inside. That said, it's also important for me to acknowledge that we’re among the lucky ones who are not evacuated and haven’t lost everything.

Regarding the devastation of climate disruption that is occurring in America and worldwide, we are tragically the only nation on Earth debating climate change. As to these catastrophic wildfires burning across the West, there’s a much, much larger picture here than the need to clear out underbrush and better manage our forests. We’ll all be witnessing this as these catastrophic climate fires continue year after year and millions of climate disruption refugees are created. 

I’m going to ask that everyone also please consider watching a documentary that my youngest son highly recommended to us, and which Ron and I just watched last night. It’s called The Social Dilemma: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uaaC57tcci0. The full documentary can also be seen on Netflix or here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/La4bn8sqNvM. It’s excellent and explores in-depth some crucial reasons behind why we’ve come to see things — like climate change and countless other critical issues — so differently, how we’ve reached this point of extreme polarization, and how there is so much debate about what is the truth.

 

Another excellent documentary that highlights why it is that our nation is the only one in the world still debating if climate change is real is Merchants of Doubt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ii9zGFDtc. The full documentary can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_1dyaXfX-w.

 

I’ve been doing a deep dive into researching our changing climate for a decade now, and especially since reading Bill McKibben's Eaarth: http://billmckibben.com/eaarth/eaarthbook.html. It is so chilling, so frightening, and so incredibly sad to now be witness of so many predictions coming true. Just makes me weep. Truly, I've been in a lot of grief. What I know today is that we are being hit on all fronts with the impact of our warming climate. Our Earth has long been screaming that we humans must, absolutely must, stop poisoning her.

It’s so incredibly important to connect the dots with all the diverse forms of climate disruption — record breaking wildfires and hurricanes and tornadoes, devastating droughts and floods, searing summer heat and enormous winter storms, melting glaciers and rising seas, crop failures and millions of climate refugees, habitat destruction and species die offs and the sixth major extinction that we’re in, etc., etc. — with the fact that the level of CO2 in our atmosphere has risen from 350ppm (parts per million) to over 400ppm.

 

Ours is the first major extinction that is man made. We’re all at risk. We need to be courageous enough to really do a deep dive into our research and know the facts about our warming climate.

 

The Earth is now forever changed. And this is just the beginning of far worse climate disruptions to come. Our denial, ignorance, and failure to act over the past four decades has already had national and global catastrophic consequences. We have no time left to do nothing and to justify a continuation of the deadly status quo.

 

It’s essential that we inform ourselves and unite nationally and globally to declare a Climate Emergency and enact a fierce and comprehensive Green New Deal NOW. The lives of our children and grandchildren and all the children of all the species everywhere are depending on our standing in protection of them and our Earth Mother.

 

Everything, absolutely everything that we love and cherish is at stake. — Molly