Peter Sinclair of Climate Denial Crock of the Week edits this video of extreme weather from news footage that makes it look like a disaster movie. Why is it so effective? These are incidents from summer 2012 so far - showing apocalyptic conditions with heat waves, wilfdfires, and blackouts.

 

 

It's called "Welcome To The Rest Of Our Lives" after a key line in Eugene Robinson's Washington Post editorial describing our new reality. For more information from the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Adminstration about our hottest year on record, check out this story on Think Progress.

Here's an excerpt from Robinson's editorial:

Yes, it’s always hot here in the summer — but not this hot. Yes, we always have thunderstorms — but never like these. (The cliche is true: It did sound like a freight train.)

According to scientists, climate change means not only that we will see higher temperatures but that there will be more extreme weather events like the one we just experienced. Welcome to the rest of our lives.

This is the point in the column where I’m obliged to insert the disclaimer that no one event — no heat wave, no hurricane, no outbreak of tornadoes or freakish storms — can be definitively blamed on climate change. Any one data point can be an anomaly; any cluster of data points can be mere noise.

The problem for those who dismiss climate change as a figment of scientists’ imagination, or even as a crypto-socialist one-worldish plot to take away our God-given SUVs, is that the data are beginning to add up.

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