Record Temps Meet Record Stupidity

Another take on the weather-meets-media phenomenon I wrote about yesterday, from Toby Barlow:

I'm once again completely blown away by the inability of the major media to connect the dots in even the most simplistic way. This Associated Press article on the heat wave is full of all sorts of cutesy comments about the current record heat, "I could use a pool out here", "Oh, I love it balmy." etc, but there is not ONE mention of the fact that this current trend is - in fact - a clear sign of global warming.

Meanwhile, we have George Bush for two more years and a rate of incumbency in the House and Senate making it hard to believe that any change is going to happen. And no matter what happens here, the Chinese are still building coal plants at a nice clipped pace and every species that doesn't have the blessing of central air (armadillos, crayfish, etc.) just keep heading north, you know, up to where the polar bears are dying. And the life that can't move, like the coral reefs, are slowly being cooked to death in the ocean's warming waters.

Once the heat gets high enough, melting the permafrost and releasing the enormous quantities of methane trapped below, our "record temperatures" will leap even higher. Then it's going to be real "balmy." Oh, yeah.

But there's not a single prominent world leader doing anything about it. Nero only had one fiddle; we've got a whole damn orchestra.

But then that's what bothered me the most about hot weather: you just can't think straight.