This Is the Future Scientists Warned About

As out-of-control wildfires burned hundreds of homes in southern British Columbia this August, Cliff Chapman, director of operations for the province’s wildfire service, issued a sobering statement. “I cannot stress enough that the conditions we are facing right now are conditions that we have never seen before,” he told reporters.

Mr. Chapman, who has been fighting wildfires for over 20 years, could have made the same statement from Washington State, Croatia or many other places where similarly explosive wildfires have scorched neighborhoods and forced mass evacuations. These fast-moving, virtually irrepressible events are not the seasonal burns of decades past; they are the hazard lights of a heating climate, and they are flashing furiously. Rural and urban, East and West, we are entering a new era of civilizational risk and retreat.

It was inevitable to anyone that understands human nature.

We will rape and pillage this Earth. It’s what humans do.

Oof. This is bitter to read.

On a positive note, I am grateful that articles like this seem to be well past the point of ‘we need common-sense bipartisan market reforms’ and on to ‘the oligarchs are going to kill us all if we don’t stop them’. That’s a kind of progress.

I can’t see it because it is behind a paywall