These Fires And Heat Waves Show Why They Call It Global Warming

In 1986, long before most people had ever heard of global warming or climate change, I went into the office of my new boss at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and asked her what we were doing. I’d been hired as junior scientific programmer a couple of weeks before. Now I had a basic handle on things and I wanted to know what kind of science were we doing.

‘We think the planet might be heating up” she said “We’re looking for the signal that it’s happening”.

Then she explained what the future would look like if they found that signal, if the Earth really was getting warming because of fossil fuels. Afterwards, I had to go out for long a walk to calm down.

That was 40 years ago. It turns out that, pretty much, everything she described that afternoon has come to pass. Now, as the Europe and the US undergo one punishing “heat dome” after another and uncontrollable forest fires make the air unhealthy for much of the Northeast, its a good moment to pause and reflect on what’s happening.

Four decades ago science had already identified the possibility that the large scale use of fossil fuels might trap enough solar energy to begin shifting the Earth’s climate state. That’s why some people called it Climate Change. All that heat, trapped by new Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere would, on average, increase the planet’s temperature. That’s why other people called it Global Warming. The predicted effects of these changes included… you guessed it … extended heat domes and increased forest fires.

So we knew this was going to happen. We’ve known for a long time. What we didn’t know was what it would feel like. That’s the big difference now. For years, global warming was an uptick on a graph, an abstraction. Now as it really begins in earnest, we can feel it as smoke in our throats. We can see it red skies at midday. We have to endure it as thousands of canceled flights due to extreme storms brought on by the heat domes.

That’s where we’re headed now. What we are seeing this summer is a kind of teaser trailer for global warming. As the years pass we’ll be getting to the actual trailer and then, by the time today’s children are well into adulthood, we will see the actual movie. It can’t predict the future but I can say with some certainty, it’s not going to be a comedy.