Screening a Movie

Trey Smith

Americans -- particularly those of you in the Midwest Region -- are getting the wonderful opportunity to screen the next big blockbuster movie: The Coming Years. This film doesn't sport any big named stars; it's made up of an ensemble cast of millions. The central plot involves how modern society deals with the return of the Dust Bowl.

Of course, it's not REALLY a movie: It's a preview of days to come...if those silly climate scientists turn out not to be so silly after all!

This is the part of the drought -- the one that's gripping over one-half of the continental US -- that I fear too many people don't get. Too many of them view it as a climate anomaly, something that comes around every few generations or so. The thinking is that it won't be this bad again for a long, long time. People just need to get through this one and then things will return to "normal."

What they seem to be missing -- either willfully or because of ignorance -- is that climate scientists have been predicting that summers like this one will be the NEW normal. All these record setting high temperatures are being treated like "once in a lifetime" news stories by the mainstream media. In subsequent summers, this may well seem like old hat!

If you live in the parts of the country that are sweltering under furnace-like temperatures, do you want to look forward to these same types of conditions EVERY summer? If so, then go about your business as usual. If not, then maybe it's time to listen closer to what climate scientists are saying.

If we don't start changing our ways pronto, we may find that all of us are "stars" in an epic horror movie.