One Burning Bush Used to Be Enough

IT’S AMAZING TO THINK there was a time when God could get one’s attention by setting a single bush on fire. Now, apparently, it takes the entire planet.

In the last 18 months or so, there’s been a lot of talk framing climate change as a lesser issue, that instead we’re concentrating on “affordability,” and so on. If that’s been true, our intermission is coming to an end. Meteorologists are predicting that a new El Niño will form in the Pacific later this summer, and that there’s a good chance it could be a “super El Niño,” only the third such occurrence in the last 30 years. But even if it’s just a “normal” massive injection of heat into the atmosphere, it will mean enormous trouble.

That’s because these recurring heatwaves now build on top of an ever-warmer global average temperature. Each one takes us further up the ladder—this year’s El Niño will probably stretch on for many months, all but guaranteeing that next year will set a new record for the hottest temperatures we’ve ever seen on this planet. And as each new step up this ladder sends us into the planet’s hot and stuffy attic, we’re finding an endless assortment of Horribles up there: floods, fires, but also an off-balance jet stream and an off-kilter Gulf Stream. For Americans, in particular, this comes at a bad moment: Even without an El Niño we just had the second-warmest winter on record in U.S. history, with more than a dozen western states setting or approaching their all-time records. There’s little in the way of snowpack out there—the melt is many weeks ahead of schedule—which means the firefighters are already on edge. Many, many, many burning bushes may be in the offing.

The only light silver lining to this jet-black cloud is that the physical terror the planet is about to unleash may combine usefully with the economic terror that’s resulting from our ill-advised war in Iran. Eventually people—even American people—will start to notice that they have an option to help with both these catastrophes. It’s that bright burning object up there in the sky, the one the good Lord was kind enough to hang at just the right distance. We now know how to capture its rays on those photovoltaic panels, producing power without adding carbon to the atmosphere and raising its temperature. And while sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. All in all, a winning possibility.

But we only get the win if we’re paying attention. There are all sorts of important things happening on this Earth right now, but the most important—the one that threatens billions of lives, and that will be read in the geological record for millennia to come—is the rapid heating. We’re getting one more reminder. Let’s take it.