The amazing thing about this title is that it has to be said at all.  There is only one world, and what happens to everyone else on this planet is going to happen to us too.  However the Trump-induced national insanity is such that the European heat wave has made zero impact on the national consciousness.   Those Europeans are just too stupid to understand air conditioning the way we do. We’re too good for climate change.

The Europeans have been hit by climate change that is beyond what their world is equipped to handle.  It  didn’t have to be very many more degrees to have a monumental impact.  This isn’t just a matter of personal discomfort.  Costs of crop failures are monumental, energy costs are way up, wild fires are burning in unheard-of places, and water levels in rivers are so low that they threaten cooling for nuclear power plants.  However as the following chart shows, we’re not so far behind.

The results for us will be different, because our national environment is different.  We do have air conditioning, but we are not equipped for the electricity needs to double at precisely the same time that we need more power for data centers—which also stress water supplies for cooling.  We do have a vulnerable agricultural sector and our own potential for wildfires.  We have not been spared because we are smarter. We’ve been lucky enough to get a little more time to prepare, and all we do is pat ourselves on the back.

I have to end by repeating what I’ve emphasized here before—there is NO NEW NORMAL we can somehow prepare ourselves to handle.  If we don’t address climate change things will just continue getting worse—more and more rapidly.  There is no alternative to action.  By now we have a pretty good idea what to do, both immediately and going forward.

We need to beat back the giddiness and do the work.