Death Toll Figure Approaches Temperature in California Heat Wave

I recently saw the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth. It was okay. I learned a lot of science stuff. For some odd reason though, Al Gore would go off on these tangents that had nothing to do with global warming. For instance, the film kept drifting off into what I like to Gore’s Land of Self Pity. There were the obligatory “losing the election” and “growing up on a farm” scenes, but there were also some sad and kind of unnecessary sequences. Namely, he chronicled the loss of his sister to lung cancer and the near loss of his son to a car accident. I’m not an idiot, I could see the analogy he was making with these stories, I got it. However to me, they just seemed gratuitous. But that’s neither here nor there and, like I said, I dug the science.

Now, let me tell you about something I am not digging: the godforsaken heat wave that is sweeping the entire nation. I live in New Jersey and it has been consistently above 90 everyday for the last two or three weeks and, while this sucks, trust me, I am not complaining. This is pancakes compared to the temperatures that have hit the west coast. By the time this story is published, it’s more than likely that the death toll from the California heat wave will have eclipsed the actual thermometer readings that are causing it.

This is a major problem. And not just a “this is a major problem because a lot of people are dying right now” kind of problem. This is a big deal because it allows Americans to see global warming in real time. I am 25 years old and I cannot recall a summer in New Jersey when there’s been this many consecutive days of high heat without a respite. Somewhere, Al Gore is sitting with his computer and snickering, not a “ha-ha, I predicted this” snicker but a “fuck, what has to happen before people wake up” snicker.

I don’t want to get into the science of the matter, I’m not a scientist, you can go see An Inconvenient Truth if you want statistics. I’ll just say that I believe it’s very real and that in my lifetime, if nothing is done to change it, well, shit’s gonna get crazy.

The shit I’m talking about, as per Mr. Gore’s movie, is the redesign of the global map and the loss of hundreds of millions of lives. The kind of shit that will make a California heat wave, and even Katrina, look like peanuts.

And yes, I used peanuts and pancakes as functioning describers in the course of this article. I also swear that I am 25 and not 65, even if my writing style says differently.