With all the 'unprecedented' things happening here and elsewhere, the climate change debate seems to have faded into the background somewhat. Yet if the raging wildfires in America are indications of anything, it must be this. Another 'unprecedented' is the timing and intensity of the American hurricane season. The governor of Washington State has just issued a blistering diatribe against those who still try to deny that climate change exists.

My sister happens to live in Oregon and while she is safe from the fires, she has not escaped the smoke. She has been sending me photos of the hazy sky and has commented on how much the smoke has dropped the temperature by blocking the sun. She says this demonstrates how easily volcanic eruptions could have triggered climate change and an ice age in the past (and a nuclear war might in the future). The point isn't so much whether the temperature goes up or down, but how these things interact and affect the environment we depend on.

What has struck me, and motivated me to restart this discussion, is how exactly everything that was being predicted just a couple years ago is coming to pass. At the moment it is the unparalleled wildfires. But it is also the heat waves, and the spread of tropical diseases, and the interruptions of food supplies, and the conflicts over fresh water, and all the other things that are happening exactly as it was said they would only a few years ago, except they are happening much faster than predicted.

Maybe the economic fallout from the pandemic will turn out to be a blessing in disguise if it slows the pace of the climate disaster. In any case, we should not let the fires and the storms (like the unexpectedly forceful typhoon that just sank the livestock ship) and the race demonstrations and the extremist violence and American politics and our own election and the pandemic and the unbelievable cascade of once in a hundred years events and catastrophes sweeping over us, make us forget the crucial underlying issues at the root of this all. The big one is climate change. It s real, it is devastating, and it is something to be taken very seriously.