Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

July 24, 2012 Tomgram: William deBuys, The West in Flames [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Check out my hour on Media Matters with Bob McChesney on Sunday, where he and I talked about the militarization of the U.S. and of American foreign policy, and I discussed my latest book, The United States of Fear, as well as the one I co-authored with Nick Turse, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.  Tom] The water supply was available only an hour a day and falling.  People -- those who hadn’t moved north to cooler climes -- were dying from the heat.  Food was growing ever scarcer and the temperature soaring so that, as one reporter put it, you could "cook eggs on your sidewalk and cook soup in the oceans."  The year was 1961 and I was “there,” watching “The Midnight Sun,” a Twilight Zone episode in which the Earth was coming ever closer to the sun.  (As it was The Twilight Zone, you knew there would be a twist at the end: in this case, you were inside the fevered dreams of a sick woman on a planet heading away from the sun and growing ever colder.) In 1961, an ever-hotter planet was a sci-fi fantasy and the stuff of entertainment.  No longer.  Now, it’s the plot line for our planet and it isn’t entertaining at all.  Just over a half-century later, we are experiencing, writes Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone, “the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.” Speaking personally, this summer, living through a staggering heat wave on the East coast (as in much of the rest of the country), I’ve felt a little like I’m in that fevered dream from The Twilight Zone, and a map of a deep-seated drought across 56% of the country and still spreading gives you a feeling for just why.   Never in my life have I thought of the sun as implacable, but that’s changing, too.  After all, the first six months of 2012 in the U.S. were 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term norm and Colorado, swept by wildfires, was a staggering 6.4 degrees higher than the usual.  TomDispatch regular William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, catches the feel of living in a West that’s aflame and drying out fast.  (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which deBuys discusses where heat, fire, and climate change are taking us, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom The Oxygen Planet Struts Its Stuff Not a “Perfect Storm” But the New Norm in the American West By William deBuys Dire fire conditions, like the inferno of heat, turbulence, and fuel that recently turned 346 homes in Colorado Springs to ash, are now common in the West. A lethal combination of drought, insect plagues, windstorms, and legions of dead, dying, or stressed-out trees constitute what some pundits are calling wildfire’s “perfect storm.” They are only half right. This summer's conditions may indeed be perfect for fire in the Southwest and West, but if you think of it as a “storm,” perfect or otherwise -- that is, sudden, violent, and temporary -- then you don’t understand what’s happening in this country or on this planet. Look at those 346 burnt homes again, or at the High Park fire that ate 87,284 acres and 259 homes west of Fort Collins, or at the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire in New Mexico that began in mid-May, consumed almost 300,000 acres, and is still smoldering, and what you have is evidence of the new normal in the American West. Click here to read more of this dispatch.