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When it comes to extreme weather events, America’s traditional media outlets seem almost inherently incapable of connecting the dots between changing weather patterns, increasing common ‘extreme’ weather events, and Global Warming. Fires … droughts … floods … ever-increasing 500 and 100 year weather events and, well, the words “climate change” or “global warming” are rarely associated with the event and the science is increasingly clear about how global warming is (and will) magnify “natural” events into more extreme events. It seems that too many of America’s journalists never figured out, as children, how to make a larger picture, a greater understanding out of connecting the dots.

you’ll have to look very hard to find a single story in the mainstream media that even mentions climate change — even though the record “once-in-a-hundred-year flooding” the Midwest now seems to be getting every few years or so is precisely what scientists have been expecting from the warming

Well, unlike those journalists, Barack Obama seems to be able to play connect the dots and come to that larger understanding.

“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating,” Obama told reporters Monday. “If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of two degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’ That indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.“

Fargo, North Dakota, “teeters on the edge of disaster”. People are facing real, immediate life and property threatening waters. And, yes, these areas flood. Flooding is not new. But something seems to be different:

In the last twenty years, Red River floods expected to occur at Fargo only once every ten years have happened every two to three years. 2009 is the third year in a row with at least a “ten-year flood.” In the 90 years before 1990, there were only eight ten-year floods.

While it might be inappropriate to state that X weather event occurred simply because of global warming or that climate change is the sole cause behind some form of extreme weather situation causing disaster, note the caveats there: “simply” … “sole cause”. It is long past time to recognize that it is inappropriate to ignore (steadfastly) climate change in the discussion of changing weather and climatic conditions: including increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

The simply reality: we live in a world that is increasingly shaped by human-driven activities, human-driven global warming.

McKibben was fundamentally right 20 years ago and is clearly right today: we have passed The End of Nature in terms of atmospheric conditions. We now live in the Anthopocene Era. Co2 levels, globally, are 50% higher than would be the case today without human fossil fuel burning since the 19th century. Ocean pH level balance is different because of human fossil-fuel burning. We have changed the planetary conditions in which human civilization developed. Interacting with nature: The climate is now manmade. Weather events are now manmade. Weather disasters are now manmade.