On Thursday, a reader emailed to point out that 120 years ago, Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, visited Vancouver during an around-the-world lecture tour. Clemens was bankrupt due to the failure of his publishing house, and had arranged the tour to pay off his debts.

He arrived here in mid-August, only to find the town engulfed in haze.

“The smoke is so dense all over this upper coast,” he wrote, “that you can’t see a cathedral at 800 yards.”

Drought afflicted much of Oregon, Washington and B.C. that summer, and the big coastal forests were on fire. Travelling north up the coast from Portland, Clemens found the smoke so constant it affected his voice. He had trouble getting through his lecture here for all his coughing.

Fast forward 120 years. The emailer, alluding to the pall of forest fire smoke that fell over Metro Vancouver this week, ended his note with a verbal shrug:

“Plus ca change … ”

Which is to say, en anglais, “the more things change,” and to finish the quote that he left unwritten, “… plus c’est la meme chose,” the more they stay the same.

Well, yes.

But no.

Clemens lived during the heyday of the Industrial Age. Droughts were assumed to have been caused by Nature.

We’re living in the toxic aftermath of the Post-Industrial Age. The suspicion is this year’s drought has been caused by Man.

However droughts, the doubters would say, are transitory by definition. They come and go. Correlation does not imply causation. There is a difference between changeable weather and climate change.

But living as we do in the backdrop of climate change, who of us looking at the bronze sky and bloodshot sun of earlier in the week didn’t wonder if it was our doing? A morning newscaster, who had never seen such weather here, described it as “apocalyptic.” I think it was meant as a descriptive comment, not an editorial one. But who wants to make that bet — that it wasn’t, in fact, apocalyptic — given the stakes?

It’s a tiring, dispiriting, exhausting thought, climate change. The mind recoils from it. I can’t watch nature shows anymore for fear of The Polar Bear Postscript — the one in which the narrator delivers the bad news, how changing climate and habitat destruction threaten the already declining numbers of the (insert name of animal here). So reader, if you’ve survived this far into the column, or even past the headline, I applaud you. And sympathize.

But is there any other story for our times? It overshadows all. It wears at us in so many forms we have become calloused to it. Researchers at the University of B.C. reported this week that populations of more than 500 monitored seabird species have declined by 70 per cent since 1950. I repeat: 70 per cent in 65 years. If that’s not apocalyptic, I’ve misunderstood the meaning of the word. That news ran as an “In Brief” on the bottom of Page A5 in Friday’s Sun. The story of bumblebees dying out because they are caught in a “climate vise” and are unable to shift their ranges northward to cooler climes ran on Page B3 of Friday’s Sun. And the story of attempts to save Africa’s last remaining 20,000 rhinos from poachers ran on B9. That is where news goes to die, not just animals.

This isn’t a criticism of The Sun. This is business as usual for newspapers and media outlets and the public consciousness everywhere. There is only so much bad news you can deliver, repeat and digest. There’s such a thing as reader fatigue.