Monumental effort

By Tom Toles

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Friday rant: Power-of-imagination outage edition

Once again my house is without power. Unimaginable freak storm! Just like last year, and other recent years. A major U.S. city just can't provide basic electrical service to its residents. This is either an infrastructure problem or a "freak weather" problem. You can see where I'm going with this. (Disclaimers to the swarming crazies in the comments section: No, I am not attributing this one particular storm to climate change, and, yes, I know it is snow, not heat, so don't waste your time riffing on these things.)

There is speculation that the lack of polar ice is changing the jet stream so that arctic air has been dumping out all winter into the U.S., causing all the strange weather, but, again, the particulars are not my point. My point is this: While sitting in the dark in a cold house is far from the worst thing in the world, it's altogether plenty to remind you that a small variation in weather can yield outsize problems. A warming planet will not be all lounge-chair basking. Infrastructure is designed for the predictable. If severe weather events increase in severity and unpredictability, trying to keep up with them with infrastructure changes will be expensive and ultimately futile.

So it appears that it is beyond the imaginative capacity of people to visualize the impact of more frequent blizzards, windstorms, huge flood-causing rains, multi-year droughts, tornadoes, massive wildfires, farmland destruction, species destruction, coastline inundation, refugees and starvation. And you don't have to try if you close your eyes and pretend that all climate scientists are just making up every single bit of their evidence in history's biggest science prank! Somehow people have little trouble imagining THAT. And in any case, a bit of planetary havoc is a small price to pay for being able to sit up a little higher in your SUV! --Tom Toles

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