Here in Boise, ID it's been between 100 and 110. I remember these temperatures 15 years ago when I worked outdoors but what I don't remember is the humidity. It's odd to be sitting outside at midnight at 90 degrees and 30% humidity, which feels like midwest weather. It's more usual for the high desert to get down to the 70s or even 50s at night with any altitude.

While this may be more of a random fluctuation than full on global warming, I’m concerned because weather has been strange for years now. We often get excessive rain for months in the spring, which didn’t used to happen. The weather in this location is getting more moderate, while the rest of the country seems to be getting more extreme (this is one of the long term predictions of global warming).

IMHO there is a connection between widespread die offs and weather that hasn’t been studied well yet. I’m too young to remember what the northwest was like before things like wildfire control threw everything out of balance. Imagine 150 years ago - there were large animal herds, dense lush forests, pristine waters, and one of my favorites: 10 foot tall sagebrush as far as the eye could see where now we only have cheatgrass.

If you go out in the wilderness today, there is so little wildlife. Big game is rare, no wolves, a handful of bears, few to no birds, orders of magnitude less fish due to dams. We really have no frame of reference for what settlers witnessed, when life was everywhere they looked.

In these death zones, we are seeing some pretty apocalyptic $#!@:

http://www.cdhd.idaho.gov/news/current/groundsquirrelplague....

The world is so much sicker than anyone realizes. All areas are in decline, so if you look at things like timber and fishing, the numbers are down 50%, even 90% of where they started. What we do have in abundance now is pests. Mosquito abatement for West Nile virus is a requirement here now. Pine beetles scurry everywhere you look, leading to the not-so-distant demise of rocky mountain forests. So it makes sense to me that global warming may show a blip of 3% off normal and result in these wide swings. Think of how missing wetlands affect hurricane flooding, but now apply that to all chaotic systems everywhere. I don’t know how anyone could come to the conclusion that everything is fine (in other words, that chaos is at a stalemate or diminishing).

So that’s my radical environmentalist explanation. Global warming is one thing, but the widespread famine of the natural world is looming within our lifetimes and I find that really uncanny. Unfortunately people generally only ponder what’s right in front of their faces rather than extrapolating how it all plays out. Although in fairness, if doing the projections leads to the same hollow realization that nothing can be done, then there’s something to be said for denial. At least we still have good beer! It’s important to keep a balanced perspective on these things and not let them get you down too much.

My personal solution to this is to live as a hipster and try to make enough money that I can not be too much of a burden on the planet (living close to work etc). Unfortunately there’s a case to be made that income and carbon footprint are relatively synonymous, due to the level of infrastructure needed to acquire it. Living as a hermit doesn’t really help either because we are capable of contributing more than 0 solutions to the problem. So I always find myself back at square one with the struggle against ineffectualism. This may be a natural evolution in global consciousness, but I just hope that it happens fast enough that it’s not all gone before we have the spiritual means to step outside the consumer capitalism matrix and do something.