on Dot.Earth and also running in NYT.

He’s pretty cautious about linking global weather extremes to global warming, and I understand that the denier population wants to single out any individual tornado, hurricane, flood, drought and make the point that the link with any single event is hard to make, but the link to the global pattern of extreme weather is simply a fact. It was predicted, it has arrived. Environmentalist activists need to be ready to push back against this clever and malevolent reframing of extreme weather. The pattern is clear, it was predicted, it is happening.

We now live on a planet with more extreme weather. The impacts will continue to be felt for a long, long time. The solution to this problem is a carbon tax levied at the point of production of greenhouse gas into the environment from every source that can be identified and taxed. So, carbon tax on gasoline, carbon tax on coal mines etc. It would be smart to use the carbon tax dollars to fund tax credits for clean energy, but maybe half of the carbon tax funds better go into reliefs.

I think about the Pakistan flooding and I think about the parable of the workers who are constantly working at the river pulling bodies from the river, trying to save folks in the river, and that is great work, very fulfilling and exciting, but somebody needs to go up the river and find out why/where/how the bodies are ending up in the river.

Up the river from the global pattern of extreme weather events is global warming.