Editor, The Times:
In that great Tora! Tora! Tora! there’s a scene right after the Japanese attack has begun in which an officer who had insisted on “information” before he would sound the alarm busts into the headquarters, a bonafide look on his face.
A certain Kaminsky who had previously urged that a general alarm be sounded as an attack on Pearl Harbor appeared to be imminent points out the window where a zero is just flying by—”You wanted confirmation, there’s your confirmation.”
After I sat on my couch a couple weeks ago, looking out my living room window at the smoke obscuring the trees behind Wadlegger’s field, I had to reflect, do we still need more information? Isn’t the smoke that obscures the Thompson Valley enough?
Not only that, but B.C. literally fumes up end to end—one of the only places not affected is where I originally came from—Queen Charlotte Islands—Haida Gwaii and around Prince Rupert—wet as always.
But the “Fires of Hell” as my waggish friend put it, are consuming the rest of B.C. in grand style. If it were just B.C. it wouldn’t be so bad, but look at Ontario, the super fires in Northern California—the drought in the UK and Scandinavia—Scandinavia for God’s sake!!?
Some of this smoke that makes it hard to breath here in Clearwater is said to come Siberia?!
The Northwest and Northeast Passages are wide open, the ice that spilled John Franklin and crew and many others is long gone. Glaciers are disappearing right before one’s eyes. Water, water everywhere. The storm surges flood New York City’s subways.
In Miami, Florida you have to wear gumboots to walk certain roads at high tide?
And as Robert Fisk pointed out years ago in the Independent, if snow falls in an unlikely place—Mexico City, say?—it really means that climate change is happening.
Not some mythical “global cooling”—although I’ve been told that in this extreme heat something about the “refrigeration effect” could trigger a new ice age? First the fires of Hades then cold as hell, one might say.
Well, at the moment of writing this letter, it is rather cool, but that’s because there’s a great pall of smoke caused by hundreds of fires hanging above everything.
Global warming—climate change, look out the window.
You want confirmation? There’s your confirmation!
Dennis Peacock
Clearwater, B.C.
