Diminishing Season

Once upon a time, backcountry aficionados could anticipate summers of wandering the wilderness areas of the West in search of peace, solitude and perhaps a few photographs. No more. That was 20 years ago now, as climate change has led to perennial forest fire smoke obscuring the atmosphere.

This year, the Bootleg Fire in Southern Oregon spotted by a USFS lookout on Calimus Butte, primed by months of drought and a record heat wave, has become the largest in the U.S. this season, burning over 400,000 acres of forests as a towering cloud of smoke reaches airliner heights.

Talk about apocalypse now. Heat waves are becoming more prevalent, and forests are incinerating everywhere, from California to Siberia. Summers that seemed unusually hot are becoming the norm. That alone is reason enough to to move quickly to reduce greenhouse gases now.

But there's so much more. Unprecedented floods in Europe, devastating monsoons in India, lethal "red tide" killing marine life off the coast of Florida, leaving dead fish reeking on beaches, and an iceberg nearly the size of Puerto Rico has broken off from Antarctica.

The situation is drastic; the greater our emissions of heat-trapping gases, the higher the temperatures and the greater the health risks. Last year was the warmest on record. The atmosphere is reacting to the weakening of the jet stream, causing increasingly uncharacteristic weather conditions.

Yes, it has been hot, and scientists expect if will get even hotter unless drastic action if taken to deal with greenhouse gases. How hot will depend on what is done to affect climate change. Meanwhile, backcountry adventures will be limited by forest fires, and Mother Nature is incensed.