The Greatest Horror Story Ever Told
And it’s happening right now…
I turned on the TV last night after I’d finished all my jobs for the day and Panorama’s “2021: A Year of Wild Weather” was on. I started watching and I soon found out that this was actually a horror film, not just a documentary. It showed extreme weather events all across the world due to global warming and the devastation that each caused.
First, there was a localised heat dome that formed over British Columbia in Canada. The heat broke temperature records by 4 degrees celsius (a magnitude of which is extreme in itself as most records are broken by only 0.5c). The hot weather caused the forests to catch fire and the nearby village burned to the ground killing hundreds of people who couldn’t escape in time.
Then there was flooding in the Rhine basin of Germany that destroyed homes, livelihoods and more lives. There was a harrowing scene where one house was lifted clean off its foundations from the immense power of the water and it became drifting debris, joining floating cars and trees all of them smashing into other houses and whatever else happened to be in their path.
Next, there was the lethal cocktail of air pollution and sandstorms in Seoul, South Korea. Here people wore face masks even before the pandemic because the air quality is so dangerous…