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image from Toothpaste for Dinner

The reality of climate change is threatening all of us. It’s cute, perhaps, to claim planets will do better with more CO₂ in the air, or that frigid countries farther north will be warmer. But that’s a crock. The reality is that weather patterns will change. We’ll get more floods in some areas, more droughts in others, more powerful storms, more forest fires (at a time when the U. S. Forest Service is out of money), and worse.

I look out my window, and to my west the Rocky Mountains are bare; the amount of snow and ice I can see at their peaks is very small—just like it was last year, and the year before. But usually, even in the height of summer, the tops of those mountains are dazzlingly white with snow. Colorado supplies water to many other states in the U.S., and this decade-long drought is starting to have real impact on other regions. It’s likely to get worse, not better.

Am I being alarmist? I don’t think so; I’m being realistic, in the true sense of the word. The problem is, the reality is alarming.
-by Phil Plait for Bad Astronomy, full post here.