Last night in Portland, as the winds kicked up to 50 miles an hour, our sky turned a dark golden brown and the air filled with smoke. California is getting all the national news coverage, but the reality is that wildfires have consumed virtually every western state this summer.

This is what early-stage global warming looks like.

Derecho tornadoes across the Midwest, massive flooding, wildfires, droughts and crop failures, hurricanes with greater force and frequency, and weather that has generally gone crazy.

Like a lifelong smoker who discovers he has early stage lung cancer, our world has been bathed in carbon pollution from fossil fuels for a bit over a century and our biosphere is now seriously, potentially fatally ill.

The ice sheet in Greenland this summer was losing 1,000,000 tons of ice every minute. The ice sheets in Antarctica are becoming unstable and melting rapidly, too. Massive increases in sea level are also now on our increasingly near term event horizon.

It's imperative that our media and government recognize and acknowledge what's actually going on, and that we put back into place the Obama policies to cut back and eliminate our use of fossil fuels that Trump gutted. Then we need to take it a huge step forward from there with a green new deal and a massive transformation of our energy systems.

Even long term smokers with early stage lung cancer can recover from their condition. So can our earth's atmosphere, scientists tell us, if we act now. Every day that goes by is another lost opportunity that we increasingly can't afford to pass up.

-Thom