ABC News on Twitter: "BEAT THE HEAT: The record-breaking weekend temperatures in the West drove this bear family to seek relief in the cool waters of Lake Tahoe. https://t.co/CZaiomFtoE https://t.co/D1Vhx4PI9B" / Twitter You gotta click it. Okay, more of a cute OP than a political debate, but Business Insider is making the climate change argument. A family of bears marched past a crowd to cool off in Lake Tahoe - a cute, but terrifying, example of our climate-crisis dystopia (msn.com) This one incident doesn't prove anything, but the heat wave argument is sound. Heat waves can make both humans and animals desperate, and scientists are confident climate change is making heat waves worse. I've encountered bears dozens of times in the Sierra, though never a mother with cubs, and I don't go near them when they're gouging themselves from a dumpster, but all the lone bears I've seen kept their distance. Except for one which was as surprised to find me as I was to find him. I slowly pulled out my camera, and the sound the lens made as it focused scared him off. A bear family taking a dip in Lake Tahoe among tourists is something I've never seen. These bears are obviously desperate to cool off. The article presents heat wave data (which all show increases in intensity and length), and I find this conclusion to be interesting: "This is something that nobody saw coming, that nobody thought possible. And we feel that we do not understand heat waves as well as we thought we did," Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, who co-authored that study, said in a press briefing. "We are much less certain about how the climate affects heat waves than we were two weeks ago." What happened in the Pacific Northwest was impossible by current models. I absolutely trust the science regarding human induced global warming, but is there something else at work here? And aren't those bears the cutest tourists you've ever seen.
