It's been a pretty epic summer. Not really for me (mostly I've been working) but for the planet. You've probably noticed, but the weather outside is getting pretty... freaky.
The USA is in the middle of its worst drought in twenty years (and in some states, since the Dust Bowl). There's an ongoing famine in the Horn of Africa and food shortages in the Sahel. There've been floods and landslides in British Columbia, the UK, Nigeria and Japan. In southern Russia, there were days where a month's worth of rain fell in less than 24 hours. In Siberia, there were forest fires so large, it's estimated they've burned nearly 100,000 square KM since June (even making the air here in Vancouver hazy for several weeks earlier this summer). I made a map of all the extreme weather events I knew about for my job at TckTckTck, which you can see here if you'd like to know more/get depressed.
I'd expected to hear more about these extreme weather events in the news, and in my ideal world, they'd even include a little context about why they were happening. But nearly all the news and weather reports I watched said the same thing:
"Tragic disaster."
"Isolated event."
"We can never know what is causing this."
In response, I collaborated with my friend Kai Nagata on creating some smart, eco and socially conscious web videos. As you can imagine, I found our first one, 'WeatherGirl Goes Rogue,' very therapeutic:
This post originally appeared on DeSmogBlog.com