The Earth, Heating Up Fast

ITS OFFICIAL. Twenty twenty three (2023) was, by far, the hottest year on record. Where I live, the summer seemed especially hot, so,I am not surprised. Not only was last year the hottest ever, but it beat it next closet competitor, which may have been twenty sixteen, by a good part of a degree, a very wide margin. Climate change, it seems, is accelerating. Accurate, reliable record keeping goes back nearly two hundred years. 2023 may possibly have been the hottest year in the last one hundred thousands years. By this time of year, about fifteen percent of the great Lakes are usually frozen. Right now, the percentage is closer to one percent. All over the world, glaciers and polar icecaps continue to melt, at an accelerating rate. By the end of this century, if we don't act, there will be no free standing ice left on Earth. Right now, where I live, it is, of course, mid-January, the middle of winter, and is suppsoed to be, in general, cold. In the last few days the temperature has reached sixty, then plummeted to below freezing withn hours, while a gale force wind blew non stop for days, and tornado warnings were issued, with violent thunder storms pounding the area. Then, it rained hard, as the temperature dropped precipitously, and ice covered roads were possible, predicted. In short, the weather has been crazy, is becoming crazier, seemingly, every year. I've heard people wish for spring. I comfort them by saying that it'll be here before they know it. I do not share what seems to me their strange desire to hasten the future into the present. As Einstein said: "I never think much about the future. It arrives soon enough". And how! I dread this coming summer, the summer of 2023. How ungodly hot will it get? What I fear is that within about five years or less we are going to start having summers in the American midwest, south, and southwest in which the daytime temperatures exceed one hundred degrees daily, for weeks on end. Every year, it seems we have at least one serious drought, and usually more than one. Drought with no rain for weeks. The local streams and creeks run dry, rivers look shallow, and water levels in local lakes drop to record lows. Trees begin to turn brown in August. My area is tree covered hills and mountains. In most wilderness areas here, the forest floors are filled with dead wood, as if they have not burned in many generations. The next time they burn, which is inevitable, the wildfires will be extremely well fueled, and massive. I know that sooner rather than later those famous western wilffires will spread eastward, and into th lower midwest, and eventually will cover and comsume the whole country. The eastern United States is far more heavily forested than the relatively barrn west; the wildfires of the future east will be enormous. After the fires, will the wooded forests return? Or will my heavily forested biosphere evolve, eutrophy into grasslands, prairie country, with fewer and fewer trees? And after that, what? Desert? We are told that it is not too late to avoid the worst consequences of cliamte change, if we act now, but that a certain amount of climate change is inevitable, is already baked into the environment by the one trillion tons of carvon we put and left in the atmosphere. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the inevitable "baked in" climate change we are experiencing is going to become much, much worse than now, and its bad now.