This is a guest post by Heather Libby.
It's been a pretty epic summer. Not really for me (mostly I've been working [1]) 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 [2] (and in some states, since the Dust Bowl [3]). There's an ongoing famine in the Horn of Africa [4], and food shortages in the Sahel [5]. There've been floods and landslides in BC [6], the UK [7], Nigeria [8] and Japan [9]. There were days where a months worth of rain fell in less than 24 hours [10] in southern Russia. In Siberia, there were forest fires so large, it's estimated they've burned nearly 100,000 square KM since June [11] (even making my home Vancouver's air hazy for several weeks [12] 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 [13].
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 [15] on creating some smart, eco and socially conscious web videos [16]. As you can imagine, I found our first one, 'WeatherGirl Goes Rogue', very therapeutic:
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