Global Warming as an Eviction Notice?

It’s May 15th in Sonoma County. I live in the coastal wine region — a short 8-mile drive to the Pacific ocean. At this time of year the temperatures are supposed to range between highs of 70 and lows in the high 40s. Yesterday it was 94 degrees and today it’s supposed to top 104.

There’s already talk among wine growers, that in a few short years premium wine grapes will likely have to be grown further north, way further north. Because each years it’s getting too hot, too soon and too dry around these parts to reliably produce top-quality grapes. The soil is still willing, but the weather is just getting too squirrelly to take the risk. (Or maybe they can switch from selling premium wines to selling the most expensive raisins on earth.)


… We had it good, we humans, for a few hundred thousand years. One could say that the Old Testament’s Garden of Eden was simply a metaphor for the earth itself. It was so full of stuff, so full of clean water, rich soils, forests, oceans rich with life and food.

Adam and Eve were, the fable goes, told all of it was for them to enjoy … everything but the fruit of one tree — the Tree of Knowledge.

What was that a metaphor for?

Turns out it was a metaphor for fossil fuels.. oil and coal. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the Genesis fable promised power through knowledge, and all the real and imagined wealth and pleasures such power might provide.

Fossil fuels promised power through energy, and all the wealth and power that flow from their exploitation and use.

I have no idea if Adam and Eve got a knowledge rush from that bite of their forbidden fruit, but we sure as hell got a rush from ours. Oil and coal fueled an industrial revolution, improved standards of living, revolutionized transportation and allowed food production to keep up with an exploding human population.

Smirking Chimp