It’s fucking hot. 108 in Portland, 115 in Medford, Oregon. Those are typical for us here, where central air meets central Arizona. But now you can’t escape the heat even if you fly 1000-miles north.

Just because the heat is on, now is not the time to scream “climate change.”

Sure, sure it’s a logical consequence of any greenhouse effect. You put more CO2 in any confined airspace and the temperature is going to go up. The Earth’s atmosphere may be a bigger scale, but it’s just like leaving the lid on the turtle’s terrarium. If the turtle keeps breathing, the temp keeps climbing.

Why not scream climate change now? It’s the same answer we give every winter. Climate-deniers pick up a snowball and scream hoax. “See snow. I’m cold. There is no global warming.”

Weather is not climate in the winter; weather is not climate in the summer. So don’t go preaching because this week or this month it’s hot.

It is fighting on the wrong ground. We are ceding the argument to the stupid who can only see what is immediately in front of their face. That’s where climate-deniers flourish.

Let’s focus on the bigger pictures:

• Burning forests
• Setting new average temperature records almost every year
• Warming oceans (so much that fish need to move)
• Rising sea level

Time to make money

But even those arguments are not likely to work.

Change is already here. All we can do is slow it down or find ways to deal with a hotter/drier/stormier Earth. Personally, I’ve given up on the “Save the Planet” campaigns. It’s obvious to me not enough people can see past their own wallets to give a shit about the survival of their own children or grandchildren.

Real change will come when it’s time to make money.

Now is a good time to give up on your “summer” cabin in the woods. The forests that haven’t burnt down already, will either do so soon, or be just as hot as the city.

It’s a good time to invest in air conditioning north of San Francisco. There’s money in duct work, compressors and condensers. Hell, it’s a good time to sell ice to the Eskimos — or anyone with skin that can feel this heat.

Bullshit readers already know about my idea to lower the oceans and ease the drought. That’s right, let’s use the sun to heat salt into a molten mass, then pass sea water over the top to make steam — cheap electricity and new fresh water. Two birds with one set of solar panels.

There’s plenty of useless land on earth (did someone say Central California/western Arizona) that is at or below the current sea level and would be ideal places for solar desalination power and electricity.

But if these temps keep up, we won’t even have to go that far. Most highly populated areas are near the coasts.

We can just put cooling towers in downtown Portland and Seattle. Let the sea water run down the tower and evaporate to cool the air and produce future rain clouds. Or cover buildings with a “skin” that evaporates sea water to cool the building.

Yes, sea water sucks. It’s expensive to move. It corrodes everything it touches. Like human blood, it keeps us alive and it’s a toxic waste all at the same time.

But 2000 years ago, the Romans figured out a way to cast concrete in the sea. Some of those structures are still working and seem to get stronger every day. (Yes this news comes from Pliny the Elder — the historian not the beer).

If the goddamn Christians had not burned the libraries and the books from the Greeks and the Romans, we would probably have the recipe for Roman concrete. But they did, so we don’t. Now we will have to reverse engineer our way to building concrete structures that can resist seawater and make desalination cheap.

When we do, that’s when we can make some real money off rising seas, drought and lack of fresh water.

I don’t know if you call it irony, but it’s not lost on me that the people who burned the potential solution to this problem 1800 years ago, follow the same “book”and crazy ideas that fuel most of the current crowd of climate-deniers. Yep, this one is pretty easy to pin on the Christians. Where are the lions when we really need them?

As we are all dealing with this new found hell on Earth, now is a good time to figure out how to make money by keeping cool. Portland and Seattle, welcome to the world according to Phoenix and Tucson. Summers are going to suck. Spend the money on your air conditioning — it’s worth it.