There should be screaming headlines about it every day! Yes, every day! Our planet, the only one we live on (despite Elon Musk’s urge to go to Mars), is distinctly going down, down, down (at least as a viable place for us)!

But climate change, of course, is at best a secondary, if not a tertiary matter in the all-American news media! If you don’t believe me, just ask Donald Trump! No matter that Western Europe has just experienced temperatures and wildfires of a truly striking, if not unparalleled sort (after, mind you, having the hottest June in recorded history)! Or that the coming El Niño in the Pacific Ocean could make next year by far the hottest in human history! Or that parts of our world are ever more often quite literally on fire! Yes, Donald, we’re talking about a flaming mess of a planet! Can there be any doubt that we’re all now living in an exclamation-point world! (Whoops, once upon a time that sentence would have needed a question mark after it, but not on this planet, not anymore!)

Alright, alright!! I’ll try to stop using exclamation points (after this one)! Or maybe this one! Or…

Oh, sorry! I didn’t mean to keep doing that but, as you can undoubtedly tell, I’m all worked up — and with good reason — over what we human beings are now doing to this world and to ourselves (not to speak of every other living thing on planet Earth)! And worse yet, just imagine what Donald Trump and crew are doing to our children and grandchildren by assuring them of a future world (barring surprises) that will all too literally be in flames!! (And yes, under the circumstances, two exclamation points there are nothing more than a minimal response to our actual situation!!!)

Now, admittedly, Trump, who, after all, was elected twice by almost 50% of American voters, even though he made no secret about his attitude toward climate change, is not exactly alone (in case you hadn’t noticed). And if it turns out that you haven’t, then I think I’d better start adding some exclamation points again! In fact, if you’re not reading the British Guardian online, which has a genuine “climate crisis” section where you can normally check daily on the latest news about this overheating planet of ours, including recently the record-setting European fire season that spread from France and Spain to Sicily, Crete, and Greece in a rather startling fashion.

At the very moment I was writing this, here were the headlines in that Guardian section: “Britain could face food shortages, as drought continues“; “Relentless UK heatwaves turn ‘green and pleasant land’ brown, Visible impact of warming climate is impossible to ignore across landscapes that have been starved of rainfall”; “‘We cannot magic up more water’: the supply problems putting housing targets in England at risk”; “Democrats’ ‘climate hushing’ prompts activists to turn up the volume.“

And that last one on Trumpian America began all too aptly this way:[BLOCKQUOTE]”This summer, torrential rains have washed away Texas neighborhoods, dangerous heat has blanketed swaths of the country, and smoke from Canadian wildfires has choked communities as far south as Florida. Research makes clear that global warming is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. Yet the climate crisis has largely disappeared from the political agenda, with many Democrats who once described it as an existential threat now shying away from talking about it.”

Unfortunately, much of the time in much of our news media (including the New York Times, which this old man still reads in print daily), climate change and the nightmarish weather, heat domes, and fires that go with it remain largely passing news, and all too seldom front-page stories, especially when Donald Trump does his next mad thing like launching that disastrous war with Iran! Of course, if the news media were truly taking in what’s happening on this planet and what it means for our future, there would be screaming headlines about it daily, instead of just screaming headlines about “our” president and his latest mad set of acts. I mean, who shouldn’t be screaming when temperatures in France hit 112 degrees and, in embattled Iran recently, 127 degrees? And no, that is not a misprint and certainly deserves an exclamation point or two!!

Even my country, of course, is now starting to experience increasing numbers of “heat domes,” despite “our” president’s wishes. And as Stephen Prager recently reported at the Common Dreams website, “Over the past decade, the average annual acreage burned in the U.S. was more than double the average of the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.”

And yes, I said it once but let me say it again (after all, you really can’t say this sort of thing too often in this strange world of ours), the headlines should indeed be screaming when it comes to climate change and, of course, the coverage on the television news and in social media should be similarly striking. No such luck, of course! And believe me that exclamation point (like the other ones in this piece) is all too apt, since, in climate-change terms, we are increasingly on a planet that’s doing little short of screaming at us to pay attention — or do I mean: attention!!!!!?

This is (or at least should be) major news daily on our increasingly embattled planet, no matter how often, from war to his polling numbers, Donald Trump manages to catch (and hold) our attention.

Yes, these days, whatever he’s doing all too ineffectively, he’s doing all too effectively when it comes to taking our attention away from the overheating of this planet, including his most recent failed war in the Middle East and his endless threats of even worse globally. In a sense, “our” president has an unceasing urge to leave climate change in the local dumpster, while he continues to make war (and I’m not just thinking of his war on Iran here) on all of us and this planet itself in the most devastating manner imaginable!!!

This article was produced by Tom Engelhardt.

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