Even columnists need editors

In an otherwise thoughtful column today, a local writer shows the need for fact-checking.

In recent months, catastrophic weather events have dominated headlines as rarely before — earthquakes and tsunami in Asia; volcanic cloud in Europe; massive ice melts at the poles; tornadoes, floods, and fires in America. “Records are not just broken,” an atmospheric scientist said last week, “they are smashed.” Without getting into questions of causality, and without anthropomorphizing nature, we can still take these events as nature’s cri de coeur — as the degraded environment’s grabbing of human lapels to say, “Pay attention!”

I am pretty sure that earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes are not "weather events." And, I do not believe any one has suggested that human influence has yet reached the point of intrusion into geological events of this magnitude.