With those in power wedded to fossil fuels, the world needs a stronger pro-science mass movement to drive climate action [View all]

During the hot summer of 1988, as swaths of Yellowstone National Park burned, we vacationed on the Oregon Coast. I took our standard poodle for a cool morning stroll on an ocean beach. The wet, sandy, happy hound then joined me in feeling the heat from The Today Show, a longtime morning fixture at NBC. Jolly weather forecaster Willard Scott was showing sobering heat wave maps.

We were in only one of two places in America — far north Maine and the Northwest Coast — below ninety degrees Fahrenheit.

The 1988 presidential campaign was meanwhile heating up across the country. The heat was widely predicted to be a major fall campaign issue.

It didn’t end up being so, even though White House hopeful Governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, made a photo op stop at Yellowstone. Instead, an escaped Massachusetts rapist, Willie Horton, took center stage.

Thirty-seven years have passed. The stakes and the gravity of the threat should be clear. After all, we are hot and choking in fire smoke. But no again. Our summers are such that I could drive six hundred-plus miles from Seattle to Canmore, Alberta, with smoke every mile of the way. Come fall, climate retreats as an issue.

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