Record temperatures and global heating

I've been looking at media reports of record summer temperatures in various parts of the world. For example, this July has been the warmest in Moscow since records began to be kept 130 years ago, with the thermometer reaching 100 degrees F. for the first time in that city. People in northern India has been suffering badly, especially from the accompanying water shortage.

But much more frightening than what these reports say is what they are careful NOT to say -- about the connection between these record temperatures and the planetary process that they reflect, that is, global heating (a more expressive term than the gentler "global warming"). Reports either fail to mention the broader planetary situation at all, or else they quote some scientist remarking that temperatures in any particular year are not direct evidence of global warming. Quite likely, the scientist goes on to say something more definite about the trend over a run of years, but that part is omitted. So it is still the policy of the media owners to conceal the planetary situation from their audiences, despite the assurances from some of them that their policy has changed.

Eventually more and more people will manage to work out what is happening. Then complacency will give way to hysteria. Quite unwarranted hysteria, of course. Our marvelous civilization will surely survive for a few more years in the Arctic region, where the plutocrats can continue extracting their favorite beverage, OIL, until the temporary survivors, including the plutocrats themselves, finally croak in the methane-saturated atmosphere.