Analysis Of The Big Heat By Elizabeth Morbert

Just because it is not happening here, it does not mean it is not happening. That is what reporter Elizabeth Kolbert would have said to the entire American population on climate change if she could go back in time. Kolbert, in her New Yorker article “The Big Heat”, argues that Americans have been extremely busy handling insignificant situations happening in their regional level that they have forgotten to deal with the most atrocious social issue of all: global warming.

At the begging of the article, Kolbert emphasizes on how indifferent Americans have been for several years regarding this matter. To enhance her argument, the author writes, “in the Arctic, Americans were told (again and again and again), the effects were particularly dramatic.”

She believes that even though Americans were warned multiple times, global warming was never (ever) their top priority. Instead, they spent their times debating only on personal-level tremendously important issues such as Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories. She mentions the horrifyingly wicked conditions native Alaskans, polar bears, penguins, and even corns are facing. But, then again, Alaskans live in Alaska, polar bears and penguins are far away, and corns… corns are simply corns. So, the author admits that although news from the Arctic was arriving in American territory, the American territory had no empty space for news that was not their own.
Elizabeth Kolbert recognizes that “the summer of 2012 offers Americans the best chance yet to get their minds around the problem.” Because of the alarming circumstances that Colorado, Indiana, and the states between Illinois and the Atlantic Coast faced during these times, the author has her hopes high for Americans to finally address global warming.

As far as she is concerned, Americans only pay attention to regional-level issues. She reports the extremely dry and hot conditions in some states of the United States and the savagely violent thunderstorms in other states. The author portrays the heat wave that reached Indiana and Colorado by saying, “temperatures rose into the triple digits for ten days, reaching as high as a hundred and seven degrees.” After, she describes a long line of thunderstorms named super derecho that took the life of at least thirteen persons. Kolbert illustrates these two events in the United States to force Americans and politicians to view climate change as an issue of great concern to the country. Yet, she later mentions that “along with the heat and the drought and the super derecho, the country this summer is also enduring a Presidential campaign.” Elizabeth Kolbert touches upon the coming Presidential campaign to emphasize (again) that Americans keep spending their time in what they believe to be much more important issues than the destruction of our

world.
Kolbert argues that the reality that there are these extreme weather variations around the United States should be enough motivation for politicians and citizens to acknowledge the repercussion of their (in)actions towards climate change. But, in spite of the fact that this is happening, “there’s no discussion of what could be done to avert the worst effects of climate change.” She believes that the inability of Americans to stand against global warming can be labeled as insanity. The certainty that Americans are not prioritizing this issue, Kolbert argues, will bring “the return of the sort of climate that hasn’t been seen on earth since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.” For Kolbert, global warming has never been a distant problem, it has always been happening right here, even if Americans are blinded to the truth.