Heating up

This is an amazing chart showing the 6-10 day temperature forecast for the country.  Seattle will have highs in the 90's for the next several days.  Not long ago, even one 90 degree day a year was rare, much less a string of them. Where it is usually hot, it is chilly this week.  Maybe "strange" is the new climate normal.

We've been watching the Cosmos television series, which puts our puny human sojourn on Planet Earth into perspective. For example:  If the entire cosmic age of the universe from Big Bang to present day was laid out on a 12-month calendar, all the life on Earth from the very first microbe evolved just a few seconds before midnight on December 31st.  In these "6 seconds" of life on Earth, there have been five major mass extinctions.

Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 185 million years, but we Homo Sapiens have only been around for about 200,000.  And the immediate future doesn't look good for us.

The original Cosmos was written and presented by Carl Sagan and aired on PBS in 1980.  Anyone who was around then remembers his billions and billions of stars... The series had groundbreaking special effects for the time, which allowed Sagan to seemingly walk through environments that were actually models rather than full-sized sets.

The 2014 Cosmos series was produced by Fox and National Geographic, and makes heavy use of computer-generated graphics, animation footage (mini cartoon stories) and other flashy visual stuff tailored for the short attention spans of the current generation. But the subject matter is so fascinating it doesn't really need to be dolled up, especially considering how much has been discovered about the universe in the past 30 years. The series is highly-acclaimed and has been nominated for 12 Emmy awards.