Al Gore, Bring on the Ark!

I hear Seattle is having snow! Here, it oscillates between seventy degree wether and severe rainstorms. Sometimes I sun myself on the roof in a swimsuit, and sometimes I need an umbrella to get to the kitchen.

While this is normal for the season, the severity of this shifts is not. By all accounts, the rains are coming earlier, in November, and La Niña is hitting harder. This is the third year of catastrophic flooding. So climate change seems pretty real from where I'm sitting.

In the Chapare, outside of Cochabamba, the town of Villarroel has been submerged. In El Alto, outside of La Paz, mudslides have buried entire barrios. It's the worst in the eastern lowlands, like Santa Cruz and the Beni. People's adobe houses have been destroyed, their animals drowned, their crops decimated, their lives on the economic margins made infinitely more difficult.

There's no aid. Even if there were, the is no way to get it there, as the already pitiful infrastructure has been destroyed, and the airforce is too poor to have long-range helicopters. And so we wait and pray.

Picture credits to the AP. I'm trying to stay as far away from the flooding as possible.