Most of us are familiar with the fable of the man on the roof who turns away repeated rescue attempts because of faith..

SPOILER ALERT: There’s no sequel to the story.

Here we are, entering another summer season that will do its best to knock off the reigning champ as the “Hottest Year EVER”, which was last year. While it’s easy to remain unimpressed by statistics we don’t understand that were compiled from research by people we teased and excluded from the reindeer games of our apparently robust and thriving social lives, the fact remains that the world is getting hotter every day. I’ve heard the phrase, “Global warming is a myth,” so many times that it calls into question whether we even know what a myth is.

Zeus, Aphrodite, Pandora’s Box, healthy fast food, fun for the whole family – these are myths. The notion that the planet’s atmosphere and ecosystems are dropping out of balance and losing their ability to maintain a stable, predicable temperature and event range for us to live in? That’s called a fact. I know some will argue whether it’s happening as fast as others claim it is, but even that argument is an acceptance of the main truth.

We are sitting on the roof as the flood waters rise, praying for help that keeps arriving and turning said help away because it’s not in the form we requested it to be in. Our boat in this flood is accepting the truth. Our helicopter? Drastically changing the way we treat the one planet we have guardianship over. But no, that’s not the help we asked for. We would prefer these same geniuses who told us for generations that this was coming stop predicting the future so accurately and devise a Jerry Bruckheimer-level fix that we can celebrate in unison across the globe.

This isn’t a movie. If it were, it would be an incredibly sad existential art house flick in which a family sold their souls for unnecessary trinkets and then screamed at the heavens that God had forsaken them. Redemption does not come to you; you must travel a long road to arrive wherever it lies. That’s why we have a saying about it.

I’m amazed at the outrage at BP (who should be held as culpable as justice allows, not mob-rule emotions) for “destroying the environment”. If the environment could talk, I’m pretty sure that its first public response would be, “Really?” This disaster in the Gulf pushed us off of the environment’s broken back so that it could get its turn setting sea and coastal life back a million years. What we should be saying is, “Damn you, BP! We didn’t need any help destroying our marine life! We were doing a bang-up job of ruining this all on our own.”

So as we crank up our refrigerators, air conditioners, and window fans across the country this summer, remember that these appliances are powered by the very same things that are killing us. Which is why it will be hotter next year. Vicious cycle, indeed. I’m no tree-hugging, barefoot-in-the-grass, Earth Day celebrator. I’m also not blind and it is becoming 1080i, hi-def clear that Mother Earth’s getting a little sick of the kids. She won’t cry about losing us, she’s got trillions of other kids who don’t make anywhere near the same mess of her home. We need to stop denying and start schooling ourselves about the oncoming Endless Summer before Summer schools us.