TUNGSTEN VALLEY - Update from the We Saw it Coming Department: Just a few days after last month’s light-hearted Peak to Peak Climate column ran, about a farmer who thought a weather radar could hail out his crop, a man physically attacked and disabled an Oklahoma City news station’s weather radar.

A surveillance camera recorded the incident and a suspect was arrested. (The monkey-wrencher attended to the camera’s destruction only after he had already recorded his crime.)

The radar’s owner, Oklahoma City News 9, quoted the head of a vigilante group that took credit for the attack:

“They can embed their technology and civilian infrastructure in every home and every household utilizing the phones and their network towers to not only control the weather, modify the weather, but they can [target] individuals.”

Radars being wrecked by people who think they are mind-control and weather-control weapons? Vitamin A and cod liver oil being recommended by the US Secretary of Health and Human Services for prevention of deadly contagious diseases in lieu of vaccination?

Who thinks vaccines damage public health; and is trying to make them less (or un-) available to Americans? It’s becoming hard for even an optimist like me to not see our society as currently losing its collective mind.

Anyway, onward with facts, not fantasies. ‘Tis the season when our cars turn into blistering bake-ovens when they sit in the sun. This is because the sun’s visible light rays (blue, green, red) go through the vehicle’s glass and strike interior surfaces, which warm up. Then that warmth radiates back, outward, as infrared (heat) rays.

The window glass, opaque to those long rays, traps them. Accumulating trapped heat turns the interior into an oven. This is the greenhouse effect.

In our atmosphere, CO2 plays the role of the automotive glass. If our planet’s CO2 were to disappear, the remaining oxygen and nitrogen would trap no heat and Brazil would look like Antarctica.

A little CO2 keeps the earth comfortable; too much turns our air into a blitzkrieging storm machine, as witnessed by recent catastrophic floods.

The graph, from Stanford School of Medicine data, shows how the greenhouse effect roars in cars. If the outdoor temperature is only 70 degrees, a car’s interior temperature exceeds 90 in just 10 minutes. It hits 104 in half an hour, and keeps on climbing.

Rising temperatures are uncomfortable in minutes, becoming lethal in short order. Pity any helpless, vulnerable being who is trapped inside.

Cracking the windows delays the temperature rise only slightly; an interior with cracked-open windows can still become a death trap in a few minutes. Car windows need to be more than half-way down, nearly all the way open, to vent the rapidly-accumulating hot air fast enough to prevent deadly heat inside.

To avoid taking chances with accidentally cooking your best friend into a hot dog, leave vulnerable loved ones at home, or bring them with you to your destination on warm days.

The author can be contacted at Peak2PeakClimate@gmail.com.