The Pentagon knows it. The world's largest insurers know it. Now, governments may be overthrown because of it. It is climate change, and it is real. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last month was the hottest March on record for the United States since 1895, when records were first kept, with average temperatures of 8.6 degrees F above average. More than 15,000 March high-temperature records were broken nationally. Drought, wildfires, tornadoes and other extreme weather events are already plaguing the country.

The United Nations' annual climate summit descended on Durban, South Africa, this week, but not in time to prevent the tragic death of Qodeni Ximba. The 17-year-old was one of 10 people killed in Durban on Sunday, the night before the U.N. conference opened. Torrential rains pummelled the seaside city of 3.5 million. Seven hundred homes were destroyed by the floods.

Ximba was sleeping when the concrete wall next to her collapsed. One woman tried to save a flailing 1-year-old baby whose parents had been crushed by their home. She failed, and the baby died along with both parents. All this, as more than 20,000 politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, scientists and activists made their way to what may be the last chance for the Kyoto Protocol.

Last weekend American politics reached a bizarre point: in order to justify their existence, government leaders decided to do something about what human beings have always agreed you can't do anything about: the weather. So we had their frenetic reactions to Hurricane Irene.

"The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels."

These two lines were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem Snow-Flakes, published in a volume in 1863 alongside his epic and better-known The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Much of the news chatter this week has been about Sarah Palin's flubbing of the history of Revere's famous ride in April 1775. Revere was on a late-night, clandestine mission to alert American revolutionaries of an impending British attack. Palin's incorrect version had Revere loudly ringing a bell and shooting a gun on horseback as a warning to the British to back off.

Of course, it's possible that the incredibly warm, barbecues-in-March weather we've recently enjoyed is just a fluke and has nothing whatsoever to do with climate change.

It's also possible that if your 2-year-old falls into a swimming pool, he might manage to thrash his way to the side without you having to jump in to save him. On the other hand, jumping in might seem like a sensible precaution.