For your information, 2016 is on pace to be the hottest year on record, beating out the last hottest year - 2015. Certainly, this should come as no surprise to the people of Alaska who can attest to that fact, seeing as their average temperature this year is above freezing for the first time ever.

Alaska averaging 33.9 degrees over seven months may not seem warm to folks in the Lower 48.

But that just proves they haven't lived there. A not-far-above-freezing high from January 1 to July 31 is a virtual heat wave.

This year's average is 8.1 degrees above the 20th century average of 25.8. 2016 has been on pace to be the hottest year on record.

In a year that has seen the most extreme of extreme heat waves, drought, epic wildfires across the globe and, most recently, another once every 500 years record flood in Louisiana and Mississippi, one would think that Climate Change would be one of the major national news stories of the year - except it isn't even when the role climate change has played in creating natural disasters is stunningly obvious.

There’s a long scientific track record connecting global warming with increasing and more intense wildfires. Warming temperatures are leading to longer fire seasons, drier conditions and more lightning to spark fires, according to the National Wildlife Federation. [...]

“This is an example of what we expect — and consistent with what we expect for climate change,” University of Alberta Wildland Fire Professor Mike Flannigan told CNN.com’s John Sutter (5/7/16). “This fire is unprecedented [locally].” [...]

Print coverage linked the fires to global warming more often, mentioning climate change 32 times in 489 articles. But as has become standard practice in the industry, it relegated climate change to sidebar or follow-up stories, rarely mentioning it in the main news coverage.

Broadcast coverage rarely delved into the causes of the fires at all, and when it did, global warming’s contributions were never mentioned.

“Lightning and drought thought to be the causes,” said Scott Pelley on the May 5 edition of CBS Evening News. “This massive inferno is feeding on dry forest,” reported Miguel Almaguer on the May 4 NBC Nightly News, not elaborating on why tinder-dry forests are becoming more common.

We have one major party candidate who claims climate change is a hoax (not that his opinion is all that uncommon among Republicans) and another who shows a marked preference for advancing the interests of large, multinational fossil fuel extraction corporations (Hello there, Madame Secretary). It's not exactly in their interest to focus on this very real and present danger to humanity.

Indeed, Hillary Clinton seemingly enjoys spitting in the faces of environmental activists. Her recent appointment of Ken Salazar as the newly named head of her transition team is abominable, especially when you understand that his staunch advocacy of hydrofracking, despite all evidence that it increases the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. That evidence includes this recent study by NASAand NOAA, which confirmed that the methane "hot spot" over the Southwest is directly related to leaks from drilling, fracking operations and pipeline transport of the natural gas produced from all the wells drilled there.

The 2,500-square mile plume, first detected in 2003 and confirmed by NASA satellite data in October 2014, is said to be the largest concentration of atmospheric methane in the U.S. and is more than triple a standard ground-based estimate. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a highly-efficient greenhouse gas—84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and a significant contributor to global warming.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and funded primarily by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), surveyed industry sources including gas processing facilities, storage tanks, pipeline leaks, and well pads, as well as a coal mine venting shaft.

It found that leaks from only 10 percent of the individual methane sources are contributing to half of the emissions, confirming the scientists' suspicions that the mysterious hotspot was connected to the high level of fracking in the region. [...]

"NASA's finding that the oil and gas industry is primarily responsible for the 'hot spot' is not surprising," stated the Western Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit public interest law firm. "In fact, the researchers found only one large source of methane not related to oil and gas operations: venting from the San Juan coal mine. This discovery renders attempts to point the finger at other potential emissions sources, like coal outcrops and landfills, definitively refuted."

Thus, is it any surprise that in all of the presidential debates held prior to the Republican and Democratic conventions, only 22 out of the 1477 questions concerned climate change? That represents 1.4 percent of all questions at the debates during the primary season, people. One would think in a year that month after month has seen new record highs in temperatures, and dramatic examples of extreme weather events across the entire world, a few more questions about the threat posed by climate change might have been asked. Even the US military assesses climate change as "the mother of all" national security threats.

Nonetheless, I do not expect the upcoming Presidential debates to spend much time focusing on what scientists now call Anthropogenic Climate Disruption. Neither major party Presidential candidate has made that threat a primary focus of their respective campaigns, nor has the Libertarian Party's choice, Gary Johnson, who at the moment stands the best, if still highly unlikely, chance of joining them on the debate stage. Add to those reasons the fact that the major media companies in the US, which are likely to hold the debates, have no incentive to make Climate Change/Anthropogenic Climate Disruption an issue at any debate they televise. The amount of ad revenue they receive from the fossil fuel industry makes that a no-brainer decision for them. Meanwhile the forests of the world continue to burn, millions suffer under deadly heat waves, and epic storms and flooding are the new normal.

Ignorance in this case isn't bliss, but rest assured our corporate/media/political elites will continue to opt for ignoring the problem, and will also do their best to ensure American voters remain ignorant of the true scope of the danger we face, as well.