On the brink?

This summer, Russia's triple-digit temperatures and smog-producing wildfires doubled Moscow's death rate at one point to 700 people a day. In Pakistan, the mother of all monsoon seasons has wreaked death on 1,500 and left 34 million homeless.

In Gansu, a northwest province of China, floods and landslides have drowned or buried 1,100. Hundreds have been unaccounted for in the deep mud and searing heat.

Closer to home, Iowa is soaked with record-breaking rain that has brought misery to thousands.

In the meantime, the United Nations' network of weather scientists, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has accumulated data over the years that predict intense heat waves and rainfall as a result of rising global temperatures.

What isn't in doubt, even by the biggest skeptics of climate science, is that worldwide temperatures from January to June have been the highest on record. If only the IPCC's voluminous data could generate a workable map that would predict where heat waves and intense rains will happen next.

While most climate scientists shy away from making direct connections between general warming and specific weather events such as floods or droughts, some believe humans have passed a point of no return - where even a significant reduction in the level of greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to avert an onslaught of more weather extremes and their grim consequences.

Another of those consequences was detected recently by researchers. A 100-square-mile mountain of ice, more than four times the size of Manhattan, broke away in Greenland's far northwest. Adrift in the Arctic Ocean, it poses a threat to drilling rigs and sea lanes, not to mention a melt that could raise sea levels.

If this giant iceberg were a metaphor for climate change, it would tell those of us on the Titanic to do our best - through more sensible energy policies - to steer clear of such disasters in the making.