With an atmosphere as big and complex as ours, climate change was always going to throw up weird little tricks like this one: increased lightning strikes.

In 2009 NASA reported that climate change was going to increase the number of lightning strikes. Their figures were supported in a 2014 paper reported in the journal Science.

Its the golden rule playing out:

Treat Earth how you want Earth to treat you.

Getting zapped by lightning is the climate's friendly reminder that it has had a gut-full of carbon pollution. It is also another dumb way for us humans to die.

According to the science, lightning strikes are on the increase because a warmer world evaporates more, and thus, there is more water vapour in the atmosphere.

The story goes that there will be a 12% increase in lightning per degree Celsius of additional temperature. As we are already about 1.15 degrees Celsius above baseline, that suggests that we should be getting about 15% more lightning strikes than we ought to be.

15% more lightning than there ought to be.

But that’s all just meaningless climate science, right? And what would climate scientists know about the climate, anyway? It's all just a Chinese plot because they hate our freedoms... Right?

Well, it turns out that a lot of people are getting zapped by lighting these days. So much so, that the subject even got the lead story in the Guardian on 23 June 2016.

Here are some lightning stories from the period:

What? Even Rudolph is copping the lighting!!! Climate change is impinging onto our more feverishly held beliefs...

Let me suggest an important takeaway message from this story: we need to stop talking about climate change as though it were some future tense concern.

We have changed the climate.

The term is CLIMATE CHANGED.

If we humans were an enlightened species, we would have changed it for the better, but we didn't. Instead, we took a precarious tenure on this planet and set it on the path to uninhabitable. And now everyone is at risk – rich, poor, superclass elite, alike.

Personally, I see the lighter side of lightning. I see the bolts from the sky as a wake-up call that we all need to hold the powerful people who run the world so badly to account, and force them to rapidly transition to a global economy based on clean technology, zero carbon energy and the restoration of natural capital.

Failing that, you’d best keep your gumboots on when you go outside, and be prepared to squat at a moment’s notice, perched on your toes, like this manly fellow, below.

End.