Genius in rhythm and time — saw this earlier today at Miss Cellania‘s and it’s one of those can’t-look-away thingies:
Well, this is utterly brilliant. Well done, lads! pic.twitter.com/k5OFlnhMGl
— Paul Cowland ?? (@PaulCowland_) July 3, 2021
Now, guaranteed to bring you right back down — weather-impacts off climate change are being experienced worldwide, and maybe escalating, too. Not only out here in the West with our ‘heat domes,’ but also with other natural bad-shit, like massive floods in Germany, or even flooding in Arizona, where record-high temperatures baked them just last month.
Climate change is here already, and what’s unsettling, the process seems to be gaining traction.
An earth-sized analysis in the Guardian this afternoon on the situation:
The intensity and scale of the floods in Germany this week have shocked climate scientists, who did not expect records to be broken this much, over such a wide area or this soon.
After the deadly heatwave in the US and Canada, where temperatures rose above 49.6C two weeks ago, the deluge in central Europe has raised fears that human-caused climate disruption is making extreme weather even worse than predicted.
Precipitation records were smashed across a wide area of the Rhine basin on Wednesday, with devastating consequences. At least 58 people have been killed, tens of thousands of homes flooded and power supplies disrupted.
Parts of Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia were inundated with 148 litres of rain per sq metre within 48 hours in a part of Germany that usually sees about 80 litres in the whole of July.
…
Climate scientists have long predicted that human emissions would cause more floods, heatwaves, droughts, storms and other forms of extreme weather, but the latest spikes have surpassed many expectations.“I am surprised by how far it is above the previous record,” Dieter Gerten, professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said.
“We seem to be not just above normal but in domains we didn’t expect in terms of spatial extent and the speed it developed.”
…
“With climate change we do expect all hydro-meteorological extremes to become more extreme. What we have seen in Germany is broadly consistent with this trend.” said Carlo Buontempo, the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.The seven hottest years in recorded history have occurred since 2014, largely as a result of global heating, which is caused by engine exhaust fumes, forest burning and other human activities.
Computer models predict this will cause more extreme weather, which means records will be broken with more frequency in more places.
…
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California in Los Angeles, said so many records were being set in the US this summer that they no longer made the news: “The extremes that would have been newsworthy a couple of years ago aren’t, because they pale in comparison to the astonishing rises a few weeks ago.”
This was happening in other countries too, he said, though with less media attention.
“The US is often in the spotlight, but we have also seen extraordinary heat events in northern Europe and Siberia. This is not a localised freak event, it is definitely part of a coherent global pattern.”
Although that shit is bad sounding in so many different ways (reading out loud to yourself), we’re faced with not only the actual storms/droughts/whatever that accompanies a warming environment, there’s the ignorant-assholes that obstruct everything, from climate deniers, to anti-vaxxers — we be fucked until we figure out how to get shit done around them (they ain’t ever-the-fuck goin’ away):
A majority of Republicans say they are irrational https://t.co/IJQ0DxtqNr
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2021
Forty-four years later:
Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me
Somebody help me, yeah
Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me, yeah
I’m stayin’ alive
(Illustration out front: ‘A Break in Reality’ by Xetobyte, found here).