Deep, wet fog this near-mid-day Saturday here in California’s Central Valley —  a yearly staple for the region, tule fog, which can get thicker-than-shit.
However, like a lot of other environmental phenomena nowadays, tule fog is slowly vanishing — when I lived here in the mid-1980s, the fog lasted months, but now it’s down to a few weeks.

Climate change cometh quick and deadly and not just smothering fog, but for all walks of life. In tackling the climate change problem, the earth must get united, but as COP26 reveals, shit is still way-divided.
And although a crisis usually brings together peoples, the COVID pandemic, especially here in the US, is a testimony to the massive disarray and chaos instead of unity — we might be seriously screwed.

The pandemic a warning of climate-action collapse:

My latest for @thedailybeast.

If the pandemic couldn't bring Americans together, we should be very worried about how we'll respond to climate change.https://t.co/dHVPi1nSqy

— Thor Benson (@thor_benson) November 13, 2021

This past couple of years could be a preview to the future — Thor Benson at The Daily Beast this morning examines the virus-induced friction in the global climate threat:

In a time of crisis, people tend to come together. It frequently happens after natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes, and during times of national strife like WWII and the months after 9/11.
Regardless of their differences, people typically try to do what they can to help others when they’re facing dire circumstances.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not, however, been a time of national healing and unity in the U.S.
Debates over lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination only exacerbated divisions. Polarized politics maimed the public health response to COVID.
The pandemic brightened the spotlight on how tribal America has become.

“What’s so strange about what happened with COVID is the world handed Republicans and Democrats a common enemy—of the COVID virus—and everyone could have joined together to fight it,” Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University told The Daily Beast.
“In fact, it went the opposite way.”

Psychologists like Krosnick have been stunned by this outcome. And they fear it is a stark warning for what may happen when climate change—one of the biggest existential threats humanity has ever faced—becomes a greater threat in our daily lives.
…
That’s not what we’ve seen in this country during the COVID-19 pandemic.
One study published in Science Advances in January found that “partisanship is a far more important determinant of an individual’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic than the impact of COVID-19 in that individual’s local community.”
Regardless of what the public health guidelines and rules were where they lived, Democrats were more likely to stay home when infection rates in their community spiked; while Republicans were more likely to go out.

Krosnick was shocked the crisis wasn’t a unifying moment. He said it’s clear politics has brought us to a place where we can’t come together at times when one would expect that we would.

“It’s literally life or death. It couldn’t have been any more non-trivial than it has been. For partisanship to win out over that is an amazing thing,” Krosnick said.
“It’s a testimony to how powerful partisanship is.”
…
The failure of Americans to come together during the pandemic doesn’t inspire hope that Americans will be able to unite to face an even bigger crisis: climate change. President Biden’s appearance at the UN’s climate change summit in Glasgow this month was hampered by the fact Congress can’t seem to come together to pass the Build Back Better bill to address the climate issue.
Even more fundamentally, cultural divisions in America could greatly intensify if climate change gets bad enough that people are feeling desperate, angry and lacking basic resources.

“If it turns out that we start to run out of resources — if we start running out of food, if we start running out of places to live, if the price of air conditioning goes way up so poor people are getting cooked at home — that kind of stuff very much has the potential to create social conflict,” Krosnick said.
…
Climate change could exacerbate divisions in a number of ways. People may differ on how to respond to disasters based on whether a more conservative or more liberal area is facing the worst conditions.
We could see subdivisions along class lines because the wealthy aren’t facing the brunt of the issue, Krosnick said.

Polls do show the vast majority of Americans 00 76 percent — see climate change as an “important” or “critical” threat.
Where we tend to divide in these polls is when we’re asked what to do about the problem.

Ezra Markowitz, an environmental social scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told The Daily Beast that it’s sometimes the belief that society is very divided that is the hardest problem to tackle.
That belief can affect how people behave and how they view others.
“There’s the potential for climate change to be taken seriously in future years, across the board, but it still leads to very divisive responses,” Markowitz said.

Go read the whole piece, makes climate change even scarier.

Yet, once again, here we are…

(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Agonizing Horse,’ found here),