Hot-as-shit just past noon-time Thursday here in California’s Central Valley — although we could be just above 100 -degrees for our high today, we’re in tune with a way-goodly portion of our earth right now. We’re looking at 110-plus for the weekend.
Even across this country, heat is mixing the weather really badly.
America (per NPR):
Heat advisories and warnings are still in place from Florida to Arizona, impacting more than 111 million people, according to a count from the Associated Press. Some cities, like Phoenix, have registered temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 13 consecutive days.
Forecasters aren’t sugar coating their warnings about the danger this heat wave poses — and how much longer that danger could last.
“Unfortunately, the long term outlook through the weekend and into next week is for an increasingly significant and oppressive heat wave,” reads the latest bulletin from the National Weather Service. “Numerous near record-tying/breaking warm lows are expected.”
Along with the heat on Florida’s dry land, the coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico are feeling water temperatures being pushed into the 90s.
Heat and rain and just general climate-change nastiness:
If you were looking for a reason to roll up your sleeve and work on climate solutions: SEAWATER TEMPERATURE IS OVER 90 DEGREES.
“About 40% of the planet is experiencing a marine heat wave.”
“It’s only July.… We’re entering uncharted territories.”https://t.co/xGbRXWWHPz
— Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson ? (@ayanaeliza) July 13, 2023
Key in the overall climate picture — the New York Times yesterday:
The real worry, scientists say, is that it’s only July. Corals typically experience the most heat stress in August and September.
“We’re entering uncharted territories,” Derek Manzello, an ecologist and the coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program, said.
Yet the entrance into that territory is no longer a slow one, the anti-environmental shit is hitting the fan and sticking nowadays. The horrible consequences of climate change have been long knowable — humanity has understood burning fossil fuels was f*cking the planet since at least the 1ate 1800s, especially forward in the late 1950s, and full Congressional knowledge of this shit happening since the late 1980s. Despite that shit, I for some asshole reason wasn’t aware of any kind of upcoming climate-change disaster action before 2007 with the release then of the UN’s IPCC report detailing for the first time mankind’s shit-influence on our planet. (Even despite Annette Bening’s character in “The American President” (1995), one of my favorite silly-romantic movies, being an actual climate lobbyist/activist).
Anyway, I started to pay attention. One aspect of following environmental news was reports/studies/scientific whatnot seemed to all carry a similar disclaimer: Shit is worse than originally recorded in previous reports/studies/scientific whatnot.
In due time, I recognized the end of an age being displayed on my laptop.
And for some reason, the last three years or so have been even worse — a far-distant future is actually right now:
“It was really like, what will it take for people to see that we are creating an unlivable planet?”https://t.co/gDrD7Flr96
— Sarah Kaplan (@sarahkaplan48) July 13, 2023
Climate reporter Sarah Kaplan in The Washington Post, from last night, updated this afternoon:
The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing.
The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding.
They’re blaring from the scorching streets of Texas, Florida, Spain and China, with a severe heat wave also building in Phoenix and the Southwest in coming days.
They’re burbling up from the oceans, where temperatures have surged to levels considered “beyond extreme.”
And they’re showing up in unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in Canada that have sent plumes of dangerous smoke into the United States.
Scientists say there is no question that this cacophony was caused by climate change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from burning fossil fuels, have raised Earth’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Unless humanity radically transforms the way people travel, generate energy and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — unleashing catastrophes that will make this year’s disasters seem mild.
The only question, scientists say, is when the alarms will finally be loud enough to make people wake up.
“This is not the new normal,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “We don’t know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we do stop burning fossil fuels … and we’re nowhere near doing that.”
[…]
And a day that is usually warm for the planet — July 4 — was this year the hottest ever recorded. Earth’s global average temperature of more than 17 degrees Celsius (62.6 Fahrenheit) may well have been the hottest it has gotten in the last 125,000 years.
[…]
This week, as more than 100 million people across the southern United States face exactly those conditions, climate researchers such as Jennifer Francis fear the escalating heat may exact a deadly toll.
“We’re seeing temperatures exceed those that can support life,” said Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “Certain places are becoming uninhabitable.”
“All of these records are being broken left and right, and my hope is people will start to put this together in their heads,” she continued. “These things shouldn’t be happening. It’s all connected to the fact that we’re warming the planet.”
No shit!
And what can be done in a short space of time? One ugly answer from climate scientist Mohammed Ombadi of the University of Michigan — via Lawyers, Guns & Money this morning:
There is little that can be done at the individual level. Most of the efforts needed for adaptation must be taken at the local, state, and federal government levels. However, people can cope with those flooding events by avoiding building homes in regions that are vulnerable to landslides and hill slopes that can be severely impacted by such torrential downpours.
??The big message here is that our infrastructure was designed for a climate that no longer exists. This is very clear with the ongoing floods in northeastern US as we hear news of washed-out roadways and bridges, damaged tracks in railroads, and swamped homes. We need to change the way we design and build infrastructure to be in line with the increase in rainfall extreme events predicted by climate scientists.
Of course, a massive-major problem is dipshit/asshole Republicans — per Roll Call on Tuesday:
At least four of the fiscal 2024 House Appropriations bills released so far propose to rescind some funding included in the IRA, including a big chunk of a $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established at the EPA.
The rescissions, targeted at the administration’s landmark effort to spend nearly $370 billion to address climate change, have drawn the ire of environmentalists. Republicans have defended them as part of their no-holds-barred campaign to reduce federal spending.
David Shadburn, senior government affairs advocate at the League of Conservation Voters, said in an interview that Republicans “are very aggrieved certainly at how successful the administration has been so far.”
“Apparently they are doing the bidding of their polluter donors, being very clear that the Inflation Reduction Act is a big target of theirs, because they don’t want to see the clean energy transition that we need to combat the climate crisis,” Shadburn said.
They don’t give a shit. Although time is a-wasting, they still don’t give a shit.
We all wonder: “Why ….,” but why:
‘Hard over,’ or not, yet once again here we are…
(Illustration out front: ‘A Break in Reality,’ by Xetobyte, found here.)