A nice warm to the air this late-afternoon Tuesday here in California’s Central Valley, and it just might be the last day for a while for pleasant temperatures — reportedly heat on the way with maybe triple-digits temps by the weekend.
The last few days seemingly a respite from the dreaded summer burndown, but nothing lasts long, and certainly not forever.
Apparently, even our only living area. I feel Edvard’s emotion — a scream of heated frustration at the plotline of our current nowadays. Shit is happening at a quick rate wouldn’t you say, and from every conceivable angle, which makes it a full-time job just keeping the crazy at bay.
Screaming for our times of frustration and sadness (WebMD): ‘This type of scream is aggressive in nature, often involuntary, and typically directed at oneself or some endeavor. There’s anger in it, too, but not to the degree of the previous scream category. Think of being stuck in traffic: You might pound the steering wheel and scream in private frustration.‘
And to make it scream louder with the unsung climate change crisis:
For the past several days, I've been highlighting diseases from a package of climate-fueled diseases set to spread as the planet warms, published by @grist last week.
The last disease in the package: Valley Fever.https://t.co/TiiNyAHXfE
— Zoya Teirstein (@zteirstein) July 5, 2022
A double-edged insight on climate change: New research released last week carried both a glimmer of hope and a startling example of how drastic the measures required to curb and eventually halt global warming — early arrival of COVID and the lockdown/shutdown of life nearly worldwide at one point two years ago caused CO2 emissions to way-drop for a little while (Phys.org):
The researchers found a drop of 6.3% in 2020, which came to 2,200 metric tons less than the year before. The researchers describe the drop as the largest of modern times, and big enough to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal if it were to be sustained. But it was not sustained, of course. As soon as restrictions were lifted, people began going back to work and levels of CO2 emissions rose to the levels measured before the pandemic began.
Glimmer of hope or not, once again, here we are…
(Illustration out front: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here.)