Welcome to the Summer of 2021: Burn, Baby, Burn
The future looks poor and sweaty.
Once upon a time the Big Deals about summer were blockbuster films and catchy tunes.
Last year, we welcomed the third decade of the millennium, aka 2020, where concerts and movie theaters were closed, and a ray of hope about the pandemic waning vanished as politicians responded to “reopen economic theory.”
Here we are in 2021, and the concert dates are trickling in.
I’ve got tickets to some shows at the new [insert name of rich person funding] shell down on the waterfront as well as a fall show at Humphrey’s. I went to see In The Heights at a luxe Liberty Station movie theater not long ago. And this weekend I attended an outdoor Indivisible gathering, getting the opportunity to see people in person that I’ve Zoomed with for the past fifteen months. There were hugs, lots of them.
There’s Bad News this summer as weather patterns influenced by climate change are giving parts of the country some extreme and dangerous conditions. Moscow (Russia) and Detroit (Michigan) experienced serious flooding over the weekend, and forecasters say a broad swath of the US, from New Mexico to Illinois is looking at up to six inches of rainfall over the next few days.
More dangerous than flooding or even tropical storms are record-setting heat waves, giving the Northwestern US temperatures as high as 117. Roads are buckling in Washington State and transit systems in Portland have shut down due to damaged power cables and power outages,
The Northeastern US is experiencing its second serious heat wave of the summer this week; portions of Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire are under Heat Advisories.
San Diego’s had some inland heat advisories, but the cooling effects of the Pacific Ocean have spared us thus far. That will change next month and into September as water temperatures rise. Extreme heat brings the danger of wildfires, and we’re coming off what’s been a dry winter season.
The climate denying set likes to conflate individual weather events with climate change, leading to stupid stuff like Congresscritters walking around the Capitol with snowballs. Although they may not recognize themselves as being deniers, the folks spreading misinformation about bike lanes on 30th street are no better.
Don't @ me on this. I've been watching this take shape for a half-dozen years, even as we are told every year that nobody informed the public. I don't care how many bicycles you say you didn't see on 30th street last night; I don't ride, am a senior, and disabled. Businesses are already adapting, having gotten a head start during the pandemic.
https://twitter.com/MikeyKnew/status/1409699827454078982?s=20
What’s important is the overall climate trend, and it’s getting worse at an alarming rate.
From Vox:
Climate change caused by greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is poised to make heat waves longer, more intense, and more frequent. It takes time for the dust to settle on the heat waves of a given moment, to allow scientists to evaluate just how much humans have contributed to the problem.
But researchers looking at past events and other parts of the world have already found that humans share a huge portion of the blame. After a summer 2019 heat wave was blamed for 2,500 deaths in Western Europe, a study found that climate change made the heat five times as likely as it would have been in a world that hadn’t warmed. Heat waves in the ocean have become 20 times as likely as average temperatures have risen. And researchers reported that the 2020 heat wave in Siberia was 600 times as likely due to climate change than not.
The mechanism is simple: The burning of fossil fuels adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which traps more heat energy and pushes up average temperatures — which, in turn, also pushes up extreme temperatures.
What’s happening in my neighborhood (North Park) is one of many choices we have to make: less car use or more extreme weather. Build denser communities or breathe more smoke from wildfires. Intensify local commerce or watch our ports go underwater. Etc., etc.
These aren’t optional, and, no, they can’t wait for other events (China cleaning up its act or more transit options). It used to be that an apocalyptic future was discussed in terms of something our grandchildren or great grandchildren would have to face.
Those arguments were being made a generation ago and the imagined scenarios have sped up. It’s no wonder that so many women of childbearing age are not interested. Life is getting harder in an economic as well as an ecological sense. The future looks poor and sweaty.
In the short term, there are things that can be done to mitigate our rising temperatures, like public health outreach and providing more cooling resources and education, particularly in the most vulnerable neighborhoods.
But these sorts of actions are a stop gap. What people have to understand is the need for collective action. Government isn’t the enemy here. In fact it needs to do more, except that politicians are afraid of emails from people upset about fantasies concerning their property values.
Mistakes can (and have already been made) happen along this road to survival. They only prove that humans aren’t perfect. Holding yesterday’s miscalculation up as a reason for not taking action today could be a fatal mistake.
The answer to angst over the consequences of the fouling of our planetary systems lies in developing an appreciation for what vestiges of nature that still exist. This can take a multitude of forms, each with its own value, from planting a garden to selecting a diet not built around animal protein to taking time to appreciate local natural resources.
We’re not looking at an either or situation. It’s all of the above. (And I'm certainly not perfect.)
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Having cast a spell of doom and gloom, let me brighten your day with the song and paean to New Orleans giving me hope and happiness this summer.
https://youtu.be/3YHVC1DcHmo
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BREAKTIME!
I’m gonna take most of the next five days off. Family is coming in from around the world to pay our final respects to my father, who passed during the first week of May in 2020. He’s where he wants to be now, and we’ll celebrate that fact.
Image by un-perfect through Pixabay
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