No, this is not a diary about that painful nitwit Kevin McCarthy and his merry band of chaos monkey nudniks. Sorry. I know they’re vastly entertaining, but this is not about that.
This is a diary about the climate, in which I echo John Gibbons in asking: What the hell just happened in September of 2023?
Canada has had 6,400 wildfires since the beginning of 2023. -Mike Hudema
And Canada’s wildlife will struggle to come back from this season’s wildfire season – as will the forests themselves.
Elon Musk has removed headlines from Twitter links, but he didn’t do it in time for this horrifying one.
Civilization ending storms?
Bill McKibben:
New York's old rainfall record stood for 150 years until 2021, and has now been broken three times.
Hot air holds more water vapor than cold; flooding follows fossil fuel combustion as night follows day.
Akin to the old saw, “it’s not the heat – it’s the humidity,” is the fact that temperature change alone isn’t responsible for the dire effects of climate change. It’s also the hydrological cycle.
Trusted old hand Ed Hawkins just disgorged his thesaurus at us, and he means every word:
Surprising. Astounding. Staggering. Unnerving. Bewildering. Flabbergasting. Disquieting. Gobsmacking. Shocking. Mind boggling.
Ecosystems in freefall.
All climate scientists are not (yet?) on board with the “aerosol termination shock” theory, but there is a lot of good science – and some informed speculation – going around that is honestly terrifying.
You’re not imagining it. It is getting worse, and it is getting worse FAST.
The answer to “what the hell happened in September” might not get 100% down-to-a-gnat’s-eyebrow scientifically resolved soon. But is is undeniable that this train is picking up speed. And it’s terrifying.
So what now? Do we wait and see? Do we take this all under advisement and carry on with other tasks? Do we cluck concernedly and look away, hoping this terror just isn’t true – is overreach – is exaggeration for editorial effect?
DailyKos is a site by and for Democrats. In other words, this is a safe space for the folks on the right side of most arguments. We’re feminists. We’re LGBTQIA+ allies. We stand with trans people everywhere. We fight the BLM fight, stand for unions, throw our time and money at efforts to curb gun madness, and more. We have a deep understanding of the evils of end-stage corporate capitalism. We’re the “good guys,” if you’ll pardon the gendered old expression.
And on the climate? Well, we all seem to be on board with… something. Doing our own part. Recycling. Carpooling. Joining marches. Being little voices who will add up and amount to a lot.
But at the risk of repeating myself (and getting shot down) I think it is time to do more.
What form that “more” takes is up to you, of course. If you are already doing everything you can, bravo. But so many of us aren’t.
It’s terrifying. It seems hopeless some days. Hell, it seems hopeless some months – and years.
But every 10th of a degree counts. Every helpful green policy that we can force our government to enact is a win. Every new oil or gas lease that we can stymie – every pipeline we can stop – makes a difference.
We’re going to blow through 1.5C – and far sooner than we thought. But that isn’t a reason to stop fighting.
Now is our time to make history. Now is our time to stare down the seemingly inevitable and say, “Not on our watch!”
I hear a lot about collapse on Twitter. My strong suspicion is that most folks (even those posting about it) can’t really imagine what collapse will look like – feel like – be like. Most folks cannot easily imagine what it would be like to be without electricity, food, a roof over their head, a job to go to, a town center with stores, a supply chain, a government.
But we have to start thinking about that, and we have to start throwing our weight around and demanding that our current, existing government do not just everything they can to slash emissions in the next 5 years, but also to put into place policies that will harden infrastructure, move people to higher ground and out of cities in the desert, build cooling centers, strengthen bridges, shore up supply chains, build seawalls, supply generators… anything and everything that will keep the population of this great country as safe and as protected as possible from the mayhem that is coming.
If there is to be collapse, we can at the very least try to save as much and as many as we can. We can use our resources to shore up what we can, for the future. For our children, as the old saw goes. And, as I always point out: for ourselves.
I have no intention of standing by and letting the government fail us so badly that millions of us spend our dotage slogging through toxic bilgewater, fleeing a monster hurricane, or driving madly away from a wildfire.
Do you?