You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 197 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Run the category
This week: Jeopardy!
CONTESTANT: City Killers for 200, please.
ALEX TREBEK: This causes mass migration and population decline.
CONTESTANT: What is “megadrought”?
- Interestingly enough, we’re in one right now, even with this year’s massive rains and snowpack.
CONTESTANT: City Killers for 400.
TREBEK: Thwaites and PIG hold meters of this.
CONTESTANT: What is “sea level rise”?
- Not only is the sea level rising, the rate of rise is accelerating, and doing so much faster than anyone predicted. When Thwaites (imminent) and PIG (also imminent) collapse, the coasts are suddenly a lot farther inland and large swathes of San Francisco are underwater.
CONTESTANT: Let’s keep going. City Killers for 600, please.
TREBEK: A metropolitan area that’s significantly warmer than its surroundings.
CONTESTANT: What is an “urban heat island”?
- Not only does SF have a significant urban heat island, but the amount of heat SF radiates varies significantly and in line with both SF’s redlining history and missing urban forest and parks.
CONTESTANT: City Killers for 800.
TREBEK: These put public safety at risk, increase local air and noise pollution, and can result in a baby boom 9 months later.
CONTESTANT: What are “blackouts”?
- With Neo-Nazis, Qunatics, and Trumpers attacking power substations and transmission lines in an effort to destroy municipalities, the need to establish an independent, sustainable, renewable, and local power supply has never been clearer. Yet PG&E still controls our grid.
CONTESTANT: Let’s finish out the category. City Killers for 1000, please.
TREBEK: A critical threshold that, when crossed, causes large, irreversible changes.
Contestant: What is “tipping point”?
- We’ve crossed lots of these and are rushing full speed at more. Yet you keep doing a lot of nothing about any of it.
While the show is on a commercial break, a little background may make the game clearer. This planet we’re on is no longer the Earth we were born on. It is a foreign planet, with systems we do not understand fully, that is hostile to life, and that is growing more and more barren as biodiversity is destroyed and goes extinct. That is why it’s long past time, if you have any interest at all in SF surviving, for you to start acting like astronauts and not like suicides.
Because the other categories on the board are much worse
Categories like:
- Human Killers (What are “wet bulb temperature”, “fungal pandemic”, “hyperthermia”, “famine”, and “bioaccumulation”?)
- Civilization Killers (What are “albedo”, “superstorms”, “keystone species extinction”, “heat events”, and “desertification”?)
- Flora Killers (What are “rainforest destruction”, “drying peat bogs”, “forest fires”, “pollinator extinction”, and “invasive species”?)
- Fauna Killers (What are “hunting”, “range segmentation”, “starvation”, “heat stress”, and “pollution”?)
- and Climate Killers (What are “plastics”, “carbon”, “albedo loss”, “super storms”, and “heat domes”?)
TREBEK: I don’t know if the Final Jeopardy category “Climate Crisis Vocabulary” narrows it down but we’ll find out with this clue, won’t we? “This condition describes a risk of loss or injury; peril or danger.” Good luck. Thirty seconds.
Do you know the question?
WHAT IS “JEOPARDY”?
You are in jeopardy. San Francisco is in jeopardy. The entire human enterprise is in jeopardy, and you can do something about it. You can and you must. Focus on San Francisco and what’s really happening right here, right now, and act.
You have a ton of info and contacts and financing leads and science telling you what is needed, what can be done, and what the consequences are if you don’t act, all very San Francisco specific. So what are you waiting for? A better time? You don’t have any more time. You have…
Thirty seconds
Cue music.
ACT!