As you may have noticed, there’s some good ole’ fashion crazy weather-n-shit happening to various rich countries at the moment: heatwaves (three and a fourth on the way for the Western US and Canada), epic fires in California and Siberia, barely believable temperature records, flooding across half of Europe.
Good times, good times.
Since it’s happening to rich countries though, it’s much more noticeable because rich-country journalists cover it, and rich-country politicians pledge to sell their balls to fix it (or something, I tune out), and the acceleration towards that wall we’re heading for picks up some more speed.
Some Bill McKibbon quotes to get you through a crazy climate week:
“Having had almost thirty-five years to come to terms with climate change, I’m used to the contours of our dilemma. Even so, the past two weeks have frightened me, both for what feels like a rapid acceleration in the pace of the planet’s heating…”
“The temperature in Lytton, British Columbia, hit a hundred and twenty-one degrees—the highest ever measured in Canada—and, the next day, most of Lytton burned to the ground, in one of a series of increasingly out-of-control wildfires. Almost five hundred people died in British Columbia in the course of five days, “compared with an average of one hundred sixty-five in normal times,” and more than a billion sea creatures may have perished in the coastal waters.”
Oh, and get ready to freak out about feedback loops as this decade advances:
“Less obvious, and more scary, is the possibility that the heat may be part of a vicious feedback loop that drives temperatures ever higher. “This is by far the largest jump in the record I have ever seen,” Friederike Otto, the associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, told the Guardian. “We should definitely not expect heatwaves to behave as they have in the past.”
Basically, take your scary climate model and pretend that’s the best-case scenario if some bad heat loops get a kickin’.
One small step in a better direction:
“The University of Calgary has suspended its bachelor’s program in oil-and-gas engineering. An official said that the school decided that “we need to give students a chance to learn about what geothermal means, what hydrogen energy means, wind and solar, and then package that together, so when students graduate from here, they are actually stronger and will be able to better perform once they go into whichever segment of the energy industry that they end up.”
And a petition many of you will surely get behind in about a millisecond:
“A petition campaign for a four-day workweek is up and running, driven in part by a British study showing that it could cut carbon emissions from the U.K. by twenty-one per cent.”
Bill McKibben’s New Yorker newsletter is a treasure trove. Sign up (for free) for it here.
[Cover photo: Erdorf, Germany. Harald Tittel/dpa via AP]