…quite frankly [DOT 19/7/22]

…I know I’m not the only one in these parts who tends to look unkindly on the firehose of news that seems to face us on the daily…but…in a lot of places a less figurative firehose is very much the order of the day

Fire activity is expected to increase in several US states over the coming months, according to a newly released outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), with parts of the Pacific north-west, northern California, Texas, Hawaii and Alaska forecast to be among those hardest hit by fire conditions in the months ahead.

The severity of the emergency will depend on four key factors: drought, dried fuels, windy or warm weather, and of course, ignitions. But the climate crisis and human-caused warming has turned up the dial on risk-factors with more intense conditions and a greater frequency with which these conditions align.

…aligned to alight is one way of putting it, certainly…one might even go as far as inclined

By 15 June, more than 1m acres (405,000 hectares) in the state had already gone up in flames, about the amount of acres that would normally burn in an entire fire season. By mid July, more than 3m acres of land had been torched, putting the state at risk of breaking its 2004 record of 6.5m acres (2.6m hectares) burned.

Today 264 individual fires are burning across the state. The East Fork complex, which ignited in western Alaska on 31 May, and the Lime complex fire above Bristol Bay, have already destroyed more than 1m acres. Satellite photos show rust-red scars trailing wisps of smoke in the west and south-west parts of the state, where fires continue to smolder. May and June set records in Alaska for dryness.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/18/alaska-wildfires-east-fork-lime-complex

…but that shit seems to be aligning all over the shop

Tomorrow’s front page pic.twitter.com/1JXdXx4vrX

— The Observer (@ObserverUK) July 16, 2022

The wildfires that have raged in Europe, Africa and North America in recent days have provided some dramatic front pages for newspapers across the world.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jul/17/wildfires-worldwide-what-the-front-pages-say

The prospect of an even hotter day on Tuesday provides a flurry of warnings on the front pages.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jul/19/earth-sends-a-warning-how-the-papers-covered-the-uks-scorching-heat

…it really is all kinds of hot

While these fires have become depressingly familiar in some parts of the world, most of Britain is just waking up to the reality of extreme weather that’s exacerbated by humanmade climate change.

The Meteorological Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather service, has issued its first “red warning” for extreme heat, urging people to avoid exercise, travel or even going outside if possible.
[…]
There was a 50% chance the U.K. could record its hottest temperature to date, currently 101.6 Fahrenheit in July 2019, it said.

If it does hit 105, that would make it hotter than all but 2% of the world, including some areas of the American Plains, the Middle East and China, according to NBC News meteorologist Kathryn Prociv.
[…]
“The extreme heat we are forecasting right now is absolutely unprecedented,” Met Office boss Penny Endersby said in a rare public service broadcast last week. “Here in the U.K., we are used to treating a hot spell as a chance to go and play in the sun — this is not that sort of weather. Our lifestyles and infrastructure are not adapted to what is coming.”

…&…well…I don’t know how familiar y’all are with the great british art of understatement…but

These aren’t uncommon levels of heat in other parts of the world — including the United States where 50 million people were expected to experience 100 degrees or above Monday. But Britain is simply not materially, culturally or psychologically equipped to cope.

Many houses were built in the 1800s and have thick brick walls that soak up heat in the day and retain it at night. Air conditioning is uncommon outside of offices and other public spaces. And rarely does the temperature reach 90 degrees on this gray and drizzly North Atlantic rock, whose most southern mainland point is on the same latitude as Winnipeg, Canada.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/britain-emergency-heatwave-hot-wildfires-europe-france-spain-portugal-rcna38647

…so…it’s tempting to say we’re all in this together

…but that undersells a couple (or so) things

The extreme temperature has not been seen “since modern record keeping began a century and a half ago,” my colleague William Booth writes of Britain. “Hitting 40C, for British climate scientists, is a kind of a unicorn event that had appeared in their models but until recently seemed almost unbelievable and unattainable this soon.”

Yet even as European scientists and policymakers recognize the need to adjust in the face of looming planetary peril, more immediate pressures are pulling governments in the opposite direction. The Russian invasion of Ukraine — which triggered chaos in global energy markets and stiff Western sanctions on Russian fossil fuels — has led to a spike in the cost of electricity across the continent, with some countries getting exposed for their overreliance on Russian natural gas and oil to power their economies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/19/europe-heat-temperature-russia-energy/

…irritatingly I can’t seem to find the link this morning but for context I think the statistic was that the US gets through the same energy tab as, say, the UK & germany combined just powering all the A/C it uses

…& a bit like that outdoor private mall in the middle east that uses industrial A/C to give the illusion of cool streets while the people stuck in its surroundings get extra baked by the exhaust heat…it doesn’t seem like rolling out a US-style approach to A/C to the rest of the joint is likely to end well…not that everywhere’s doing the dry-as-tinder thing

In the first five days of this month, a storm system deposited 8.7 inches of rain on Sydney, double the month’s average rainfall and leading to the wettest July on record. Some surrounding areas received over 30 inches. In what has now become a familiar routine, tens of thousands of people living along the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, west of the city, evacuated. For some towns, it was their third severe flood in the past 16 months. For others, their fourth.

Australia’s leaders have been quick to praise the “resilience” and community spirit of local residents. But as the cleanup begins again, that resilience is starting to falter. With climate change intensifying extreme weather events, residents must confront the prospect that a constant and exhausting cycle of evacuation, return and months of cleanup will become the new normal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/world/australia/sydney-floods.html

…although somewhat perversely it turns out that in fact the heat thing might come down to wet things when it comes to the crux of the matter…even (or perhaps especially) in regions we’d all benefit from not being parched to within an inch of their lives

Parts of India and Pakistan have been sweltering for weeks under a record-breaking heat wave, exposing more than a billion people to dangerously hot conditions with little relief in sight.

While temperatures in the region cooled slightly this week, blistering heat is expected to return in the coming days and spread east, where rising “wet-bulb temperatures” — an esoteric measurement that was little known outside meteorology circles until now — could threaten the ability for humans to survive, according to experts.
[…]
As the intensity of heat waves increases as a result of global warming, it raises the risk that what’s known as wet-bulb temperatures will also go up, pushing some heat events into “unsurvivable” territory, experts say.

Wet-bulb temperature measures the combination of heat and humidity, which can hamper the human body’s ability to cool itself down if at too high a level.
[…]
“It’s a very effective means of cooling, but it’s crucial that the sweat can actually evaporate,” said Tapio Schneider, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the California Institute of Technology.

When the wet-bulb temperature, or the combination of heat and humidity, exceeds the temperature of the human body — around 97 degrees Fahrenheit or 36 degrees Celsius — sweat cannot evaporate and humans can no longer cool themselves down.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/wet-bulb-temperature-weather-average-climate-human-heat-wave-rcna27478

…I’m not qualified to judge whether NBC might be lowballing that tipping point…but I will say the BBC did make the point that the last time britain was that hot was the ’70s…when it topped out around 37 or so on the celsius scale…& some folks have fond memories of frolicking in the sunshine rather than thousands succumbing to heatstroke & the like

…so the extra half-dozen or so degrees are what they suggest puts this time the wrong side of that tipping point…& tipping points certainly seem to be all over the damn shop in a way that ensures I’m having a hard time getting around to harping about some of the other ones knocking about in deplorable abundance…you’d think some people might…I dunno…pay a bit more attention to them?

Can we talk about it now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts – the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing the pundits are dust. Even the Times editors still publishing columns denying climate science know it. Even the candidates for the Tory leadership, ignoring or downplaying the issue, know it. Never has a silence been so loud or so resonant.

This is not a passive silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. It is a void assiduously filled with trivia and amusement, gossip and spectacle. Talk about anything, but not about this. But while the people who dominate the means of communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar becoming impossible to ignore. These days of atmospheric rage, these heatshocks and wildfires ignore the angry shushing and burst rudely into our silent retreat.

We have seen nothing yet. The dangerous heat England is suffering at the moment is already becoming normal in southern Europe, and would be counted among the cooler days during hot periods in parts of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, where heat is becoming a regular threat to life. It cannot now be long, unless immediate and comprehensive measures are taken, before these days of rage become the norm even in our once-temperate climatic zone.

The same formula applies to every harm humans do to each other: what cannot be discussed cannot be addressed. Our failure to prevent catastrophic global heating arises above all from the conspiracy of silence that dominates public life, the same conspiracy of silence that has, at one time or another, surrounded every variety of abuse and exploitation.

We do not deserve this. The billionaire press and the politicians it promotes may deserve each other, but none of us deserves either group. They are constructing a world between them in which we have not elected to live, in which we may not be able to live. On this issue, as on so many, the people tend to be far ahead of those who claim to represent us. But those politicians and media barons deploy every imaginable wile and ruse to prevent decisive action from being taken.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/18/heatwave-extreme-weather-uk-climate-crisis

…& while I often struggle to agree with some of the conclusions monbiot draws if only because they sometimes come across as sort of bombastically extreme in a way that implies the only thing that could save us is a series of unrealistically swift & massive changes with the uncomfortably chilling corollary that it’s all too late & we’re rearranging deckchairs while the band play on & our global titanic succumbs to an anti-iceberg…but the hell of it is…he’s probably right about more than I’d like him to be

But while they have been playing patience, power has been playing poker. The radical right insurgency has swept all before it, crushing the administrative state, destroying public protections, capturing the courts, the electoral system and the infrastructure of government, shutting down the right to protest and the right to live. While we persuaded ourselves that there is no time for system change, they proved us wrong by changing everything.

The problem was never that system change is too big an ask or takes too long. The problem is that incrementalism is too small an ask. Not just too small to drive transformation; not just too small to stop the tidal wave of revolutionary change rolling in from the opposite direction; but also too small to break the conspiracy of silence. Only a demand for system change, directly confronting the power driving us to planetary destruction, has the potential to match the scale of the problem and to inspire and mobilise the millions of people required to generate effective action.

All this time, environmentalists have been telling people we face an unprecedented, existential crisis, while simultaneously asking them to recycle their bottle tops and change their drinking straws. […] Their timidity, their reluctance to say what they really want, their mistaken belief that people aren’t ready to hear anything more challenging than this micro-consumerist bollocks carries a significant share of the blame for global failure.
[…]
Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury, doughnut economics, participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. None of these are bigger asks than those the billionaire press has made and largely achieved: the neoliberal revolution that has swept away effective governance, effective taxation of the rich, effective restraints on the power of business and oligarchs and, increasingly, effective democracy.
[…]
I feel clearer about what effective political action looks like than I have ever done. But a major question remains. Given that we have left it so late, can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/18/heatwave-extreme-weather-uk-climate-crisis

…so…I know I’ve been up in some hills like an over-served parody of zarathustra…where my phone refused to acknowledge there was an internet to connect to & the room I was in wasn’t in radius of a router…for what didn’t seem such a long time when the assembled company featured five kids between three & thirteen & the dozen or so attendant grown ups…& the concerns of the day were more on the level of whether or not you can generate enough ice cubes that the children’s depredations can be induced to leave enough at the end of the day for a round of gin & tonics between their bed time & the grown ups’…so I’m behind by a whole jan 6th hearing, a couple of tory leadership debates & the demise of a few candidates’ chances…& quite honestly it seems like an apocalypse bingo card with the classic war/famine/pestilence/flood/fire combo would be not so much filled as suffering an embarrassment of riches about now…maybe I’ll get to catching up with some of that this side of thursday’s effort…but for now…it’s hard to get off this particular horse when it seems not so much mid-stream as barely keeping its feet in a torrent

And this is just the beginning. When our children are our age, they will yearn for a summer as “cool” as 2022, because long before the century’s end, 40C-plus heat will be nothing to write home about in the climate-mangled world they inherit.

The brutal truth is that dodging dangerous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown is now practically impossible. Even if all the promises and pledges made at Cop26 were kept, we would still be lucky to stay below a 2C rise, and if tipping points are crossed and feedbacks kick in, the figure could be much higher. So, hothouse Britain is a reality, and the sooner we face this fact, the better. And be very clear, this isn’t alarmist. It isn’t what deniers are fond of calling “climate porn”. This is simply how things are.
[…]
In the decades ahead, summers are set to get ever hotter and last longer, overwhelming the other seasons, and reducing winter to a couple of dreary months punctuated by damaging storms and destructive floods. Blistering heat will be the default weather for July and August, when a combination of high temperatures and humidity will make sunbathing and working in the open extremely unpleasant and potentially deadly. Our poorly insulated homes will provide little respite as they are turned into unliveable heat-traps. Camping out in gardens and parks will become commonplace as baking nights make sleeping indoors impossible. Inevitably, increasing numbers of people will flee the cities to escape the heat-island effect that will transform them into unbearable saunas. A general migration northwards and uphill can be expected, as cooler conditions become a big property selling point.
[…]
A confluence of desiccating drought, torrential rains and battering hail, flooding and new pests that thrive in the heat will take a massive toll on crops at a time when frequent harvest failures and climate wars will mean an erratic and unreliable supply from overseas. We have already seen price hikes and gaps on supermarket shelves as a consequence of the Ukraine conflict. Climate breakdown will bring far worse. One study predicts that by 2050 the world will need half as much food again, while crop yields could be down by as much as 30%. This is nothing less than a recipe for widespread hunger, social unrest and civil strife, and the UK is unlikely to be immune.
[…]
Coastal communities will fight a losing battle as bigger and more frequent storm surges, increasingly powerful waves and a remorseless hike in sea level supercharge cliff erosion and permanently swamp low-lying terrain. Sea level is now rising by a centimetre every two years, which is more than double the rate for the period 1993-2002. Within 80 years it will certainly be more than a metre higher, and could have climbed by 2m or even more. This would bring the North Sea far inland, threatening especially low-lying communities such as the Lincolnshire towns of Boston and Spalding.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/18/britain-hothouse-extreme-weather

…so…when what’s needed is change on an industrial scale* to avoid a scenario akin to extinction-by-suicide…could we at least do something about tying the hands of the more obvious people pointing the big guns at our collective head?
[* – …it’s true…for example the cooling effect in an urban heat-sink environment of painting every residential roof white is equivalent to that which could be achieved by a mere fraction of the benefit of swapping residential for commercial/industrial in that sentence…just for instance]

During an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Sanders interrupted host Martha Raddatz when she said Manchin had “abruptly pulled the plug” on supporting a scaled-back version of a spending bill that is crucial to Biden’s agenda. Manchin said he would not support provisions in the bill that increase spending to combat climate change and close tax loopholes.
[…]
“He didn’t abruptly do anything – he has sabotaged the president’s agenda,” Sanders said. “If you check the record, six months ago, I made it clear that you have people like Manchin, Sinema to a lesser degree, who are intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want.”

“Nothing new about this,” Sanders added. “The problem was that we continued to talk to Manchin like he was serious. He was not,” noting how the West Virginia senator and coal baron has benefited from campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies.

…if anyone still wasn’t clear about the understatement thing…”nothing new”…that right there is pretty much what they might call a textbook example even in blighty

The West Virginian has always argued that he votes in the interest of his state, historically poor and hurt by the coal industry’s decline.

But critics are skeptical, particularly when it comes to his position on climate legislation. Manchin is the Senate’s top recipient of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry and has made millions from his family’s coal firm.

“Senators have told me and others that negotiating with Joe Manchin is like negotiating with an Etch-a-Sketch,” Norm Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said of Manchin’s opposition. “It appears to be a coal-powered Etch-a-Sketch.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/16/joe-manchin-biden-climate-senate

…because I was feeling pretty relaxed about things in my immediate vicinity this last week or so…& I don’t mean to let my reaction to sticking my toe back on the steadily-warming pot of simmering news leave anyone feeling scalded

The Reuters Institute revealed last month that 42% of Americans actively avoid the news at least some of the time because it grinds them down or they just don’t believe it. Fifteen percent said they disconnected from news coverage altogether. In other countries, such as the UK and Brazil, the numbers selectively avoiding it were even higher.

“In the United States, those who self-identify on the right are far more likely to avoid news because they think it is untrustworthy or biased, but those on the left are more likely to feel overwhelmed, carry feelings of powerlessness, or worry that the news might create arguments,” the institute said.
[…]
And yet major longstanding news organisations are sceptical because their audience numbers just keep growing. Professor Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, said that while there are short term peaks and troughs in engagement with the news around major events, the long term trend is up.

Bell said that in recent years the total number of stories read by Americans has grown to be much larger than she would ever have imagined. “So I start from this position of, is this really happening? People say, ‘I’m sick of the news, I’m actually taking steps to avoid it or I’m not paying attention to it.’ While one has to take them at their word, statistically I would like to see a bit more evidence it’s actually true,” she said.
[…]
Bell also pointed out that although younger people may be turning away from traditional news sources that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re turning away from the news.
[…]
Still, Americans, exhausted by it all, may be increasingly likely to retreat between the big stories. It’s also possible that people say they are turning away from some news because so much more is coming at them, but at the same time they still consume more than they ever did.
[…]
Bell, who sits on the Guardian Media Group’s commercial board, agreed. “The sense of being overwhelmed, particularly with troubling and bad news, is very real. It’s exhausting,” she said. “People feel for their own mental stability, that there are a certain number of things about which you can’t do very much on a daily basis, where opting out of the news might be something that is very appealing.”
[…]
“The way that we have designed our new communications infrastructure is to be absolutely relentless,” she said. “If I read one story about somebody being made ill or dying, possibly because they had to have a Covid vaccine, I get 50 stories about people dying from every single news outlet in the world. So the overwhelming impression you could get is that something bad was happening with vaccines even though it wasn’t. And even though every single story was was more or less accurate, it was only representing a tiny bit of what was happening in the in the real world.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/16/americans-avoid-news-reuters-survey

…since I seem to be coming up short on my own this morning…& I’d wager I’m not alone…here’s a bit of vicarious optimism courtesy of the youth

In the 1960s, we ignored signs of climate change and steamed ahead with big energy. In the 1970s and 1980s, anger began to mount. Some scientists, like physicist Carl Sagan, raised red flags around a changing climate, while others, like the head of the UK Met Office John Mason, tried to debunk “alarmist US views”. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies began investing in PR campaigns to amplify doubt about the climate crisis, a trend that continued well into the 1990s.

The 2000s saw the depression stage of grief. The science was undeniable and while many began to take action, the climate dread set in – something psychologists say is a big obstacle to taking action.

Enter Gen-Z. If you’ve spent much time on eco TikTok, you’ll know that they’re extraordinarily good at shaking off the climate dread and spreading climate optimism – perhaps it is the acceptance stage of grief. We spoke with a few of them to find out more.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jul/15/climate-optimism-gen-z

…& while my recent sojourn might give me at least some basis on which to claim I’m not entirely out of touch with the youth of today…I’m most definitely not up to speed with what the cool kids listen to…so forgive me if the tunes run a little old today (…or indeed every day it’s me picking any)

[…seriously, though…I have a lot to catch up on so apologies if you’ve all been over this already or there’s anything I seem to have callously overlooked…hope everyone’s keeping well…or as well as any of can manage with one thing or another…I’d say it’s good to be be back…but the news continues to be dire so that sounds way too close to blowing my own horn for comfort, really…figure I’ll go with best of luck out there…& don’t let the bastards get you down?]