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Climate Brief: We're having a heat wave - it's damn frightening. [1]
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Date: 2022-09-07
I used to write a lot about climate change here at DK. Until I didn’t anymore. And that happened when I began to experience intense grief and fear over what our future looks like. I think that happened in conjunction with the 2015 Paris Agreement, which, while lauded now by many, fell woefully short of addressing the urgency of the problem and calling for rapid action. For a time, I tried kickstarting the Climate Brief group here, but ran on of steam on that one. DK, is after all, a political site, and folks just weren’t all that interested in what our writers had to say, save for those diaries with spectacular headlines. I wasn’t capable of writing a sensationalized header for a doomsday news story. I just couldn’t bring myself to share my true thoughts and fears, informed as they were by the facts.
Today, this week, as California sluggishly moves through what the San Francisco Chronicle reports as the worst heat wave in the state’s history, I feel compelled to give voice to my fears. Because holding them inside is causing such intense anxiety. Maybe venting will give me some release.
It’s so hot that life isn’t going on as usual. The world feels drained of energy, as if everything is feeding the ferocious heat. Businesses are closing early. Schools are canceling outdoor activities. And we have fires burning on both ends of the state as we enter what has become the most dangerous time for wildfires in California.
It’s getting damn frightening outside!
And it amazes me that the climatologists and meteorologists who have been working on climate models for so many years, so undershot the hole with their predictions. What is the most amazing thing to me is how scientists, who have been working on climate models for so many years, so desperately underestimated the degree and speed with which climate change would play havoc with life as we know it.
Tuesday was a brutally hot day in the North Bay near San Francisco, with temperatures in some towns reaching 116 degrees.
I received an email from a friend who shared how they have been coping with the heat wave: She and her husband are in their late 70s and they haven’t left their apartment since Saturday. She wrote:
“This [Tuesday] morning we did not open one door. We opened one curtain for some light - NOT sunlight. Amazing how cool our place stayed. That's the way they do it in Italy.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/7/2121371/-We-re-having-a-heat-wave-it-s-damn-frightening
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