I’m writing on a day when SeaTac had a high temperature 10 degrees hotter than the previous record.
Summer—our brief respite of full, sunny days and clear-crystal weather for which we endure our nigh-year purgatory of ever-drizzle and afternoon sunsets—is still not officially arrived at time of this writing.
We can hope this season will squeeze in some few nice days precious amid the ash-gray haze of Pacific Northwest forest fires that turns the high-sky sun into a cigarette’s cherry.
We’re told this is the new normal, but it could be worse. And it will be.
“It is, I promise, worse than you think.”
The New York Magazine piece “The Uninhabitable Earth” by American journalist David Wallace-Wells from 2017 goes on:
If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
Wallace-Wells details what heating the whole world by degrees really means, the sort of catastrophe a rise of four degrees Celsius causes everywhere and how 10 degrees makes vast portions utterly unlivable from the direct heat—let alone crop failure, flooding, and extreme events that will become common enough just to be called “weather”.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determined in its Fifth Assessment Report that: Continue reading “BOOK REVIEW: We can still make “A Bright Future” with nuclear energy”
ADJ 