This planet can only take so much damage before it decides it’s had enough of us as a species.
Record-shattering heatwaves, raging wildfires and floods like Hurricane Idalia out here destroying lives in the US, while similar wildfires devastate Europe, heat waves in India, China and beyond in 2023, it all raises a rather alarming question: has humanity’s unending addiction to carbon emissions (aka dinosaur juice) finally pushed the climate crisis into a new and accelerating phase of global destruction? Or am I just paranoid and too focused on the negative to see our collective progress?
The issue is being strongly debated by experts, with accusations of doom-mongering being countered with accusations of complacency. This article from The Guardian asked 45 leading climate scientists from around the world their thoughts. The scientists warned that the patterns of extreme weather we’ve seen in recent months was just the tip of a melting iceberg compared with the even worse consequences still to come. In just a decade, these exceptional climate events of 2023 could become the norm, unless there is a dramatic increase in collective climate action.
Some of these climate scientists further speculated that the tendency of climate models to underestimate extreme weather means we’re flying partially blind into a future that could be even more catastrophic than we can anticipate.
“July has been the hottest month in human history and people around the world are suffering the consequences, but this is what we expected at this level of warming. This will become the average summer in 10 years’ time unless the world cooperates and puts climate action top of the agenda.”
- Professor Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, UK
Side Items
Flight Attendant Strike: Flight attendants at American Airlines voted overwhelmingly yesterday to authorize their union leaders to call for a strike. This was a move designed to put direct pressure on the airline during ongoing negotiations over pay raises. The Association of Professional Flight Attendants said that more than 99% of members who voted recently favored giving the union power to call a strike. The union backed up the vote with picketing at several airports, causing delays felt across the country
Microdosing Death: The reviled toad of a senator from Kentucky Mitch McConnell had another of his unresponsive episodes on camera yesterday. It's the second time the 81-year-old republican was briefly incapable of speaking in public in a little over a month. This time he was at a press conference in northern Kentucky, speaking about God knows what marginalized community he would exploit next, McConnell trailed off and paused after he was asked whether he would run for reelection. An absurd question to ask a man who should’ve retired 15 years ago. A staffer eventually joined McConnell at the podium and repeated the question for him. In all, the six-term senator silently held on to the podium for about 30 seconds, failing to answer the posed question, just staring woefully, possibly into his eternal future of damnation
Gaze Into This Abyss: The fellas over at NASA dropped a new heater earlier this week, releasing a hypnotic new image from the James Webb Space Telescope, giving us a view of a spiral galaxy floating ~27 million light-years away from Earth.
It's a wild snapshot representing a mysterious realm called M51 (also known as NGC 5194 or the Whirlpool galaxy) that brilliantly captures the rocky relationship this galaxy has with its nearby neighbor, a dwarf galaxy named NGC 5195. It is, in fact, partially because of this galactic interaction that M51 may have such an ornate pattern in the first place. Science rules