Daily temperature records will tumble as sizzling early season heat from a summerlike heat dome sends thermometers skyrocketing into the triple digits in parts of California and the West this week.
The official start of summer is just a few weeks away, but it will feel like July in much of the West as temperatures climb 20 degrees or more above average, the highest temperatures of the year so far for many locations.
Excessive heat warnings are in effect for more than 17 million people in California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona this week. The warnings are the most extreme form of heat alert issued by the National Weather Service and are used when widespread, dangerous heat is expected.
The soaring temperatures are being caused by a heat dome, a large area of high pressure that parks over an area, traps air and heats it with abundant sunshine for days or weeks. The resulting heat becomes more intense the longer a heat dome lasts.
Climate change effects are compounding, as polar caps melt they release trapped methane which is more effective greenhouse gas than CO2.
As temperatures heat up, people just gonna turn up HVAC more, more energy usage, which means we either get green real quick, or this feedback loop will continue until we break.
But all this is known. We’re all gonna be scrambling when we reach that point, spouting “We didn’t listen” like that episode of South Park about this very issue.
Meh, im sure the rich fucks have contingencies for themselves, so it’s all good.
That’s the thing though, we, the we being your average human on the planet, are put in a position to have very little power to do anything about it. In America specifically (not so sure about the rest of the world) you’re kept busy trying to manage your health insurance (if you have it), your retirement fund (if you have it), your job (that may or may not have unpaid on call), your home (maintaining and cleaning your home/apartment/townhouse, trying to do repairs yourself because you can’t afford to pay for others to do it as prices for service/repair work have skyrocketed), your food (it is too expensive to even buy fast food anymore so you gotta cook to save money), your car (gotta own a vehicle as the US doesn’t have meaningful public transport, gotta make sure it is insured, maintained, etc.), your bills (gotta juggle those credit card and points cards and discount cards to get the best deals on every purchase!), if you have children, then you have to manage all the facets of their lives as well including making their food, cleaning up after them, taking them to/from school and other extracurriculars, deal with any school system issues, and on and on.
By the end of the week, you just want to have five minutes to catch your breath, but you can’t, because you only (maybe) have two days off of work and those will be spent catching up on whatever chores you didn’t get done during the week.
Democratic governance was meant so that we could vote people into office to manage the governance, but now that is so bloated and broken, we also have to collectively stay on top of our nation, state, county, city’s issues so we can be aware and try and “fight” back whenever we can with a letter or a council meeting. Never going to have time to go to a protest or skip out of work for a week to protest with your work/dollar because living paycheck-to-paycheck with no safety net means you’re homeless if one thing fucks up.
The whole system (again, in the US at least) is designed to keep one so busy that one doesn’t even know their way out of the week, let alone to take individual action to collectively organize and kick these politicians and corporations in the teeth for destroying the human habitability of the planet.
You are absolutely right about all the challenges facing average Americans that keep us too busy to do a lot about issues like these.
Still, there are lots of different ways to help. Some do require more time, and are probably out of reach for someone who’s just barely getting by. But some require less.
Today I dropped off at the post office 350 hand written postcards to low propensity climate voters in my state. I wrote and addressed the postcards while I was watching TV, so it didn’t really take much more of my free time (I would have been watching TV anyways). Elections in my state have been decided by only a few hundred votes, so actions like this do make a difference.
Next week, I will be meeting with staff for my member of Congress in person in D.C. I have the luxury of having the time and money to make this happen, but if you pick up the phone or write an email every single month to your congressional office and mention climate change, it makes it much easier for us to get these meetings and get our point across. Pressure on congressional offices alone doesn’t get the job done, but it makes them take us more seriously when we meet with them and present a bill that we want them to support.
Congress is pretty dysfunctional right now, but we still have managed to get some climate friendly legislation through. Every bit of help and support we get along the way makes a difference.
The group I volunteer with is Citizens’ Climate Lobby, and I think they are the best, but there are other groups out there. The American Conversation Coalition is more right-leaning and has been gaining traction recently. The Sunrise Movement is more left-leaning, though for some reason I haven’t heard much from them recently, at least in my state. I’m sure there are other groups out there besides those three.
Dude responds to a post about having no time and money by saying he hand wrote hundreds of postcards in his free time and also volunteers…
Thanks for your reply. I think I might have introduced a bit of confusion here, as I’m making two points in a bit of an implicit way.
My first point is a bit of a refutation of the OP. It’s basically the same as you’ve heard from any other political non-profit: “you can make a difference with just 5 minutes of your time! It doesn’t matter if you’re broke and struggling under late-stage capitalism just like the rest of us, your voice matters!”
There is both truth, and deception in that statement.
The truth is that small actions do make a difference. I’ve seen the link between how getting more contacts from my district to congressional offices helps me set meetings with the office. Anyone can pick up the phone and call Congress, it doesn’t take a special skill, or money. Similarly with the postcard thing – if someone felt like doing it, and if postcards & stamps were provided by the group, it wouldn’t take a lot of extra time or money to do like a couple dozen, and I’m sure that person would feel more involved and empowered. I’m not trying to say everyone should do it, just that it takes less effort than you might think to make a real noticeable difference, even if you’re struggling under late-stage capitalism.
The deception is thinking that it is enough for a movement to rely solely on these actions as a strategy. It is not enough on its own and leads to slacktivism, and is probably part of why most of us have felt so burnt out for so long on the idea of making changes – we’ve been burned before (remember Net Neutrality?)
Therefore, my second point, and the reason that I shared a bit more about what I’ve been doing, is that I’m trying to give people a little bit of hope. I’m trying to build on the first point (it’s easier than you think to take a small action). And what I’m building on that to say is: “don’t worry that you (person who has very little time/money to contribute) aren’t doing enough, because I’m here to pick up the rest. I’ve got this. We are a team, so pass the ball to me, and put me in the play”.
What I’m trying to say is, a movement needs both pieces. Again, movements that have the first (popular pressure) but lack the second (volunteer development, engagement, active lobbying, etc.) tend to fizzle out like the Net Neutrality movement.
On the other hand, some movements have heavily dedicated and invested volunteers, but can’t convince an average American to do things like regularly contact their representative. The feedback we get in my state from congressional offices is something like 100 contacts per month, every month on a particular issue will cause them to start taking it more seriously. Without meeting that threshold, a movement will never get traction no matter how enthusiastic their core volunteers are. Nobody will take them seriously.
Of those 350 postcards, 330 were immediately thrown in the trash without being read.
Edit: Also 350 postcards with the proper postage would cost $185.50
I’m sure that many will be thrown away, and the cynical take sounds logical at face value. But that’s not what the data shows:
https://www.environmentalvoter.org/results
Postage costs were spread around among volunteers. Some people have more time than money, some have more money than time. Personally, I paid for about 250 postcard stamps, and got a roll of 100 from the group. Others got more or less rolls of stamps.
Cynicism among folks who care about climate change is understandable, and widespread, which is a big motivation for sending postcards targeting climate voters. The data shows that we tend to vote less than the average voter. If we really want the political changes that we say we do, then we need to show it and take action.
It’s entirely possible that it is too late to do anything about climate change. But if we act as if it’s true then we make it a certainty, where now it is only a probability.
Climate change realists (people that have common sense) voting less than the average population is not something I expected. If anyone believes that climate change is real and isn’t voting Democrat, you’re the problem.
Climate change has become reality because of apathy. Not evil actors. They’ve always been the minority relying on inaction.
Yes. Die after everyone else does when they finally figure out that there’s nothing left to live for, money doesn’t mean shit if you’re king of a dead world.
🤣 The joke is that if society were to start collapsing, it won’t, but if, the rich people’s homes would be raided and looted first.
So the rich are fucking up doubley.
Like the idiots in World War Z who created a compound and then started livestreaming from it.
No one is safe including the rich.
The biggest major effect that global warming will have in the next few years or about 20 to 30 years is … mass migration. Once that starts in earnest, countries will be breaking out in conflicts everywhere. We aren’t cooperating with ourselves within our established borders now, what do you think will happen when millions of people start moving around to avoid the heat and more natural disasters.
Everyone will suffer … the only thing the rich buy themselves is time because we are all headed to the same global environmental apocalypse.
I feel good that I’m middle aged now because I will have lived my younger years when the world was doing relatively OK.
I feel bad for anyone born right now because they’ll either see the beginning of the end or start surviving it.
All of this has a silver lining: Dumping this much CO2 into our atmosphere will clearly signal that something weird is going on at interstellar scales, so maybe what’s left of humanity will finally make first contact. This is compounded if we use nuclear weapons during the resource wars.
We are talking about ppb. Very hard to detect that from a distance. We couldn’t detect it on Mars from earth.
Space is big, any civilization analyzing the composition of exo planet atmosphereres wouldn’t know for quite a while. It’s for more likely that they wouldn’t discover it until after several decades of passed, at which point it will have been too late.
That, and there’s the fact that first contact almost universally goes bad for the group with less technology, which is us in this case.
So you may as well just start playing the lottery.
The only hope I have left is a Star Trek civilization at some point in the future and this is the only path I see to it.
Don’t take that from me.
Star Trek required WWIII, a major nuclear conflict, and the Eugenics Wars for humanity to pull their head out of their asses and not immediately shoot the first Vulcans that came by to see what was going on with the warp drive that Zephram Cochran had just turned on.
Yeah, hence my hope that a collapse and resource wars will teach us how to work together