To retain my sanity and keep stress levels down, I take “news” (aka usually anxiety-producing biased content) in tidbits (not tweets) — morsels that are still so disturbing I cannot linger long. Excessive hurricanes, fires, flooding; power cuts and flight cancellations due to excessive heat; people rushed to emergency rooms for heat exhaustion and dying from heat stroke — are all happening today. Right now. The reality of worldwide weather changes and what I see in my own environment confirm climate change stories first-hand.
A New York Times article reports 2014-2018 as the hottest years on record worldwide. Think about that. (And we still have the fourth quarter to go.) “Seventeen of the 18 warmest years since modern record-keeping began have occurred since 2001.” And these hot temps are projected to continue to rise. I find that astounding. And worrisome.
Every day this summer I’ve thanked God for air conditioning. I wasn’t so fortunate in my youth. Residing in a 3rd floor walk-up with no AC, an oscillating fan kept me alive when I couldn’t escape the suffocating city heat — and that was 30 years ago before even hotter temps.
So much is at stake — lives, food, clean water, breathable air, electricity to name a few. Can the grid endure? I wonder about a global outage. We saw Puerto Rico’s plight with no electricity for 11 months…
Brian Petersen, a climate change and planning academic at Northern Arizona University noted in a Guardian article, “It’s only a matter of time until the west is completely insufficiently prepared for climate change. If we really wanted to be prepared we would be doing a lot of different things that we’re not doing.”
Some cities are offering cooling shelters and promising to slash green house gas emissions but is it too little too late? Have we poisoned what nature’s generously given and created our own Hell on earth?
Cities planting more trees to help alleviate the heat are like saying, “Oh Mother Nature, you were right. You knew all along what we needed…yet, taking it for granted we foolishly followed our selfish ways.”
I wonder what your personal experiences have been with climate change, what differences are you noticing in your local environment?
wRighTing My Life 
Truly life altering — for people, animals, plants, the planet. There is no denying what we can see for ourselves.
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More days with above average temps here. Also year-round, or nearly, insects that used to be seasonal. It’s all worrisome.
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Thank you for sharing your experience, sad as it is. I can’t imagine being in the midst of that smoke, or seeing all of the destruction. It seems nature is calling out everywhere. Our rains this summer have been of near Biblical proportion. My heartfelt wishes to you.
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For the second year in a row, my beloved home province of BC is battling forest fires. 149 last year…600 this year! I’m currently in Alberta, one province over and since August the smoke from these fires has blocked out the sun more days than not. Some mornings, it looks like dusk for hours on end. And on all days it feels apocalyptic. Trying not to panic here, that’s for sure. I do wonder that myself, is it all too late?
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