#climate weirding

[thatstormygeek]

Technically there is less than a month until Election Season ends, but that’s a lie. It will stretch beyond November 5 because there is no longer a firm winner, only contestation and violence and profiteering, swirling like storm water in a sewer.

We have been in Election Season for a decade. The season has no predictable pattern other than its steady series of disasters. It is like climate change, with each catastrophe first denied and then weaponized. We know the roots of the crises, but no one is held accountable. We know how to mitigate the damage, but the powerful insist it is ordinary people’s fault. “You should have voted the hurricane out,” they scold. “It’s your job to evacuate before fascism arrives!” Maybe I got that backwards. It’s hard to keep messaging straight in Election Season, when authority holds no sincerity and time loses all meaning. There are no sweet summers or crisp autumns or cool winters or lush springs in Election Season. There is only the memory of a bygone era when things changed, instead of dragging on and on. Once there were four seasons and now there is one: climate chaos. Once there were rotating four-year presidencies and now there is one endless campaign, a pale horse race whose rider is Death, and Hell follows him. Hell follows you too, on social media, and demands you follow Hell back. Hell follows your phone and your car and your right to privacy and asks you for a donation.

The 2024 campaign discourse was a rerun in which pundits gave the same warnings about Trump’s autocratic aims that I gave in 2016 but ignored that he has since held office and carried many of them out, including sedition, yet was unpunished and allowed to run for president again. That is the real story of the 2024 election: sanctioned illegality. Impunity countenanced by all sides. No one in power takes the sovereignty of the US seriously and now they don���t even bother pretending.

[joelmeador]

Logbooks, like the nearly 200-page document kept aboard the Eunice H. Adams, served as legal reports, necessary for insurance claims, which meant log keepers kept exhaustive records of the crew’s day-to-day exploits. They tracked the ship’s location, other vessels encountered, and both weather and sea conditions along the routes they sailed. But they also kept clues for the future: Stored within the pages of the 18th and 19th-century whaling logbooks is a cache of ancient weather records, meticulously logged by crews traversing the world’s oceans

[reasonsforhope]

This is kind of a weird reason for hope, honestly, but it genuinely changed how I think about catastrophe.

Historical fact that you probably do not know:

At least 30-50% of the population of Pompeii survived.

Maybe even the majority of the people of Pompeii survived.

(The numbers 30-50% there are according Professor J. Theodore Peña, a professor of ancient Roman archeology who studies Pompeii, whom I took a class on Pompeii with in 2018. The numbers of "maybe even the majority" are from articles linked below.)

Yes, that Pompeii, the one where the entire city was swallowed by a volcanic eruption.

And no, I'm not kidding. x, x, x, x, x, x

So how this is possible, that anyone could survive, when the entire city was literally buried in volcanic ash? And the answer is that the eruption actually took place over the course of almost 24 hours, as the earthquakes and clouds of smoke emitting from Pompeii gradually got worse and worse, followed by the ejection of ash and giant stones that gradually escalated, until the fifth pyroclastic flow (aka giant wave of searing hot ash) hit the city.

So, people had a bit less than 24 hours to flee the city. And many of them did, whether by boat or cart or horse or foot. And many of them made it.

Pompeii is the iconic, ultimate example we have, culturally, for a natural disaster that causes complete annihilation.

But it never caused complete annihilation at all. Not of the people who lived there.

I think climate change, ultimately, is going to be like Pompeii. Yes, there will be natural disasters. Yes, it will keep getting worse for a while.

Yes, people will die, and yes, we do need to act fast, and we need to do all that we can to save every single living being that we can.

But unlike the people of Pompeii, we have the ability to fix most of the effects of climate change. We have the ability to cool the planet down from whatever temperature it ultimately hits. (Masterpost on this here.)

Natural disasters fucking suck. But as the true story of Pompeii exemplifies, they are often a lot more survivable than we think. And we have benefits and resources and technology and knowledge above all communication that the people of Pompeii never did - in fact, we're getting so good at building for and detecting and warning for natural disasters that the number of people dying from natural disasters has been plummeting, even as natural disasters are getting worse and worse (x).

We are going to survive climate change (x). We are going to fix as much of it as we can (x). And we are going to rebuild afterward.

Because as the many survivors of Pompeii show, that's what humans do.

[tart-miano]

Happy Kagerou Day, i made this in half an hour :D

[dutchs-blog]

Tornado Damage In Palm Beach

[tomorrowusa]

Yep, these 500 year storms seem to be happening every few years. And if Trump gets elected and his Project 2025 has its way, NOAA won't be around even to warn us of approaching disasters.

Why was Hurricane Helene so bad? Fossil fuel pollution.

Helene also rapidly intensified twice before it reached Florida, because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is off-the-charts warm — much like the rest of the Atlantic. More than 90% of warming around the globe over the past 50 years has taken place in the oceans, and it’s making storms more likely to undergo these rapid intensification cycles. Sea levels in Florida are as much as 8 inches higher than they were in 1950. The speed of that rise is increasing too. This translates to higher storm surge. Across the board, Helene was a hurricane supercharged by climate change. “For decades now, scientists have been warning us that extreme weather events will be exacerbated by this blanket of carbon pollution we’ve been wrapping around our planet,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “But as a human, it is shocking to see the devastation occurring in front of our eyes, affecting the people and places we know and love.”

Four ways climate change likely made Hurricane Helene worse

DONALD TRUMP"S RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE...

[slyandthefamilybook]

can i say it. it's kinda weird how whenever the US south is threatened by climate, weather, or politics, people always says "don't celebrate them having their lives destroyed! there are LGBT people/people of color in the South too!"

[front-facing-pokemon]

[hale-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Bill Nye The Science Guy Endorses Kamala

Trump: "Sea-Level Rise = More Beachfront Property" [FALSE}

Bill Nye: The Planet's On Fire!!!

Trump: "I'm Not A Big Believer In Global Warming"

[thedepressedjuggalette]

Republicans are refusing to help victims of Hurricane Helene and are already planning to prevent any aid going to Florida once Hurricane Milton hits because if victims get help it would make Biden and Harris look good.

[doink-boink]

For the two Phobos/Sheriff asks I've gotten <3

[why-the-heck-not]

insomnia? do u mean my true crime podcast time

[templeofvengeance]

[tomorrowusa]

If you want more climate disasters, vote for Trump – an unnatural disaster.

Oil Tycoons Open the Money Floodgates for Trump

[crowzenyogurt]

work from my character&environment class

was assigned a kakapo character, then I had to give it a human companion, then I had to put them both in a desert environment and make a story out of it. plus some style studies

[thatstormygeek]

Basking in the cool evening air...

Such a lovely day for a concert.