First Responders in Jeopardy

First Responders in Jeopardy

From the dangers of conservative mythology

There is a difference between medical professionals, especially doctors and nurses, and those frontline, first responders who put their lives on the line, battling criminals, social unrest, guarding jails and prisons and fighting fires. There is a bravado, a machismo if you will for the men in these danger-facing fields, there is a physicality, an old-world vision of manliness. Even with a growing number of women in these professions. Guns and brawn. Discipline and pride. Power in the face of danger. Most have military experience. Almost a pioneer ethos, old West vision of what they do and what they mean for society. A rather dramatic, significant conservatism and vision of patriotism that often put them at odds with the society around them. 

We’ve seen this story unfold as police/fire fighters are often on the “other side” of liberal social issues and politicians. For example, the number of such first responders and those with military were part of the Capitol Hill mob on January 6th, and the number of right-wing militia members with the same background are alarming. Statistics tell us that 40% of Republican men still are not and have no intention of getting vaccinated, often repeating claims of “coronavirus is not much worse than a bad flu” despite mortality rates, that the entire COVID epoch is of Chinese manufacture used by liberals to push through unwarranted economic agenda or still, that the vaccine is both ineffective with major side effects, or that the entire matter remains a hoax/conspiracy theory promulgated by the radical left to take down righteous patriotic right-wing leaders. Given the conservative leanings of so many such frontline government officers, it is pretty obvious that they are not about to embrace “Democratic theories” about the necessity of a COVID vaccination.

Nothing evidences this commitment to right-wing causes, now manifest in nationalist Trumpism, like the abysmal vaccination rates within this body of first responders. Even in liberal California. Writing for the June 20th Los Angeles Times, Kevin Rector, Richard Winton, Dakota Smith and Ben Welsh drill down on a local California statistics, with vastly better first responder rates than virtually all red states: “When COVID-19 vaccines became available in California, police officers, firefighters and other first responders got priority access, and potentially more…

“But despite the priority access and array of incentives, vaccination rates for police, fire and corrections agencies across Los Angeles and California have lagged well behind the state’s average for adult residents, according to a survey of agencies conducted by The Times…While about 72% of adult Californians and 64% of L.A. residents 16 and older have received at least one vaccine dose, only about 51% of city firefighters and 52% of LAPD officers are at least partially vaccinated.

“Less than 30% of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department staff members have received vaccine doses through employee clinics. (Some could have received shots elsewhere, but the department doesn’t keep track.) About 54% of employees of state prisons are at least partially vaccinated, but rates plummet at certain facilities — with one site recording just 24% of its staff fully vaccinated.

“The low rates, which are not fully understood due to a lack of universal tracking, mar an otherwise positive outlook as the pandemic wanes and the state reopens. As first responders interact regularly with the public, the fact that many remain unvaccinated is a growing source of tension among city officials, public safety leaders and their rank-and-file workforces…

“Many in policing and other public safety sectors lean to the political right, among whom vaccines — and vaccine mandates — have been ridiculed, despite the fact that Republican leaders including former President Trump have been vaccinated… Skepticism was identified in the Los Angeles Police Department months ago, when an unscientific poll of 9,500 department employees found that 60% were willing to take the vaccine when offered. About 20% said they needed more information, and 20% said they would decline vaccinations.

“A major concern is first responders’ role in interacting with vulnerable residents. Research has shown lower rates of vaccination among homeless and mentally ill people and among young Black and Latino residents of L.A. County… The lower rates also show up among low-income residents who may work multiple jobs or worry that vaccination side effects could cause them to lose pay, as well as among immigrant communities that face language barriers or where fears about immigration enforcement run deep… 

“Prisoners, a substantial portion of whom remain unvaccinated, have no choice but to interact with corrections workers in tight quarters — where airborne diseases like COVID-19 can spread quickly… Nearly 50,000 state prisoners have contracted the coronavirus, and 224 have died, according to state data. Activists maintain that staffers are partially responsible for bringing the virus into the facilities.

“Since the start of the pandemic, more than 2,700 LAPD personnel have been infected with the coronavirus, and nine have died. Nearly 1,000 city firefighters have tested positive, and two have died. More than 17,000 state corrections staff members have been infected, and 28 have died.

Community leaders believe that police officers and other public safety officials have helped spread the virus by not wearing masks and refusing to get vaccinated, though such cases are difficult to quantify.” It would seem prudent, but to many political suicide, to require government employees, particularly safety-directed first responders, who routinely come into contact with the public in unprotected situations, to require these individuals, as a condition of employment, to get vaccinated. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and as ill-informed first responders with political agendas refuse to be vaccinated, we are unlikely to achieve herd immunity, and the virus is mutating into increasingly vaccine-resistant variants.

No Water for Chocolate

No Water for Chocolate

And So Much More

I’m an espresso nut (pun intended); I grind and brew my own special selection of beans, which I purchase from growers and trusted wholesalers around the world. I began to notice that over time that there were fewer and fewer farmers selling these products. Prices began to creep up, then soar, sometimes even doubling. Kona. Jamaica. Ethiopia. Colombia. It was happening everywhere. The price increases paralleled price increases in chocolate; the cocoa bean was clearly facing an equal level of contracting serviceable land. Drought was killing these crops, it seems. But, as they say, it’s just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Will these foods disappear? Became rare and pricey luxuries? What about the rest of our food chain? Is it due to climate change or is this just a cyclical pattern that the earth has witnessed before?

The current Holocene Epoch – effecting a huge measurement of time on Earth, reaches back about 11,000 years, immediately following the Pleistocene Era – began as the Ice Age ended and humanity began expanding sedentary agriculture. For most of that time, climate change did not vacillate wildly; no significant temperature changes altered that pattern… until the Industrial Revolution, and with the proliferation of motor vehicles, electrical power plants based on burning fossil fuel, increasing the use of fire to clear agricultural land and carbon-based industrial power… well… the Holocene Epoch just changed all that. Greenhouse gasses. Global warming such as the earth has never witnessed in recorded time.

Finnish researchers at Aalto University, in a peer-reviewed study entitled Climate Change Risks Pushing One-Third of Global Food Production Outside of Safe Climatic Space (in One Earth, May 14th Issue), warn that statistical analysis predicts that 30-34% of currently growing crops and raising livestock face severe climate risks within a foreseeable future. So many farms and ranches can no longer count on climatic stability for continuing their production. These are not short-term weather changes. Permanent destructive alterations in food production. Dangerous insect migration as well as diseases to plants and livestock are in this mix as well.

The authors summarize: “Food production on our planet is dominantly based on agricultural practices developed during stable Holocene climatic conditions. Although it is widely accepted that climate change perturbs these conditions, no systematic understanding exists on where and how the major risks for entering unprecedented conditions may occur. Here, we address this gap by introducing the concept of safe climatic space (SCS), which incorporates the decisive climatic factors of agricultural production: precipitation, temperature, and aridity. We show that a rapid and unhalted growth of greenhouse gas emissions (SSP5–8.5) could force 31% of the global food crop and 34% of livestock production beyond the SCS by 2081–2100. The most vulnerable areas are South and Southeast Asia and Africa's Sudano-Sahelian Zone, which have low resilience to cope with these changes. Our results underpin the importance of committing to a low-emissions scenario (SSP1–2.6), whereupon the extent of food production facing unprecedented conditions would be a fraction.”

Writing for the June 19th edition of Yahoo News, David Knowles analyzes the above report, and as the above graphic illustrates, notes that if humanity chooses to do so, the damage can still be mitigated somewhere:  “There is hope, however: If the world's nations are successful in their goal of limiting global mean temperatures to warming between 1.5° and 2°C, the impacts on food production will be lessened. 

“Numerous other studies have looked at how climate change will affect individual crops or growing areas, and some have concluded that global warming is already wreaking havoc on food production. Others make the case that dietary changes are imperative to prevent temperatures from rising even further… As certain food industries feel the impact, their products won't go away, but prices could rise and change behaviors.” 

Knowles presents observations of the expected impact of continued failure to address this climatic catastrophe: “[Wine and Beer] ‘Over the next century, the area suitable for premium wine grape production is likely to shrink and shift,’ a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded. ‘According to the higher emissions projections, premium wine grapes could only be grown in a thin strip of land along the coast of California, with premium wine-producing regions shifting northward to coastal Oregon and Washington.’… A 2018 study published in the journal Nature found that weather disruptions spurred by climate change will also affect the production of beer, thanks to the impact on barley crops… 

“[Meat] According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, meat and dairy production accounts for 14.5 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Citing deforestation that is carried out to create grazing land for livestock, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included a section in its landmark 2019 special report that declared that the prospect of eating less meat could ‘present major opportunities for adaptation and mitigation while generating significant co-benefits in terms of human health.’… Beef is, by far, one of the worst food sources in terms of its impact on climate change, in part because of the methane gas that cows produce. Beef production generates 60 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of meat, more than double that of lamb, which ranks second, Forbes reported…

“[Wheat, corn and nuts] A 2019 study published in Science Advances found that unless global mean temperatures can be kept from rising, major droughts will affect 60 percent of areas where wheat is grown. That is dramatically higher than the current 15 percent of wheat-growing areas affected by drought conditions. The backdrop to the rise in the prevalence of drought, the study noted, is that demand for wheat was projected to increase 43 percent from 2006 to 2050. 

“A similar dynamic is at play with corn, 30 percent of the world's supply of which is grown in the U.S. Weather patterns resulting in drought or widespread flooding that can overlap with the growing season for corn are projected to reduce yields by 20 to 40 percent over the decade spanning 2046-2055, a study released in April concluded…

“California, which is currently in the grip of a mega-drought, is the world's leading producer of almonds, growing roughly 80 percent of the global supply. Thanks to rising temperatures and the drought, which has depleted groundwater and deprived the state of a robust snowpack, the future of the water-intensive crop has been made more precarious. 

“Yet, as with many other crops, climate change may present the opportunity for almonds to be grown in latitudes currently too cold to support them. .. Researcher Lauren Parker of the University of California, Davis, is studying whether, as temperatures continue to rise, almond trees could thrive in states like Oregon and Washington.” 

In short, not only will climate change slam us in the wallet, well beyond the start-stop price disruption we are experiencing post-pandemic, but the actual availability of many foods we just take for granted today may well fade.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for all those remaining “it’s just a natural cycle” climate change skeptics who do not believe disrupting business with greenhouse gas restrictions, you can learn this lesson the hard way or the much, much, much harder way.

Were Those Golden Days Really Golden Days

 

“[Today’s reality reflects] a political culture that spurs conflict, rewards intransigence and empowers the loud and adversarial, even if polls show most voters would rather their lawmakers give in some if it means getting things done… The system disproportionately empowers a rowdy minority and helps drive lawmakers toward the extremes.”

 LA Times Editorial writer, Mark Barabak, June 18th

There is so much revisionist rhetoric in any nationalist/populist movement focused on returning a nation to the “halcyon days of yesteryear.” Looking at that movement in the United States, powerful enough to have elected a nationalist president on the platform of “Make America Great Again” in 2016 and to have captured virtually the entire body of elected officials from one of the two major parties in the land, one has to ask exactly what “going back” really means. Back to an era where blue-collar workers, with powerful unions and great healthcare plans, made enough money to live a middle-class lifestyle? Where working with your hands paid well? Where most workers had only a high school education, perhaps with trade school or an apprenticeship program? Where college tuition was vastly more affordable? Where the dollar and the US economy dwarfed the buying power of any other nation on earth? Where buying a house was just expected? Where getting a new car every two years was normal?

Or where “Negroes” and “coloreds” knew their place, enforced by a very specific parallel “separate but equal” reality and Jim Crow laws? Where were powerful slave owners and Confederate leaders were revered with abundant statues and celebratory building names that proclaimed their honor? Where taxes were low (they were exceptionally high, for the record) and government regulation was minimal? Where people took care of themselves, believed in a conservative Bible, and where the state simply kept out of their way? Where inane theories like “global warming” were not used to change our industrial priorities and economic direction? Where the mass of voters were blue collar, white Christian voters, whose earnings gave them a quality lifestyle, but where the elites were few, specialized and contained? Where Japanese goods were cheap imitations of American supremely high-quality manufactures?

For foreigners looking at the assault of nationalist populism on the great American experiment with democracy, it all seems so strange. BBC journalist, Nick Bryant, penned a piece for the BBC on June 17th, entitled Once the future, US now captive to its past. Here are some excerpts from that editorial:

“When the pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol on January 6th, some of its members chanted ‘1776’, believing they were acting in the same insurrectionary spirit as the revolutionaries who overwhelmed the British… The gun lobby here continually invokes the Second Amendment, even though it was only in 2008 that the Supreme Court affirmed the individual's constitutional right to bear arms… Nostalgic nationalism explained much of the appeal of Donald Trump's ringing slogan Make America Great Again, even though he rarely specified what halcyon era he was harking back to. That partly explained its genius: voters were left to conjure up American dreamscapes in the minds.” And so they did. Conspiracy theories were treated as truth. White supremacy was legitimized. Educated elites were denigrated as out-of-touch, even as folks pushed their children to contemplate college. A presidential loser claimed a constitutional right to continue in office, rejecting the vote that took him out of office.

Like so many in our purported allied nations in Europe, Bryant was aghast at the populist forces tearing at the very foundation of American democracy, seemingly accelerated by an election-losing Donald Trump and the vast majority of elected Republicans: “One of Trump's final acts as president was to release the 1776 Report, which sought to overturn what the presidential commission behind it called ‘the radicalised view of American history’. It was a rejoinder to the 1619 Project from the New York Times, a series of articles and talks which emphasised the African-American experience and endurance of white supremacy in the American story. 1619, of course, was the year when 20 enslaved Africans first arrived on these shores.

“The Black Lives Matter campaign has its roots in that story, and also segregation and the unfinished business of the civil rights era. Many statues memorialising the Confederacy have now been toppled and torn down. Younger Democrats especially are driven by a galvanising idea, that historical wrongs need urgently to be righted, especially when it comes to race.

“Thus, in modern-day America, there is no such thing as a bygone era. The battlefields of yesteryear are also combat zones of today. The political geography of America is increasingly being shaped by a politicised historiography. The past is viewed through a partisan prism.

“Polling conducted by the American Historical Association has shown, for instance, that Democrats believe that people of colour and women do not receive sufficient attention… Republicans think that the military, religious groups and the Founding Fathers have been neglected. And at the root of these conflicting views lies a fundamental divide. Republicans overwhelmingly believe that American history should be celebrated, while Democrats think that history has to be reckoned with and atoned for.

“Conservatives accuse liberals of promoting what they call a woke interpretation, heavy on self-flagellation and light on self-congratulation. Liberals often dismiss conservative takes as chest-thumping cartoons or out-dated movies, like Gone with the Wind.

“Rather than agreeing on a collective national story, the trend has been towards separate narratives. Black History Month. LGBT History Month. Italian-American History Month. Native-American Heritage Month. History has become hyphenated. But it's also more complete. And it's no longer written solely by the winners. Marginalised voices are telling stories that need to be heard.” Look at the red state legislation aimed at disenfranchising minority voters, their banning criticizing racial injustice in our classrooms and their desire to worship the slave trade by arguing anything to the contrary is simply “cancel culture.” Culture? Worst of all, we are now living in a failed interpretation of a post-WWII past.

Until the late 1960s, most the rest of the developed world – having been decimated by WWII – was mired in rebuilding war torn nations. Turning to consumer goods without that rebuild was sheer folly. However, the United States, relatively unscathed by that conflict, could turn to research and development driven by scientific excellence, it could send an entire generation to college if they chose, subsidize housing and encourage new consumer driven industries. We had an abundance of electric power, a rising and skilled workforce with union pay to support the required consumer demand. The world caught up. We had real competition at last. Yet we allowed infrastructure to decay. We fought continuous wars while cutting taxes. We failed to support displaced workers as foreign competition pushed their jobs overseas. And our federal deficits climbed. Automation and income inequality soared. Tuition climbed at a multiple of the rising cost of living. 

Instead of addressing reality – for example, that fighting wars without austerity, choosing to cut taxes at the same time, was idiotic – we lived on the investments of past generations, failing to invest in our own future beyond spending 41% of the entire planet’s military budget. To a significant socially conservative and populist constituency, global climate change was cast as a temporary cyclical weather pattern, the pandemic ranged from being a minor inconvenience, perhaps even a hoax, to a problem that required affixing blame rather than confront the disease. 

We lived in our vision of a “better” past, survived on institutions and infrastructure from that past without upkeep, but found solace in blame, dividing into separate constituencies, each sounding like the cacophonous seagulls in Finding Nemo: “mine, mine, mine!” The notion of unity, working together as Americans to solve problems and build a solid future, had simply left the building. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and does anyone really believe that our bitter dissonance left to fester has the slightest chance to create a better future for anybody?

Hysterical Over History

 

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana

Most nations attempt to rewrite history or simply bury profoundly negative historical facts. That between 1830 and 1850, the U.S. federal government force-marched 16,000 Native Americans (Cherokee, Muscogee [Creek], Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw), from Tennessee to North Carolina to reservation lands west of the Mississippi, where at least 4,000 died along the way, is an ugly page of our history that is often disregarded in our school textbooks. The massacre of hundreds of African Americans, a very successful upper middle class, in 1921 Tulsa lay buried for almost a century before the fact began pouring out. The racist Dixiecrats, the severe repression of Black Americans in the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period, the Jim Crow laws and the nascent and lately increasingly blatant discrimination against minorities of color are underplayed if not totally ignored. One Texas textbook actually referred to slaves as “immigrants.”

Japan has been equally callous in its denials of murderous rampages in its conquests in Asia, from Korea to China. Japan did nothing wrong according to its textbooks, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary. The 1937 murder, pillaging of and rape in Nanking (see photo above), for example, “never happened.” Contrast these denials and deflections with Germany’s reaction to its own horrific past.

Germany’s Nazi period, particularly in the 1930s until surrender in 1945, produced the horrific genocide that murdered where between 11 and 16 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews (literally two-thirds of Europe’s entire Jewish population). Between 1904 and 1908, Germany also slaughtered tens of thousands of African natives in their colonial holdings in Southwest Africa. Yet German textbooks fully describe both genocidal periods, and German youth cannot graduate from high school without taking a very graphic tour of a former concentration camp, and in May of this year, Germany also agreed to create a €1.1 billion fund to be paid over 30 years as reparations for their African genocide. 

Meanwhile, back in the United States, racism continues to be denied and buried under the rug under bizarre notions of “critical race theory” (honestly reporting classes of Americans who practiced severe racial and ethnic discrimination) or “cancel culture” efforts (where, for example, removing a statute of a notorious slave owner is considered by some on the right as unpatriotic even as it reminds current generations of Black Americans of how their ancestors were denied basic humanity). It seems that right-wing America is hell-bent on erasing significant pockets of racial injustice, literally banning such teachings from public American classrooms, even as historical awareness of these injustices has increasingly been documented and brought to public attention. The consequences are the continuation of racial injustice without meaningful efforts to right this wrong.

Writing for the June 9th New Yorker, David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and the author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” reminds us: “In April, the Department of Education called for a renewed stress, in the classroom, on the ‘unbearable human costs of systemic racism’ and the ‘consequences of slavery.’ In response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a formal letter, demanding more ‘patriotism’ in history and calling the Democrats’ plan ‘divisive nonsense.’ Like all great questions of national memory, the latest history war has to play out in politics, whether we like it or not. This is especially true as we limp, wounded, from the battlefields of the Trump era, when facts were nearly rendered irrelevant.

“History wars follow patterns. The subjects at their core usually carry visceral meaning for large swaths of the public. The disputes quickly invoke curricula, creeping into school boards and state legislatures with increasing stakes. The combatants then employ a kind of existential rhetoric, with all sides declaring surrender unacceptable. Political teams are chosen, and the media both fuels and thrives on the contestation. Authorities, whether in academia, libraries, or museums, try to fight for up-to-date research and interpretation. The politics of knowledge and the emotional attachments to country threaten to sweep up nearly all before them. Finally, someone declares victory, whether by creating or removing a monument, cancelling or curating an exhibit, or writing a book about a triumph of historical engagement. ‘Good’ history can be both a result and a casualty of these wars.

“Some of these battles never quite end. (The endurance of the Lost Cause ideology, which argues that the South fought not for slavery but for sovereignty, is one example.) But the broader problem is that, in the realm of public history, no settled law governs. Should the discipline forge effective citizens? Should it be a source of patriotism? Should it thrive on analysis and argument, or be an art that emotionally moves us? Should it seek to understand a whole society, or be content to uncover that society’s myriad parts? The answer to all of these questions is essentially yes. But this is where the history wars, old and new, merely begin. We call them wars because they matter; nations have risen and fallen on the success of their stories.” As red states trip all over themselves to ban “critical race theory” and “cancel culture” efforts by means of statutory mandate, you really have to wonder how long it will take to repeal the First Amendment.

I’m Peter Dekom, and hiding or denying shameful national policies on insures that we are destined leave these injustices unsolved, another egregious shameful act.

Dry without a Sense of Humor

Climate change has hardly achieved the priority it deserves. Ignore the increasing frequency and intensity of cyclones/hurricanes, storm surges, coastal erosion, serious forest fires, drought fomenting conflict which in turn forces mass migration to unwelcoming lands, floods elsewhere, migrating disease-carrying insects, agricultural disaster and reconfiguration, unpredictable weather patterns, and temperatures rising in some areas projecting near-term uninhabitability. The world’s focus has been on the pandemic; no nation on earth has done remotely enough to reverse global warming for the foreseeable future, a reality that projects a life-expectancy, quality of life diminution and mortality rates that will make our COVID-19 losses pale by comparison, perhaps even creating a fertile future for new pandemics.

The primary arguments against taking appropriate steps have been the costs, disruption of long-standing patterns of human behavior, the obsolescence of industries with billions of dollars of past investments and the concomitant political pressure by such wealthy incumbents to preserve the continued miscreant greenhouse gas emissions, unwilling to pay the hard costs of their folly, with campaign money and lobbyists to spare. Effectively, expensive inconvenience. False programs such allowing emitting corporation to pay for “carbon credits” just have not worked. See my April 17th Laughing All the Way to the Carbon Bank blog for more details.

Poorer nations blame industrial growth that made first world nations rich, suggesting that the economic costs of containing global warming should be borne accordingly. They have done little or nothing to end carbon emissions. For those millennials and younger, educationally exposed to the climate change realities that will materially impact their entire lives and the lives of generations to come, there is a primal political shift against those selfish incumbents into a world that simply recognizes the harsh realities they face. Can they make a difference in time?

As I read reports here in California – where wildfires constantly rage (fire season is no longer a limited time of the year), where there is now a serious new danger of Lyme Disease from ticks that have migrated to our beaches and that the entire West faces a level of drought that last impacted this region well over a millennium ago – I wonder why there is any continued resistance to adopting severe containment and warming reversal policies. But there is. 

“Trees are dying. Riverbeds are empty. Lake Mead's water level dropped to its lowest point in history [pictured above], and Utah's governor asked residents to pray for rain… Water is increasingly scarce in the Western U.S. — where 72 percent of the region is in ‘severe’ drought, 26 percent is in exceptional drought, and populations are booming.

“Insufficient monsoon rains last summer and low snowpacks over the winter left states like Arizona, Utah and Nevada without the typical amount of water they need, and forecasts for the rainy summer season don't show promise… This year's aridity is happening against the backdrop of a 20-year-long drought. The past two decades have been the driest or the second driest in the last 1,200 years in the West, posing existential questions about how to secure a livable future in the region… It's time to ask, ‘Is this a drought, or is it just the way the hydrology of the Colorado River is going to be?’ said John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.” NBCNews.com, June 11th. The facts offer no genuine alternatives to emergency action. NOW!

Precipitation has fallen precipitously. Snow-capped mountains not only have significantly less snow, but they are melting earlier, with insufficient runoff to replenish streams, lakes, aquifers and reservoirs. Millions of acres of once productive agricultural lands lay fallow as farmers demand that city consumption of water be cut to the bone to restore their food-producing livelihoods. Economic growth in many cities and towns in the West, particularly places like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, may shudder to a standstill for lack of water. The prospects of water rationing and water wars all over the globe are clearly within the realm of near-term probability.

When the Polar Vortex drops temperatures here in the United States to unprecedented lows, ignorant voices tell us that this is clear evidence that the describing nature’s heat-rising climate realities as seriously dangerous is a “hoax.” But what they do not realize is that warming air in the Arctic, melting polar ice, is expanding (as warmer air tends to do) to push that colder Alaskan and Canadian winter air southwards into our northern and eastern regions. Rejection of science is the beginning of a failure to respond to our reality accordingly.

The big question is whether we have already passed the point of no return, a tipping point where global warming will increase on its own, even without human contributions of greenhouse gasses. Simply, dark earthly patches (typical of oceans and a large masses of land) absorb and retain heat while light patches (typical of snow and ice, particularly in polar regions and mountain ranges) reflect heat away. 

Thus, as snow and ice melt permanently, that once reflective surface area is replaced by darker heat absorbing underlying sea and land. Global warming simply accelerates. This phenomenon is further exacerbated when it comes to frozen tundra (permafrost) that traditionally did not melt away even in summer months. Since tundra is simply the accumulation of millennia of organic material, as it melts, it releases massive amounts of methane gas, which is over 23 times heavier (and hence thicker) than the carbon dioxide generated from burning of fossil fuels. A horrible super-contributor to the greenhouse effect. We need far more than to slow or even stop carbon-based emissions; we need to find ways to remove existing carbon gasses from the atmosphere. Technologies exist. See my May 23rd Carbon-Based Emissions Suck blog. They just need to be massively deployed. Time’s up!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the fat lady has sung, so many canaries in so many coal mines have died, the point of no return is upon us… so red alert, planet earth, red alert!