Hurricane Ida made landfall last Sunday at Grand Isle, Louisiana like a really badass joke. It was sixteen years to the day since Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans. What are the odds? Ida demolished the southern portion of the Bayou State before heading north through the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast, leaving death and destruction in its wide, scimitar path. We even had a tornado less than a mile from my house in Annapolis, Maryland. New York City looked like Venice with skyscrapers.
Welcome to climate change, friends and neighbors. Life on the edge.
Yeah, I know, the same people who get their news from FOX, love the Trumpster, and won’t get the COVID vaccination, think that global warming is just another big lie. And let’s face it, people who won’t get a free vaccine to inoculate their own kids from a preventable disease and seem quite proud to watch them die, are never going to accept the hard, dry, hot, wet reality of the planet dangerously warming.
The Q People don’t care that the latest blockbuster climate report released by the normally wishy-washy Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), signed by almost 200 countries who normally can’t agree on where to go to dinner, says in over 600 pages that we are all essentially doomed. No amount of rain, wind, heat, drought, flooding, or weather mayhem is going to change the minds of at least a third of America. We all may be in the same boat, but a lot of us are rowing in opposite directions.
One of my favorite things on earth is a good scientific irony. And climate change comes wrapped in a real humdinger.
We know for a fact that past Ice Ages on earth were triggered by global warming. Melting ice at the North Pole overwhelms the deep, cold water trough off Greenland called the North Atlantic Oscillation which controls weather and climate on Earth. And when that happens most of the planet slowly turns into a giant popsicle thousands of feet thick. So, extreme heat ultimately leads to extreme cold.
Now, imagine the fun the Conservative media could have with that one if they only believed in truth and science.