The campaign is heating up

In school, back in the old country, when learning about deserts around the world, we came across a name that summed up what awaited one on a miserably hot day in the desert: Death Valley.

There is simply no way that I would have imagined then that I would live in the United States, and for a few years not far from Death Valley itself.

However, visiting Death Valley never happened.  It turned out that visiting Death Valley and staying at the historic inn during the couple of pleasant months required long-term planning and committing to the dates month in advance.

Death Valley is in the news today: It "hit a scorching 130 degrees on Sunday, marking what could be the hottest temperature on Earth since at least 1913."

130!

The World Meteorological Organization tweeted that this "would be the hottest global temperature officially recorded since 1931."

We can't merely shrug this off though, in a world in which we have been experiencing a warming trend.  A year ago, on July 2nd, Shahdad, Iran, registered 127.6 degrees on the thermometer.  Every year, we are told that it was hotter than the previous year.

Bill McKibben writes that we might be looking at a century of crises:

Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization.

We can't even console ourselves with the Casablanca line, "We'll Always Have Paris."  tRump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, remember?

So, what are we looking at?

McKibben quotes from the book by Matthew Lynas that he reviews in the essay:

If we stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory, we could see two degrees as soon as the early 2030s, three degrees around mid-century, and four degrees by 2075 or so. If we’re unlucky with positive feedbacks…from thawing permafrost in the Arctic or collapsing tropical rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by century’s end.

Keep in mind that the "degrees" are in Celsius.  One degree in Celsius is about 1.8 degrees difference in the Fahrenheit scale.

tRump does not want to "stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory"--he is bent on accelerating the process with his populist talk about coal (and oil and natural gas too.)   The Arctic is for drilling! So, we don't even need to wait for 2030!

The record-setting heatwaves of 2019 “will be considered an unusually cool summer in the three-degree world”; over a billion people would live in zones of the planet “where it becomes impossible to safely work outside artificially cooled environments, even in the shade.” The Amazon dies back, permafrost collapses. Change feeds on itself: at three degrees the albedo, or reflectivity, of the planet is grossly altered, with white ice that bounces sunshine back out to space replaced by blue ocean or brown land that absorbs those rays, amplifying the process.
And then comes four degrees

You don't want to know what happens!

While there is no vaccine to protect us from the warming and the effects, there are other things that are happening.  Like:

The price per kilowatt hour of solar power has fallen 82 percent since 2010—this spring in the sunny deserts of Dubai the winning bid for what will be the world’s largest solar array came in at not much more than a penny. The price of wind power has fallen nearly as dramatically. Now batteries are whooshing down the same curve.

There is hope.  Possibilities.  "The climate plan announced by the Biden campaign last month is a credible start toward the necessary effort."

Vote tRump out of office.  And unseat all the Republicans who continue to deny the science and reality of global warming and climate change.