Turkey and North America are suffering from unforgiving heat, parts of Europe and China experience torrential downpours. Hundreds have died. The bigger picture: The Nothern hemisphere is sectored into alterning heat domes and areas of lower pressure. The jet stream over the Northern Hemisphere is basically experiencing a traffic jam. The human costs are enormous. In some countries, problems are worsened by social policy. For example, 3% of the population of Portland is homeless! Can you imagine? I like to think that Europe has a much smaller homeless population than America. But then again, in the further North you go, the less houses have air conditioning–things are not going well.
I think about this as the actual new normal. Natural disasters are becoming more frequent, that is the actual cost of climate change. Sure, we can clean up after one Hurrican Katrina. And California’s economy somehow survived the 2011-2017 drought (more like 2011-2021 drought with temporary relief…). Are we going to start really struggling in a few years, when these events become a regular occurance? Wikipedia already has articles on the 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2018, and 2021 heat waves. When do these heat waves just become weather?
It is easy to overlook that places like Pakistan, South Africa, and Bangladesh are already struggling because of a double whammy of climate and policy failure. What other countries are going to be added to the list before the end of the decade?
For attribution, please cite this work as
Barg (2021, July 21). Julian Barg: Heat and rain. Retrieved from https://www.jbarg.net/posts/2021-07-21-heat-and-rain/
BibTeX citation
@misc{barg2021heat,
author = {Barg, Julian},
title = {Julian Barg: Heat and rain},
url = {https://www.jbarg.net/posts/2021-07-21-heat-and-rain/},
year = {2021}
}