The Twin Engines Driving Climate Disasters

 It’s been over 90 degrees where I live in Vermont for days on end. We can’t take evening walks, plant our gardens, or breath all that well since the Canadian wildfires first compromised our air so badly that some of us have experienced respiratory issues. We’re halfway through the summer and we have yet to spend time on the deck with friends. And all that happened before biblical floods started after record monsoon rains that just wouldn’t quit. 

 It's beginning to seem like we’ve been witnessing the final stages of our own well-crafted horror movie for a long time now and the credits are about to roll. Among them are extreme heat and massive fires, along with our prolonged denial of global warming and the urgency of acting to decelerate it.

 We’ve seen otherworldly orange skies, orange fires that resemble the surface of the sun, erupting volcanoes, cars, homes, and debris tossed around like toys in tornadoes, or floating away in immensely powerful rivers. On the news people are beginning to wander around looking like stunned zombies because they’ve lost everything and have no idea what to do next because things will never be normal again. We all know that there is more to come and our resources, financial and emotional, are running low.

 There are those who will say this is too doomsday a scenario to talk about, but we all know it’s going to happen again, and worse. We know that because climate change is rapidly driving unprecedented heatwaves that fuel wildfires -- the two engines hovering over us faster than we thought. We ignore it at our own peril.

 Here’s the reality. As the climate continues to warm, heatwaves will get worse – everywhere. It’s happening in Europe, China, India, the U.S. and pretty much everywhere. Temperatures are already soaring above 110 degrees Fahrenheit and towns in several countries are being forced to evacuate, including in Italy and Greece. Florida could be next. This is not hyperbole. Scientists have been warning us about a global pattern of rising temperatures largely due to human activity and too many of us chose to look away. Now even Pope Francis has called on world leaders to heed the Earth’s “chorus of cries of anguish.”

 “Every heatwave that we are experiencing today has been made hotter and more frequent because of climate change,” says climate scientist Friederike Otto, co-leader of a World Weather Attribution research collaboration.

 Scientists agree that manmade greenhouse gas emissions have rapidly heated the planet and further speculation and theories have led to hundreds of studies conducted for decades, especially   involving situations where heat, floods, and drought have occurred. The important thing is that the situation is getting worse and fast.  Heat events that happened once every ten years before are now three times more frequent, according to Zurich-based climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne.

 Hot, dry conditions help fires spread rapidly, burn longer, and rage more intensely. Heat also means less moisture is retained for vegetation so that it turns to dry fuel for fires. Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, noted in June that treacherous heat and fire had burned a large area of the U.S. that month killing more than a dozen people. She said the events embodied the “multiple stressors linked to man-made climate change” that the United Nations has warned about through its scientific panel on global warming. “If ever there was a moment to stop and re-evaluate our fossil fuel emissions trajectory, that moment is now,” she said.

 In his recent book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, writer Jeff Goodell says “global warming” sound too soothing, like we can just turn up the AC and all will be well. But, he says, the planet is burning and we’re running out of time, citing dying fish, melted asphalt, and melting glaciers.”  “When it gets too hot, things die,” he says simply.

 Noted environmentalist Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, is another truthteller. “We can’t stop global warming at this point,” he told Democracy Now during a June 7th interview. “All we can do is try to stop it short of the places where it cuts civilizations off at the knees.” He calls on politicians and ordinary people to cut into the status quo. “This is the last of these moments we’re going to have when the world is summoned to action by events and when there’s still time to make at least some difference.”

I’m with him. The time is now to turn off the horror movie we have produced and get to work on saving our planet, ourselves, and our kids’ future. Maybe then we can go back to the backyard deck with our friends, no longer complacent, and ready to do what it takes.

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Turbulent Times Six Miles High and On the Tarmac

Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying, wrote about  more than her own fear of flying in her best-selling novel, but she did manage to capture my own feelings whenever I board a hunk of a silver vessel about to hurtle across the sky. “My fingers (and toes) turn to ice,” she wrote, “my stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same temperature in my fingers, and my heart and the engine correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics [will save us}.”

 I never give in to my fear of flying because I love to travel, and like most of us I think “it can’t happen to me.”  But what’s been occurring in aviation recently has ratcheted up my anxiety.  It doesn’t help that I am writing this commentary prior to a trip that involves several flights, two of them transatlantic, which means there’s nowhere to land in an emergency between London and Boston except Iceland. Nor am I assuaged after PTSD memories of a flight over the Andes in which the turbulence was so intense I wondered if I’d be forced to eat survivors as we waited for rescue. Then there was the “close as it gets” landing in Honduras some years ago when two aircraft rounded a mountain simultaneously while trying to land.

 Now my anxiety is heightened by near misses taking place. Recently, a commercial aircraft and a private jet were within seconds of crashing into each other on a runway when the pilot of the smaller plane ignored air traffic control instructions to wait for a Jet Blue plane to land in front of it. This was only one of several incidents involving near misses. “Experts say near-misses on runways are more common than the traveling public may realize. There have been 613 runway incursion incidents so far this year, according to FAA data, compared with 1,732 in all of 2022,” according to an NBC.news report.

 Then there’s the cluster of potential disasters taking place in aircraft cabins. The FAA’s year-end totals for 2022 are shocking. Nearly 2500 episodes of unruly passengers were reported, Over 800 investigations of incidents were initiated, and more than 500 enforcement actions  were started. In March of this year, a man tried to stab a flight attendant on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston and cabin crews report having suffered various physical attacks as well as sexual harassment. According to the Flight Attendants union, flight crews have  “called on the entire airline industry to step up to combat harassment and recognize the impact it has on safety. … Airlines must also ensure that staffing levels on flights are sufficient.”

 It’s also clear that climate change and global warming have played a part in increased episodes of severe turbulence. The research is clear: “Earth’s warming, the result of the burning of fossil fuels, is increasing the risks of bumpy flights. It has to do with ways warming in the atmosphere influences winds at varying altitudes,” as the Washington Post reported in March. In December 36 passengers on a flight to Hawaii were injured and in March a Lufthansa flight from Houston to Frankfurt had to make an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.

 Despite all these worries, I realize in my rational moments that air travel is statistically safer than getting into your car. I know that like cars, airplanes are, for most of us, a necessary part of modern life. Still, there is something about flying that kicks in when I board a plane and the aircraft door is sealed by a gatekeeper on a terra firma ramp. As the engines rev, and the safety instructions, which we all know are pretty useless, are demonstrated, I think of Erica Jong, who admitted that “constant vigilance” was her motto. “I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot fly that 250 passenger !#+@!” she said.  Believe me, these days I relate to that more than ever.

 Political commentator and comic, Dennis Miller, along with Erica Jong, have both captured my own aerophobia (a real word), which is nice. It gives me something to laugh at when the going gets rough.  “"My fear of flying,” Miller shared, “starts as soon as I buckle myself in and then the guy up front mumbles a few unintelligible words then before I know it I'm thrust into the back of my seat by acceleration that seems way too fast and the rest of the trip is an endless nightmare of turbulence, of near misses. And then the cabbie drops me off at the airport."

 So, here's to all the other fearful passengers out there as we buckle up. Long may we fly high until we reach our destinations, which is more than likely to happen.  Right?

Actions Have Consequences: The Supreme Court Should Know That

It was like standing alone on a nuclear landscape. Like being in the center of a dystopian nightmare. Like being on a sinking ship without a life vest. At least that’s how it felt to me as the Supreme Court’s decisions were handed down, one after the other in their recent session.

Stunned and frightened like so many others were, I wondered whether the faux Christian, conservative justices on the Court had any idea what the consequences of their hideous decisions would be as they ended a term in which civil rights in America were systematically ended. Did they willfully ignore what would happen because of their Draconian decisions, did they not have a clue, or did they simply not care?

Was this the legacy they wanted to leave their children and grandchildren, let alone the rest of us? Did they have any sense of the consequences, intended or otherwise, for American citizens, and the planet? Do they grasp the context of our Constitution, or the concept of democracy? Do they really hate women and others unlike them this much?

As these questions roiled in my head, I thought about some of the consequences the justices’ rightwing agenda presented, beginning with what would befall women and girls who no longer have agency over their bodies and lives, or access to reproductive health care.

Among them is a ten-year old child pregnant by paternal rape being denied an abortion in Ohio,  women with pre-eclampsia – high blood pressure that can be fatal to mother and baby when not treated urgently, women with gestational diabetes, a condition that can be harmful to mother and baby, women with ectopic pregnancies in which a fertilized egg attaches to the Fallopian tube instead of the uterus, an emergency situation requiring immediate care to prevent a fatal rupture, women whose lives are at risk because of  drastic fetal anomalies.

 Now women with these urgent or other reproductive healthcare needs are too frightened to seek timely reproductive care while providers are increasingly unwilling to offer it, both for fear of being prosecuted. These examples offer a small glimpse into what will happen to women and girls because of the Court’s decision to end Roe v. Wade, but this much we know: Many of them will die. So will women who elect to have an illegal or self-induced abortion for any reason.

I also thought about the death knell being sounded for the fragile, struggling planet on which we live due to environmental degradation and the global warming crisis. Just these staggering statistics are enough to send chills down my spine: “Every hour, 1,692 acres of productive dry land become desert. We are using up 50 more natural resources than the Earth can provide.” What’s more, “We have a garbage island floating in our ocean, mostly comprised of plastics - the size of India, Europe and Mexico combined!” 

Further, “The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible on the timescale of people alive today, and will worsen in the decades to come,” according to NASA. “Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted, and trees are flowering sooner,” while “effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves.”

Against these chilling facts, six Supreme Court justices saw to it that the Environmental Protection Agency would now have limited ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants “making it nearly impossible to cut greenhouse as emissions any time soon.” In their dissenting opinion three justices said the majority had stripped the E.P.A. of “the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”

When it comes to separation of church and state the conservative majority outdid themselves. Recent decisions included a ruling in favor of a Christian group’s plea to allow a flag with a cross on it to fly over Boston’s city hall. Another decision allowed for taxpayer money to cover tuition for students attending religious high schools, while the six Supremes decided in favor of a high school football coach who led Christian prayers on the playing field  after games.

Then there’s states’ rights. Again, the Scotus-6 opined against New York State's concealed carry law requiring state residents to have a permit to carry a gun in public.  That law’s requirements for a permit were specific and in the public interest but when two guys who wanted to carry guns publicly were denied permits, they appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled the state law violated the 14th and Second Amendments. The decision proffered that the Second Amendment protects the public carry of firearms and set up a new test for courts to determine whether a law violates the Second Amendment.  New York's law was struck down, and other laws like New York's are likely to be struck down now.

Is it any wonder these frightening, tip-of-the-iceberg rulings made me feel like we’re approaching nuclear winter?  Bundle up. The Supreme Court is just getting started.