Stay Tuned

There is the slow-motion climate crisis, in which each year gets a little hotter (so the hottest June on record was last month) and different places get record-breaking heat, while others get unusually wet months or unusually dry months, and so the definition of "usual" changes.

The saving grace of slow-motion heating is that humans and their institutions get some time and experience to deal with the effects. So the very recent horrendous heat in Europe did not kill as many people as the heatwaves in 2003, seemingly because European countries instituted a set of procedures to deal with these situations when they arise.

Eventually the slow-motion climate crisis will see effects that are more permanent and harder to address. Suddenly the restaurant where you are escaping the heat doesn't have its full menu.  And so on.

But there's no guarantee that a slow-motion crisis is the only kind we'll have.
Right now the heat that gripped Europe is headed for the Arctic.  Nobody yet knows what the effects will be, other than a likely increase in melting.  How great an increase, and what the combined or cumulative or interacting or even chaos theory effects will be, are all yet unknown.

  But there is the potential of this or something like it triggering greater effects that either have relatively sudden impacts--like a larger rise in sea levels--or end up affecting the overall climate to speed up the effects of global heating by radically changing the world's weather.  Particularly vulnerable are major ocean currents and atmospheric patterns.

Such a change--quite possibly an irreversible change--can occur almost any time now, for as much as science knows about the climate crisis, there is much that isn't well understood about the complex workings of larger climate-determining systems.  While the phenomena and effects we're seeing don't surprise climate scientists, the speed of some of them does--particularly when it involves temperatures and melting ice at the poles, and interactions in the oceans.

So stay tuned.  And stay sharp, because our so-called leaders aren't going to tell you anything (the US and now the UK being governed by bought morons, bent on international suicide) and who knows about the media anymore.