End the Hush

Every week it is the same story though the places may be different. This week it's extreme heat up to 120F in the US Southwest, tens of thousands dislocated by wildfires in Washington state, continuing devastation and heat in western Europe, and 90F at the edge of the Arctic.  Scientists announce that global warming has sped up.

The media shows the photos which look like all the others, though the suffering caused by heat is hard to make into readable visuals. Among the stories about celebrities, box office records, sports trades and the Chaos out of Washington, there are some "lifestyle" pieces about how to get a better night's sleep when its continuously hot and humid.

But maybe more than that is actually going on, and besides having their brains driven to mushy dullness by hot weather, at least some people are seeing the big picture.  And this picture could hardly be bigger.  

From The Guardian:

"Research makes clear that global warming is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. Yet the climate crisis has largely disappeared from the political agenda, with many Democrats who once described it as an existential threat now shying away from talking about it.

Now US activists are pushing back against this trend of “climate hushing”, arguing it is misguided. During the summer’s federal recess, during which lawmakers leave the nation’s capital to work directly within their home states or districts, demonstrators organized by the environmental advocacy coalition Climate Action Campaign are calling on representatives to put climate back on the political agenda."

The article continues:

"The activists’ campaign comes as new polling challenges the need for “climate hushing”, a trend that took off as some policy wonks argued that talking about global warming could alienate voters and distract from the message of affordability. July research from the University of California, Santa Barbara found that emphasizing climate change was neutral to beneficial for Democratic candidates, suggesting that talking more about the issue does not alienate voters and can even increase support in competitive races.

Though the Trump administration frequently derides climate policy as a “scam” and a “hoax”, polling indicates most Americans are not onboard with that view. Another July poll from Data for Progress found that 61% of likely voters believe extreme weather has become more frequent over the past five years, including nearly half of Republicans. And one month earlier, a Yale survey found that roughly two-thirds of Americans are worried about global warming."

The upcoming actions involve coalitions organized by the Climate Action Campaign and its director Margie Alt.  The coalition includes Sierra Club and NAACP chapters, as well as Bill McKibben's organization of elders called Third Act.  There are events both large and small slated for at least 20 states. The Guardian article concludes:

“Smart politicians will grab on this issue,” said McKibben. “There’s perhaps no other question where the gulf between Maga and the general public is higher.”

Alt said she saw climate-hushing as “the climate denial of 2026”. “I don’t think that ignoring the climate crisis is smart politics,” she said. “I think that it is dropping the ball on the biggest threat the US and the world faces.”

Dropping the ball is an almost insulting understatement.  Climate hushing must end.  Climate crisis leadership is the wave of the future, if there indeed is to be anything worthy of the name of future.

Lessons Without Plans

 

Many places in the world--and more particularly, in the United States--are in the midst of harsh object lessons about the chain of climate disruption effects.  At the moment, the combination of high heat and huge wildfires in Canada and northern Minnesota are causing dangerous air pollution in a number of northern US cities, which  currently have the worst air quality in the world.

The forecast is for this swath of heat and pollution to inundate the mid-Atlantic states, including the hot air capital of the world, Washington.  

The heat and deadly air usually affect the old and the young disproportionately, so the political impact is somewhat doubtful.  But this time it is going beyond that, as Bloomberg News reports that the pollution is "emptying the streets" of major northeastern and upper Midwest cities. None of this is going to improve the image of government, either cowed into ignoring all this or ideologically rigid in its denial.  Though often on the local and state level, officials are forced to deal with immediate crisis.

Bloomberg also reports that high heat has been straining the electrical grid, particularly in the Midwest.  This is an area where the combination of high heat and high humidity has in the past come close to lethal levels.  And I mean lethal--and without air conditioning due to grid failure, lethal to a lot of people, not just the poor.  

With its high heat, Europe is having its own air conditioning crisis this summer, but at least there (as well as India and other vulnerable areas) the so-called plug-in solar devices are becoming popular.  Yet in much of the United States they aren't even legal.  They would power at least some cooling in homes, even if the grid were down.

Meanwhile, a cyclosporiasis outbreak related to produce is making headlines.  An oped in USA Today by Dr. Tyler B. Evans notes that this outbreak is not due to a more virulent strain or anything particularly unusual.  It is easily detectable in produce by ordinary food inspection.  Unfortunately under the Chaos administration those inspections are fewer, due to lack of interest and personnel.  

All of this--climate and health related alike-- is completely predictable, but instead of planning and paying attention, we will go through a cycle of suffering and political controversy before cooler heads actually effectuate remedies and safeguards.  And in this climate (physical as well as cultural), cooler heads are at a premium.

Commentators wonder why the US electorate is so down on the political establishment, while political cynicism among officeholders has reached critical heights.  Witness the lavish funding of ICE and the cynical excuses, while an entire federal police agency is utterly cynical and irresponsible, turning a blind eye to its thugs continuing to murder people (in Maine, which may have doomed Susan Collins chances no matter who the Democrats select, as well as Houston and Memphis), and a labor crisis is only beginning due to the demonization of immigrants.  When will these lessons be learned?

Not Our Project

 

On the Fourth of July weekend, we watched the hit movie Project Hail Mary on streaming.  Like the novel by Andy Weir, it was engaging and entertaining.  My impression is that his stories proceed in a long line of science fiction, back perhaps to Jules Verne but certainly to the first generations of American science fiction writers, many of them scientists or engineers, who built their stories around plausible technologies and current scientific theories or speculations: the so-called hard science fiction.  Others like early Stanislaw Lem also appear in this lineage.  

Weir also absorbs influences from science fiction movies and television, with references in this movie specifically to Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman and E.T., for example.  That lineage includes 1950s films that set the basic familiar framework of this story: a threat to life on earth is detected, governments of the Earth (perhaps after initial skepticism) or (in some cases) wealthy patrons find scientists to discover a solution and, with the help of the military or other action-oriented entity, go on a dangerous adventure to solve the problem, eliminate the danger and save the planet.

There is an additional lineage in science fiction in which the story is a metaphor for some current or just-identified social problem or danger from a technology itself.  This goes back to H.G. Wells and certainly includes the aforementioned Star Trek.  These stories may offer the same kind of adventure, but with perhaps more relevance to a current concern. 

So part of my response to the Hail Mary movie was the same as my response to the book when I read it five years ago or so.  Instead of constructing a story around the very real threat to the planet of climate distortion, Weir invented a fictional danger that in a way was kind of opposite: some unknown cosmic force was causing the sun to dim, so the planet would die from the cold.  

The movie is an even better illustration of why he did it than the novel.  It is dramatic--there is a visible antagonist (which in this case doesn't appear to be conscious or at least intentional), and solution requires very dramatic tech: a completely new and fabulously equipped spacecraft fueled by a new source (ironically by the very force that threatens the planet), on a space journey of unprecedented and otherwise impossible distance to another star, and eventually the cooperation of a previously unknown alien species, vaguely on the level of humans.  

To achieve this--to identify the problem, marshal the resources and expertise, a powerful organization created and supported by the world's governments is apparently given vast power and a blank check. This does not seem to be an irrational response to an imminent threat to all life on Earth.  

When watching the movie, however, and especially the portrayal of Eva Stratt, the head of this organization, as played by Sandra Huller, I could not help thinking of the organization created by the United Nations to confront climate distortion which came to be known as the Ministry for the Future in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel of that same title, and its chief, Mary Murphy.  It is also a fictional response to a threat to life on Earth, which in this case happens to be very, very real.

Although there is dramatic action in KSR's novel which spreads over decades, there is no shiny spaceship or life and death drama in space confronting a phenomenon that can be seen in real time.  KSR's novel may yet make a fine movie, but it will likely not be anything like Weir's.  

Still, the idea that the world would unite and offer unlimited resources to keep the sun from dimming and freezing the Earth is rational and reasonable.  Whether it is realistic is another question.  Perhaps an easily identified "enemy" or cause, in the present, would make a difference.  But that's clearly not happening anywhere near that extent in addressing climate distortion, and even the few commitments previously made--resulting from the Paris Accords, for example-- seem to be slowly but effectively fading.

Is there a Project Hail Mary applied to climate distortion possible in the real future?  The reference is to the Hail Mary pass in football, a desperate heave at the end of the game, often covering 50 yards or more, into the end zone to possibly--but not likely--win the game.  It's named after the Catholic prayer, and was first used in the 1930s to describe a play by the Catholic university of Notre Dame, at the time the most famous football team in America.  The problem applying it to climate distortion is that there appears to be no single solution once it has taken hold, and addressing the causes of future distortion must begin years earlier. That and other complexities are dealt with admirably in KSR's novel.  It requires focused and consistent commitment over time. 

But in addressing the very real and growing threats to life on Earth posed by human-caused greenhouse gas pollution and related ecological attacks like ocean acidification and various threats that together could lead to mass extinction, which certainly threaten human civilization and life as we know it, if not-- in the worst situations--humanity itself...such focused and comprehensive commitment is not happening, let alone a powerful organization working on it.  Even though this threat has been known for decades, and right now is as plain as the sunburn on your face.

We continue every day, even as the climate distortion underway becomes more obvious and obviously dangerous, to look away.  We assign confronting them to our nightmares and as expressed in the major themes of futuristic stories in our time: dystopias and zombie apocalypse.  

Take this Fourth of July.  Held during an intense heat wave, the official Washington celebration of the 250th anniversary was centered in a faux state fair grounds, with tents surrounding a vast central area without shade or shelter on the mall.  There was no apparent protection from the heat of even a normally hot Washington summer; apparently not even water.  (One woman reported that the only water she could find was a concession selling a bottle of it for $5.  But they'd actually run out of it--and still they refused to even refund her money.)  As a result, hundreds were treated or evaluated for heat-related illness at area hospitals, even though the events were badly attended. 

Officials were able to evacuate the grounds when the heat became too intense, and again when lightning and thunderstorms threatened, but when they tried again to cancel evening events on the mall because of an approaching lightning storm, they were countermanded by the White House so King Chaos could speak and the fireworks go off. 

The fireworks themselves, billed as the largest display in history, created such a toxic environment that immediately afterwards, D.C. experienced "Code Red" air pollution--the worst of any major city in the world.   The New York Times reported that the smoke from the fireworks was so thick during the last 30 minutes that the fireworks themselves were not visible in the sky.  But the nearby lightning was.  

It wasn't only Washington.  Los Angeles also reported intense pollution expected from their fireworks.  Moreover, the fireworks everywhere sent tons of CO2 and other greenhouse and noxious gases into the atmosphere, to otherwise harm the sustaining water and air as well as other animals and plants, as they attack the health of vulnerable humans.  This at a time when other equally impressive kinds of displays by laser and drone are available.

A society that is serious about a long-term commitment to addressing the causes and effects of climate distortion would behave differently.  We apparently are not such a society.  This may be a small example, but it is a telling one.  We're in a different movie altogether.     

Forewarned

 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known popularly as NOAA, issued an update this past week from its Climate Prediction Center on the emerging El Nino.  It pegs chances that it will be a very strong and long-lasting event at 2 out of 3.  And it appears to be heating up (literally) to affect global weather faster than previously predicted, likely to come to life officially in June.  It is given a 96% chance to last through the winter, with some suggesting its most extreme effects could come in 2027.

A lot of scientists and other observers are especially alarmed by this El Nino's potential to be historically immense.  But whatever its strength, its heating effects will be on top of the ongoing effects of climate distortion, which means we could really be in uncharted territory.

One story quotes a Florida meteorologist: "I think we're going to see weather events that we've never seen in modern history before."

Hotter than usual water in a particular region of the Pacific affects wind currents which lead to major shifts in weather around the world.  But no one can predict which areas will be hit with torrential rains or stifling drought, an onslaught of storms or eerie calm.  El Nino usually does one thing consistently, however: it raises the global temperature.

The possible ramifications for an El Nino matching the strongest on record--from 1877 (that's eighteen seventy-seven)--has been the subject of several articles.  David Wallace Wells in the New York Times provides the largest context, both historical and in terms of current climate science and speculation. 

That 1877 El Nino led to droughts and then famine in India, China, Africa, Brazil and elsewhere, leading to the deaths of an estimated 31 to 61 million people.  While the world is vastly different economically now, there's much to worry about in terms of the ability and willingness of wealthy nations to help those most devastated.  And the resulting turmoil in heavy armed countries.

Wells also suggests that this El Nino could be strong enough to shift global climate permanently into the hotter world predicted by climate models for the 2030s to the 2050s.  It is a world the world is not prepared for, least of all the United States, where the federal government's official policy is denial and indifference to helping in emergencies, let alone preparation.  As a people we deny the effects of the most likely and widespread outcome: heat itself.  This in a country where excessive heat kills more Americans than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined. 

And not only could the effects of the El Nino be added to the ongoing climate effects--some prominent scientists like James Hansen believe the ongoing effects are being greatly underestimated.  Just in recent months other scientists announced that the world's ice is melting and sea levels are rising faster than previously believed, and that the Atlantic current is weaker and more likely to break down than previously believed. 

We do not seem to be physically (in terms of infrastructure, etc.) or psychologically prepared for what's coming.  Yet I read recently some professional political advice to Democratic candidates to stop talking about climate--it turns people off, and the people who already are concerned are never going to vote Republican.  Part of the premise is that Democratic candidates in recent cycles have talked about it, and lost.  I really doubt that premise.  Nobody talks about it--not in anything but general terms.  And so, there is no public leadership, and we are nearly as unprepared now as we were in the early 1990s, when the alarm was first sounded.  

One thing that seems to be different is the undercurrent of fear.  But lacking leadership, this fear has nowhere to go to be focused on action.  Instead it is expressed in phenomena like the falling birth rate, when young couples fear the future.  A NYT oped to that effect  manages to refer to climate disasters without even mentioning the fear of climate distortion as a factor in that fear.  That's how strong it and its corresponding denial are: it reminds me of the fear of nuclear holocaust in the Cold War period--always present, hardly ever acknowledged, expressed in symbolism as in atomic monster movies. People felt helpless--and they were.  That's not the case with responding to climate distortion. It should have been the work of this generation.  It will have to be the work of the next.

The Elephant Is The Room

 

The daily, the hourly assaults.  Remember back when Boss Chaos was threatening to invade Greenland?  That was all of eight weeks ago.  Now added to the barrage of corruption, callous cruelty, lawless authoritarianism, aggressively racist and sexist policies and actions, and all but unprecedented stupidity, destroying institutions and damaging institutional integrity for years to come, we're mired in profligate murder and international economic suicide.

While all along, the assault on the future of life as we know it on planet Earth accelerates.

The climate crisis as a focus of news and public attention has sunk almost out of sight.  Partly (one assumes) at the behest of tech bros anxious to power their AI bubble by any means necessary, previous federal efforts to lower carbon, support green energy and even to control pollution have been officially halted.  Climate denial has never been easier.

Despite extreme weather in increasingly long doses, somewhere in America, almost all the time.  Quite recently for instance: a record high temperature for March of any year in any place in the US was registered in Arizona: 110 F.  From the Pacific to the Rockies, the recent mid-March heat wave registered temps some 30 F degrees above the previous normal.  Some 140 cities were affected by that heat dome, which scientists said would be "virtually impossible" except for climate distortion. 

As a consequence, mountain snowpacks in places like Colorado and California are low and likely to disappear early, leading to summer drought, and adding to wildfires (already ongoing in Colorado.)

Meanwhile, Hawaii is experiencing record rainfall and the worst flooding in 20 years, with one place worried about a major dam failure.

But just about all of the United States has been hit with extreme cold or heat (and some areas of the Southeast getting doses of both within 24 hours), snow or rainfall of greater intensity and longer duration, during unaccustomed seasons, for just the past year.  And there are doubtlessly effects as bad or worse elsewhere in the world, of which we are wearily and systematically ignorant. 

These are the markers of what climate scientists have been predicting, more and more precisely, over the past 35 years.  They are symptoms of the sickness enveloping the planet.  There's little point in rehashing all the research results announced over the past year--it's pretty much all bad.  As goals haven't been met and promises not kept, it's been clear for awhile that the world is going to crash past the global temperature red line of the Paris Accords. (And that's even before the obscene bombing and warfare in the Middle East is reportedly spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than 84 countries combined.) Among the predicted effects, sea levels have risen and are rising higher than previously known, and ice near the poles is melting faster.

But the latest UN report came out this weekend, and it shows that greenhouse gases are now trapping so much heat on the planet that it's not cooling off as it has in the past.  In other words, the greenhouse effect is in effect.  Hothouse Earth is no longer a prediction.  It's the planet's present, and its future for potentially thousands of years--except of course it's likely to get worse. 

Climate distortion is no longer the elephant in the room.  That elephant is the room.  

Current US policies and actions are patently insane.  Other insane policies, like the destruction of public health and FEMA, will sooner or later contribute to the rippling effects of climate distortion.  But the failure is shared. It's not all the party with the elephant symbol, though mostly it is. 

 Democrats in power had opportunities to do much better.  But no Democratic candidate--not Clinton or Gore or Kerry or Obama or Biden or Harris--made climate a central issue in their campaigns.  No Democratic President--not Clinton or Obama or Biden--ever made an Oval Office address outlining the dimensions of the climate crisis, with a comprehensive program to address it.  

Obama (with the Paris Accords and environmental policies) and certainly Biden with his massive support for clean energy in the Inflation Reduction Act, made substantive changes to address aspects of the climate crisis.  But especially in Biden's case, it was done stealthily.  Obviously the judgment was made that calling for all-hands-on-deck efforts was politically dangerous, if not suicidal and therefore impossible to achieve.  They had to bet that the crisis could be successfully addressed incrementally. Some experts even agreed, for awhile, especially about green energy.  No one knows the future, but to me it so far appears to be a lost gamble.

For the first time, humanity faced a comprehensive global challenge to current civilization and current forms of life.  But also for the first time, humanity has the knowledge, the ideas, the potential and the power to meet that challenge.  Or so it once seemed.  If this is an evolutionary test, so far humanity is failing.

I've been reading about and writing about the climate crisis for 35 years. On this blog alone, I've written somewhere between 835 and a thousand posts on this subject and related subjects since 2005.  But I haven't written a word about it since Boss Chaos took power.  And it could be I won't write about it again.  

Younger generations will have no choice but to deal with its consequences.  Maybe some of them will find meaning and purpose in their lives in addressing the causes and effects of climate distortion, by concentrating on them in whatever field of endeavor best suits them.  For them, hope won't be most importantly an emotion.  It won't be what they feel.  Hope will be what they do. Real hope will not be felt or expressed so much as enacted.  

Most may well suffer the consequences of climate distortion without ever naming it, just as we almost never name it now.  An environment, McLuhan used to say, is invisible to its inhabitants, as water is to fish.  In a practical sense that's nonsense, but in terms of conceptualization, it's probably true.  Right now it's some mix of denial, fatalism and unconsciousness.  Nevertheless, the elephant is the room.

2025

 “Beings are owners of their actions, heirs of their actions; they originate from their actions, have their actions as their refuge.”

Majjima Nikaya, 

Buddhist teaching

There is nothing about this election I understand, except its very dire consequences.  

I guess I'm not alone in this.  Half the country seems to be having a nervous breakdown today.

For me, I realize that this hasn't been the world I've known for some time, but now it is a truly alien country.

America is in disgrace today.  Our system has failed, beginning with the judiciary, that sent hundreds to jail for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, but failed to bring its leader to justice.  The result is we have a man who was impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, who is guilty of 34 felonies and charged with what amounts  to multiple treasonous acts, handed fateful power again.  Now everyone is endangered (except perhaps a few billionaires), including the selfish saps who voted for Chaos.

2025 was always shaping up to be a fateful year.  For the international effort to address the climate crisis through the Paris Agreements, 2025 is a benchmark year. Several targets for that year are almost certainly going to be missed.  Needless to say, the new US government will officially not care. Meanwhile the emission of the main greenhouse gases reached record levels in 2023, after one of the highest one year increases from 2022 despite international commitments to lower emissions.

In all the campaign fuss, a few relevant news items were obscured, such as the latest UN climate conference which called for "no more hot air" instead of action, and a "quantum leap in ambition" if the goals of limiting greenhouse gases sufficiently is to be attained.

 And the story that half a million people around the world were killed since 2004 in natural disasters made worse by climate distortion--more deaths than caused by wars, terrorism and malnutrition combined.  The predicted expansion of formerly tropical diseases has also begun, with outbreaks of malaria, cholera and dengue in new regions.

Now of course we've elected to have multiple other very dangerous crises and soon.  Perhaps even before the US commits economic suicide with global consequences, we've learned that Russia is enlisting North Korean troops to fight Ukraine, coupled with the kowtowing to Putin by Musk and of course Chaos himself, threatening Ukraine's existence, the western alliance and eventually the sovereignty of the United States.

I could go on but who's listening? I haven't slept since Monday night.  Every time I started to fall asleep, another terrible consequence would attack me.

 On November 6 the sun came up on the beginning of a very different world, for everyone.  And really really really, not in a good way. 

Helplessness and the American Reich

In the last post, I quoted C.G. Jung from his essays just after World War II characterizing Hitler as an hysteric, in terms that obviously apply to our current dictator-in-waiting.  While this post sat atop this site, controversy exploded over a video posted on the Trump campaign site, calling for a “unified Reich” in America.

The Trump campaign took down the video, and said it was a repost from somewhere else, added by a staffer who failed to notice the nomenclature.  But this makes its own point: Trump’s hysterics evoke and give form to the hysterics of his supporters, and so these tendencies go beyond Trump himself.  He has clearly invited this form and content of hysteria, with statements that echo Hitler as his most inflammatory.  This affair illustrates and symbolizes a growing fact: the American Right is refashioning itself as the American Reich.

Support for other dictators in the world, as well as Trump’s declared dictatorial ambitions, have become overt among them.  Though some express resentment in public concerning Hitler references to Trump, and project them back on their political opponents, others seem willing and even happy to identify with Nazi symbolism and Hitler himself.  Trump’s statements echoing Hitler’s so closely are not only hateful and inflammatory, they give permission to his followers to accept—privately and increasingly in public—the ambition’s of the Third Reich in the 1930s and 40s, perhaps somewhat differently applied for our time.

In his writings on Nazism and Fascism, Jung concentrated on psychological factors as the necessary foundation for such a societal response, but he acknowledged other contributing factors.  “Naturally there were plenty of reasons—political, economic, social and historical—to drive the Germans to war, just as there are in the case of common murder,” he wrote.

Jung does not discuss any of those specifics.  In this post I begin speculations on such contributing factors, briefly glancing at 20^th century Germany, but looking at such elements in contemporary America, with their attendant psychological implications.

The now conventional shorthand version of history says that Nazi Germany was a reaction to the economic hardships and national shame imposed by the harsh terms of the peace treaty after Germany was defeated in World War I.  Another factor, probably related, was the immense monetary inflation in Germany in the early 1920s.

 Jung may have not bothered with such explanations partly because he saw similar hysteria in Germany that led to World War I, before any of this happened.  But I emphasize the German inflation because in my lifetime I’ve observed that no economic misfortune is as likely to evoke an hysterical response as is inflation.

 In my experience, we as a people will grimly survive recession and depression, but inflation drives us crazy.  I believe the reason is that, even more than unemployment or recession, inflation makes us feel helpless.  If you are unemployed, you could still imagine getting a job, or borrowing a certain amount, etc.  Inflation attacks the value of money itself, and hence its reality.

  In a recession, a dollar is still worth a dollar, and may even buy a little more. You can help yourself by getting more dollars. In inflation, the value of a dollar declines unpredictably. It’s unclear how to help yourself when dollars don’t have the same value from one week to the next. Each goal you might reach is not enough. Suddenly everything is uncertain, frightening and threatening.

 We saw the intensity of response in the American inflation of the late 1970s, which was nowhere near as large as Germany in the 20s, but was larger than the recent inflation, which is still being felt.  The response in 1980 (together with other factors) defeated a sitting President, and changed America profoundly. It led to the election of Ronald Reagan.  The postwar consensus was over, and rapid change in institutions and daily life began. 

An energy crisis caused by the Middle Eastern oil cartel, earlier recession and the ongoing flight of industries contributed (steel mills and auto plants closing, leading to economic hollowing especially in middle Atlantic and Midwestern state, including Detroit’s half-century of decline) but it was double-digit inflation that shook the security of the middle and upper middle classes as well as those below.  I certainly found evidence of this in interviews I conducted for a New York Times Magazine cover story.

 After decades of relative stability, even through various crises, global inflation hit again around 2022.  But much of the US felt it in the past year or so through the sudden spike in grocery prices, and then prices for other goods and services.  Although inflation is officially low, these prices—up to a third higher than a few years before-- continue to create anxiety and dismay.  Going to the grocery store is shocking, or restaurants. According to a news story this week, many Americans now view their everyday fast food meals as a luxury. Many people are less secure, and many others feel insecure.

 Higher food prices are likely caused by other real factors as well, such as the effects of various kinds of unaccustomed weather on crops, and related glitches in the supply line.  Nevertheless, that the realities—and the shock—of inflated prices don’t register proportionately in official economic numbers is just one of the ways in which the whole system of measuring economic health is broken.  These measurements (and what they don’t measure) add to the obscuring of the major and growing problem of the concentration of wealth in a few hands, while most Americans don’t share in the statistical growth, and feel themselves falling back.

 Though this inflation is very recent and thus the icing on the cake, this huge imbalance known by the dubious shorthand of economic inequality is a persistent and now endemic problem.  As people feel more and more insecure, they feel shame at their helplessness as well as anger.  They look for scapegoats (such as immigrants and other races), and they listen to those who best resonate with their otherwise silent hysteria.

 Though potent, anxiety based on money and status is not the only source of these feelings of helplessness.  There is also the most comprehensive threat to the future, to existence itself, to the world as we know it, of climate distortion.

 In Jung’s theories of the unconscious, the worst fears are likely to be the most repressed. In this case, the strongest of insecurities becomes the most threatening to even admit.  In a healthier society, that tendency would be tempered by conscious efforts to address reality, however frightening and difficult. 

 But that is not happening in one segment of the public, reflected in those whose political power is built on forming and intensifying their hysteria.  Perhaps the most classic example of this political as well as psychological response made the news last week, when Governor DeSantis of Florida signed into law a bill which removes any mention of climate as a priority in state energy policy, among similar provisions. 

 As numerous news stories mentioned, Florida was at that moment in the grips of a May heat wave that sent temperatures to 115F in Key West and gave Miami its hottest day in history.  In its most dire predictions to date, NOAA forecasts a dangerously active hurricane season, even as Florida has already recently experienced rising seas, flooding rains, damaging storms, toxic algae blooms and other disasters that manifest climate distortion.  In other words, Florida is ground zero for the climate crisis in America, and its governor’s solution is to forbid considering it—even forbidding the words.

 This is denial writ large, done consciously no doubt for political effect (it got a lot of attention for a law that actually doesn’t change much) and to mollify Big Oil donors. But it also could not be a clearer example of hysteria, and the cynical exploitation of hysteria, which in the end amounts to the same thing.

 Hysterics in movies usually throw fits under pressure, crying we’re all going to die.  But totally ignoring mortal danger is also an hysterical response. In practice these two responses often cause each other.

 The potential consequences of climate distortion are huge, too awful to fully grasp, or allow oneself to contemplate for long. Not much could be bigger than the end of the world as we know it.  But this is not the first such situation, and there is a longer history in how Americans responded to the earlier one.

 From almost the moment the first atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima was known, fear of a future that included the threat of instant and total annihilation began to take root.  As the nuclear arms race went on relentlessly, and it became a patriotic duty to support it with at least silent consent, or thanks to McCarthyism, the Blacklist and J. Edgar Hoover, risk ostracism if not arrest, the feeling of helplessness grew in every direction.

 At first government officials were amazed that the public was silent.  Psychologists talked about a national numbing, and the 1950s became known for a kind of hysterical quiescence: a manically happy face that any unusual event could turn into panic.  Later psychologists came up with the theory of “learned helplessness,” based on rats in a maze who stopped trying to escape when their previous efforts always led to failure—even after escape routes were open.

 Denial seems proportionate to the dimensions of helplessness.  People are not insensible to floods, fires, smoke, rising waters and heatwaves when they are their victims, though even then the denial can be quite remarkable.  Everyone else would like to ignore stories about these threatening events that lurk in the news somewhere every day.  These are “natural” disasters, almost by definition outside human control.  Yet those damn scientists pile up evidence that they are caused by how we’ve lived our modern lives. So suppressed shame is also part of the response, and anger at the double bind of creating havoc by leading normal lives.

 But it’s all so big that it seems impossible to address.  We seem to be helpless.  Individual efforts seem pitiful and deluded.   It must require a major and therefore threatening change to our way of life, which must be in some ways more threatening than the ultimate climate crisis consequences.  At least when they hit we’ll all be dead.  Maybe.

 How can it be my fault anyway? I did what I was supposed to do.  It must be a hoax perpetrated by evil forces just to shame and intimidate me, and to give them more power over me. 

 The contents of the unconscious, Jung writes, are not evil or destructive in themselves, “but are ambivalent, and it depends entirely on the constitution of the intercepting consciousness whether they will turn out to be a curse or a blessing.”

 This seems true also of the phenomena apparently behind this hysteria of helplessness.  The problem of income inequality can be addressed by higher taxes on the wealthy, and even a wealth limit, with the excess devoted to (for example) addressing the effects of inequality, and addressing climate distortion causes and effects.  This method was American policy from the 1930s through the 1970s to some degree, and some redress of excessive tax cuts of Reagan and the Bushes did begin in the Obama years, to be immediately reversed.  But the American Reich for its various political and psychological reasons, ignores any such remedy.

 Though incremental measures to address climate distortion may well help and perhaps eventually lead to societal attempts at solutions, this is not a mere political problem, nor one that can entirely be addressed through bureaucratic or economic means.  Jung warned (as early as 1919) that if the collective unconscious becomes animated “due to a complete breakdown of all conscious hopes and expectations, the danger arises that the unconscious may take the place of conscious reality.”  For many, it seems that it already has.

 This is the essence of the American Reich.  The conscious reality is denied.  They believe their unconscious fantasies and projections.  Some news outlets now routinely provide “fact checks” of absurd rumors and claims, most of them promulgated on American Reich social media. 

 So powerful are these fantasies, especially those promoted by their dictator-in-waiting, that previously establishment Republican politicians, eager for power, abase themselves by supporting claims in spite of quite obvious evidence that they are false.  This extends even to Members of Congress who hid from rampaging mobs, saw blood on the floor of the Capitol, and now deny that anything unusual took place there on January 6, 2021.

 Obvious hysteria has become an American Reich technique, from social media and vigilante activity to the halls of Congress and the Supreme Court.  

 How can this hysteria itself be addressed?  Jung suggests two ways.  First and foremost, as individuals, we look deeply into ourselves, for as he writes, if there’s something really wrong in society, there’s something really wrong in me. 

 This is true politically as well. There is something to some political responses and even right wing fantasies,  however distorted, that some on the left self-righteously ignore or one-sidedly deny. 

 We must all examine ourselves, to consciously restore balance with the unconscious.  For the hysteria, the anger, the hatred and helpless rage, the avarice and greed for power, as well as the arrogance, the envy, the prejudice, the projections and denial and the repressed feelings of inferiority, do not all occur on one side of any question, and certainly not on just one side of the political divide.  Haven’t we all seen the environmentalist who is always angry, always in a bad mood, glowering in the woods in his Save the Redwoods t-shirt?  

  “As a psychiatrist, accustomed to dealing with patients who are in danger of being overwhelmed by unconscious contents,” Jung writes, “I know that is of utmost importance, from the therapeutic point of view, to strengthen as far as possible their conscious position and powers of understanding, so that something is there to intercept and integrate the contents that are breaking through into consciousness.” 

 The other remedy is the culture—cultural norms, bonds, institutions.  For culture, Jung writes, “is our only weapon against the fearful danger of mass-mindedness.” 

 Speculations on how the American culture broke down to become the breeding grounds of the American Reich is the subject of a future post.  But Jung has something else to say about the importance of our political culture in surviving this hysteria of helplessness: the function of a democracy:

 “True democracy is a highly psychological institution,” Jung wrote in this same postwar context, “which takes account of human nature as it is, and makes allowances for the necessity of conflict within its own national boundaries.”

 Later he adds: “The marked tendency of the Western democracies to internal dissension is the very thing that could lead them onto a more hopeful path.”

 This of course is the most proximate threat of the American Reich: an end to this democracy in their totalitarian “unified” Reich.  Preserving what is left of American democracy is at stake in the 2024 election.  That also is a topic for next time, but is always worth emphasizing.

Summer Is Coming

 

Summer is coming.

Last summer saw Phoenix exceed 110 degrees continuously for close to a solid month, with an average temperature in July of 114, and some 55 days cumulatively above 110, with 133 days of 100 or above.  Many other places in the U.S. had days and weeks of temperatures above 100F, up to and including 110. Even Seattle, where temperatures rarely top the 70s, went over 90. Even now the oceans are eerily warm, and at places the water is literally hot to the touch.

Today the National Weather Service issued its summer forecast: almost the entire United States is in for a hotter summer this year.

The heat starts a cascade of consequences, from larger, more frequent and more intense and fast-moving wild fires, to urban infrastructure failures (otherwise known as melting.)  But the heat itself maims and kills.  Apart from acute conditions it causes or contributes to long term damage to kidneys and other organs. Even with official statistics vastly undercounting heat related fatalities, they exceed deaths from hurricanes, tornadoes and all other weather-related causes.  Heat is often accompanied by excessive humidity, and the two together are a recipe for widespread death.

Even those who live and work in air-conditioning, with cool water taps at hand and a cold shower a few steps away, suffer from the heat.  But the worst effects fall on workers, both outside in the sun and inside corrugated steel sweatbox warehouses, where they rush around sticking online orders in packages, and packages into trucks. 

Research revealed in a new book (and previewed in a New York Times oped) shows that the effects of heat on concentration causes workplace accidents, some of them deadly. In California alone, the research found, there are some 20,000 workplace accidents a year that go unrecorded as heat-related, but are directly attributable to the effects of excessive heat. 

As for direct effects, the watchdog group Public Citizen estimates that nationally some 20,000 workers die each year from heat effects, with another 100,000 suffering injuries and illnesses.

Moreover it doesn't take much heat to take a physical toll, let alone a mental and psychological one. In places where it didn't normally get that hot, even temperatures in the 80s and low 90s can be fatal to the most vulnerable, and harmful to others.   A 2020 study shows that bad health outcomes begin with a heat index of 83F, even if workers have access to water and shade, and regular breaks. 

Heat is a pervasive problem across all ages, occupations and income groups, from infants and schoolchildren to elders, that not even air-conditioning can fully address.  But apart from the most physically vulnerable because of age and health, the risks are greatest for workers outdoors and in those warehouses.

But there is no current federal health law that addresses excessive heat.  President Biden has called for it, comprehensive legislation is being developed, but the current Congress refuses to pass emergency measures. (Biden's climate law provides funding for infrastructure to address heat, such as cooling centers.)

 So right now regulation is up to the states and localities.  Some cities, like Phoenix have instituted some protections.  California has had some protections for outdoor workers since 2015 (leading to fewer Workman's Compensation claims, by the way), but recent legislation to protect indoor workers is years away from implementation.  Oregon and the state of Washington passed heat protection laws earlier this year, after hundreds died in heat waves last summer.  Minnesota and Colorado have some protections, while other states, like New York and Nevada, have bills proposed, but have failed to act on them.

Meanwhile, state governments in Florida and Texas have not only refused to consider state standards but have forbidden counties and cities from creating their own heat protection rules, as Miami-Dade tried to do.  The Texas action was specifically to crush ordinances in Dallas and Austin that simply mandated 10-minute water breaks in the shade every four hours for construction workers. This ban against water breaks represents "the most pro-business, pro-growth bill passed in the 88th Legislative session, and will be a lifeline to Texas job creators," according to one of its Republican proponents, as he sipped his chilled designer water in his air-conditioned office. These Texas and Florida moves give wage slavery another dimension.

Even the measures on the books are inadequate.  The standards for excessive temperatures are too high, and the remedies are partial.  But anything that adds at least some air-conditioning, access to shade and water, and more frequent breaks is better than the slave driving practices of many places today.  (Air-conditioned trucks was a key demand won by drivers for UPS in their strike last year.)

Meanwhile, it might be worth contacting your favorite online seller and delivery service to serve notice that your patronage depends on humane heat standards for the workers who process your purchases. (If indeed you can find a point of contact.) This may be no guarantee--there is a current dispute in California over conditions in an Amazon warehouse which the company says has many safeguards in place, including air-conditioning, but that some workers claim is inadequate because of excessive humidity accompanying the heat.

There is the possibility of legal challenges based on the Occupational Safety and Health law requiring businesses to protect "the general welfare" of workers, but it doesn't appear any have been filed so far.

All of this is one symptom of our continuing failure as a country to truly address comprehensively the effects of the climate crisis.  Leadership has not found a way to be effective, and I suspect it is because they haven't made this a priority that they address regularly in the most public ways.  

Nevertheless, summer is coming.  

Year of Dread?

 The most obvious cause for dread is the 2024 election campaign and the elections themselves.  As 2023 ended, the polls showed President Biden with low approval ratings, and several polls showed Trump ahead in preference for November's voting.  But politically, November is a long time in the future.  Nobody really knows what polls measure these days, except whatever it is they measure is in the present, not that future.  A lot will happen between now and then--and I suppose that's as much reason for dread as the possible outcome.

I've called him Homegrown Hitler on this blog since 2016, and so I am not surprised that Trump has become so obvious about it that even major media has noticed.  His election would be a defining tragedy for this country, as it is likely to complete the destruction of constitutional government he and his cronies and minions have begun. I don't think he will be elected, but the institutions of government and law, as well as the Constitution itself  have already been seriously weakened, perhaps fatally in the long run, with the pressure that the future is highly likely to bring.  

Regardless of the election outcome, it's all but assured that the coming year of news will relentlessly and copiously be about Trump. Even worse that last year.  The media can't shake its addiction to him (even the progressive British paper the Guardian features his photo on every online front page, sometimes several of them), since he is for many the ultimate in clickbait.  President Biden has so far signaled that he will make Trump and his threat to democracy the primary issue of his campaign, which may only be acknowledging reality. (But my few readers be forewarned: you'll need to get your Trump fix elsewhere this year.)  

There's almost inevitably going to be a lot of related drama this year: trials for 91 felonies, Supreme Court decisions, the campaign, the election, probably extending into 2025.  Just dreading the drama has to head the list.  

For me, another cause for public dread in 2024 is that, partly because Trump is likely to be the major campaign issue, once again this year we are no going to get the clear, forthright and vocal leadership on the climate crisis that we need.

If you got past the war news, the front page lifestyle features and celebrity controversies, you may have noticed that 2023 was officially the hottest year in history, and not this time by a little.  By a lot.  Human civilization is perhaps ten or twelve thousand years old, but the Earth's temperature hasn't been this high in 100,000 years, at least.  The jump far exceeded predictions and scientists' expectations.

For the past decade, the clarion cry for climate action has been fixed on keeping the world's temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Centigrade on average.  2023 hit 1.48 and some scientists believe it is likely that sometime in 2024 or shortly afterwards, it will be official that the 1.5C has been breached as the average.  This is the number that the nations of the world said in the Paris Agreement of 2015 that they wanted to avoid.  "Above that threshold," said a CNN report, "many of Earth's ecosystems will struggle to adapt and summertime heat will approach the limits of human survivability is some places."  That's the minimal impact.  If it pushes the planet past various tipping points, it will be much worse, especially in the long term.  

There was positive news during the year on addressing climate distortion, and the Guardian (the most reliable daily news source for climate issues) published dueling year-end evaluations: "World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientist says" vs. "I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis.  I was wrong."

The title of that second one is disingenuous--nobody expected most "of us", i.e. people now alive to die from the climate crisis. Just when in the future that might be a real possibility depends on a lot of other things as well.  It's an annoying simplistic way to talk about the real concerns. (On the other hand, some thousands of people will likely die of effects of climate distortion effects this very year.)

 The author of this piece and the book it comes from, Hannah Ritchie, bases her optimism chiefly on statistics about the growth and prospects of renewable energy, especially as it becomes cheaper than coal and oil. She pushes these conclusions to the point where she accuses anyone with doomsday warnings as aiding climate crisis denialists.  

The title of the first one, on the other hand, fails to mention that the scientist in question is not just any scientist--it is James Hansen, formerly of NASA, the scientist who brought the news of the climate crisis to Congress and the world--in 1988.  

While I don't dispute the numbers that Ritchie and some other climate writers use and apply to temperature rises (she believes the rise could be stopped at 2C or a fraction more) due to the phenomenal growth of renewables, the climate crisis is not just about balance sheets, it doesn't just go by the numbers.

The dangers of the climate crisis to the natural world and to civilization, even in the rest of this century, are not about absolute numbers.  They are also about what the effects of climate distortion in the real world can do to push at vulnerable situations, and make already dangerous matters catastrophically worse.  That includes exacerbating threats to the natural world on which we depend, from species extinction to the now fragile life of the oceans.  But it also includes threats to vulnerable institutions and to the now fragile global civilization, and these may well become more dangerous sooner than later.

Some of the direct effects of climate distortion are evident now--we don't even have to wait for the spring and summer fires and heatwaves of 2024--we're about to see climate distortion-fed and energized storms and coldwaves in much of America, with attendant direct and indirect damage, including flooding.  We're seeing coastal flooding on the increase as well.  Meanwhile, a quarter of the world's population is living in drought, and huge parts of the world are drying up to a lethal extent.

These begin cascades of consequences.  Even in America there are mounting costs of addressing multiple disasters, with communities slow to recover.  The danger of disease and epidemics increases.  Worldwide, we are especially seeing probably the most proximate cause of danger for the rest of this century: large scale migration; that is, large numbers of refugees.  Sometimes it is caused directly by climate effects, sometimes by warfare and political turmoil that is in part caused by climate effects.  

But we don't talk about migration that way.  We don't see it that way.  Many take no thought as to the reasons, and have no empathy for the refugees--something we haven't seen for awhile in the global north, but with dangerous potential for the stability of governments and public institutions.  This is one obvious problem related to climate that increases the dangers of violence and warfare, including the eventual use of nuclear weapons.  (Speaking of dread, I worry the dread of nuclear bombs has weakened, and their use against people is likely to happen again.)

Refugees and the reaction to them is only one issue that needs to be addressed in the context of the climate crisis.  The world dearly needs the leadership to spell it out clearly: to talk about causes and effects, and to outline action to address each.  But there is no such leader, even on the horizon.  There really isn't one I see in the US.  The only possibility I know of is Vice-President Kamala Harris, who seems to have some grasp of the problems, and who I once heard speak in terms of the causes and effects of the climate crisis--which is possibly the only terms that can organize the information in a form people at large can immediately grasp.

Here are the causes, here is what we need to do, and here is what we're doing about them.  Here are effects, here is what we need to do, and here is what are doing about them.  There is a plan, and I will keep updating you on our progress.  This is what we need, and what--in 2024--we are once again unlikely to get.

While Republicans continue their delusional and self-serving rants, Democratic politicians are afraid to name the crisis and its components.  Everything is obscured, disorganized, coded.  Electric cars alone aren't going to do it.  Saying that the climate crisis is about jobs is not enough.  It's just more hiding from really confronting the crisis and its dimensions.

The United Nations had another climate meeting in 2023, another COP.  This year's much lauded outcome was to declare that the age of fossil fuels is over, we're going to end them.  Excuse me if I see this as akin to an alcoholic declaring an end to drinking, and celebrating that with another round.  Meanwhile the US is pumping more oil than any nation in the world, and any nation in history.

Most of the COPs beginning with the Paris Agreement have been about promises.  They set goals for reducing carbon output.  They never meet them.  They set up a fund for rich nations to help the poor nations most affected, especially by rising tides.  They failed to put any money in it, and then they contributed too little.  It's been mostly about promises. Similarly, there are lots of ideas for technologies and things to do; some of the oldest have been known for years but still nothing is done. And others will require decades more of refinement, when it will likely be too late to apply them effectively.  Yes, people and nations are trying, and showing some progress.  But not enough to keep the promises from becoming lies we tell ourselves.

Until we dread the lies more than the work that needs to be done, every year will be a year of dread.  That's all I've got to say.  Captain Future, over and out.

Hawaii 911

what do you think was here   before the pineapple fields

 would you suppose that the fields   represent an improvement

 do you think they smell better   than they did before

 what is your opinion   of those square miles of black plastic

 where do you think the plastic   goes when the crop is over

 what do you think becomes of the land   when the crop is over

 do you think the growers know best   do you think this is for your own good

 --from "Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field" by W.S. Merwin

In the public imagination, Hawaii is a tropical paradise--perfectly warm, with dazzling beaches and lush landscape, the rainforest trees bathed in sunshine and yet wet with the morning mist.  That carefully fostered image made the horrors of the past week especially bewildering.  

A perfect storm of dry wind and heat led to a perfect storm of consequences: all-consuming fire engulfed and destroyed a town as well as its surroundings, while cell service and 911 collapsed, and the water system failed.  People were literally driven into the sea to escape, a situation eerily similar to the opening disaster in K.S. Robinson's novel, Ministry of the Future.  The dead are still being counted, while many survivors watched their homes disappear into ashes.  

El Nino and the vagaries of a passing hurricane were proximate contributors, but more long term effects made this apocalyptic.  Since 1990, Hawaii's annual rainfall has decreased by 31% in the wet season and 6% in the dry.  This part of Maui has been in drought for some time.  Clouds have been thinner (less moisture, more sunlight gets through) and storms that normally brought rain have drifted northward.  Climate distortion is largely responsible for all of this.

Hawaii had an indigenous population and culture for thousands of years, and was an independent country until eventually the United States made it an unofficial colony, and maimed huge parts of it for firing ranges and bomb testing and other military uses, while  a few companies cut down forests to establish pineapple and sugar cane plantations.

That's why this catastrophic fire was not really a forest fire: what burned were non-native grasses in miles of abandoned sugar cane fields, weeds grown as high as five or six feet tall and dried out by the drought.  It was this tinder that gave the fires their speed and ferocity. 

Hawaii may have been an exception in our imaginations, but it is not an exception in the combined effects of generations of ecological destruction meeting climate distortion.  Rainforests throughout the world, weakened by clear-cutting, are endangered by drought, and once they collapse, it's a long way back.  Many if not most municipalities in the United States, with inadequate and highly vulnerable infrastructure, and general lack of preparation, are unprepared for such catastrophe.

Somewhere, some official or headline writer is going to call this Hawaii disaster a "wake-up call," if someone hasn't already.  But of course we've had hundreds of such wake-up calls and as a society always manage to hit the snooze button.  Republicans deny these realities, while it seems to me that the Democrats'  strategy to address the climate crisis and these related environmental catastrophes-in-waiting is to do so indirectly, incrementally and almost secretly, for fear of waking up the rabid opposition.  Maybe that will work.  But I have my doubts.

Climate Distortion

Update: Nine days after this post, about 175 million people (or close to the total US population in 1960)  in every region of the United States were under heat advisories with many experiencing high heat indexes, and the temperature of the ocean off Florida was 100F.  After forty days of excessive heat, the southwest was anticipating moderating temperatures but higher humidity as monsoon rains were forecast for early August. The world is boiling, said the UN Secretary-General.

The current heatwave in the US south and southwest (as well as northern Mexico) is expanding.  The National Weather Service predicts that this weekend about 80 million people will experience temperatures or heat indexes above 105F.  And the heat is likely to continue into next week.

When you add up everyone in the world dealing with excessive heat for weeks at a time, and then factor in those dealing with torrential rain and flood, firestorms and smoke, and all the associated problems, that number must be in the hundreds of millions if not billions.

This is the summer that climate distortion comes home.  The heat is no longer a temporary inconvenience, nor are the floods and fires.  They are much harder to ignore, and for many they are fatal to ignore. Their reality changes everyone's daily reality: how they think, plan, act and feel.  It should be motivation for institutions to make more than temporary fixes.  Gaps in public services become more apparent and must be addressed.  Even when the weather changes.

Climate distortion--though not necessarily this summer's weather--is here to stay, for a very long time.  It seems important to me to understand what's happening.  Some people call it climate change (a name invented by a Republican consultant so it wouldn't sound so "negative").  But the climate hasn't changed.  It has been distorted.  From a different point of view, some call it climate derangement.  It's colorful, but it isn't any more accurate.  The climate has not changed nor has it gone insane.  The climate is doing what it has always done in these geophysical circumstances.  But something is distorting the climate--usually making it more extreme and violent.  Something is interacting with ordinary climate phenomena, like El Nino and various other cycles.  That something is excessive CO2 and other identified gases spewn into the atmosphere by industrial age human societies, and the global heating they have caused.  

The effects of these distortions can be predicted in a general way, but not in a weather forecasting kind of way.  More days of higher temperatures in the summer, for instance, has been widely predicted for decades as an effect of global heating caused by greenhouse gases.  But distortions are inherently volatile.  Nobody knows how they will manifest in a given year.  A distorted climate is full of shocks and surprises.  There may be baseline changes within all this, but those probably won't be known until some time has passed.  But because of time lag effects, a distorted climate is here to stay.

The distortions in turn can distort various major ocean currents and atmospheric currents that play a huge role in determining weather patterns.   Then we're in the area of feedbacks and tipping points.  That's climate distortion.  They can eventually alter key features of the planetscape that affect climate, like polar ice.  They can affect life directly as well as indirectly, with cascading consequences.

Some people won't care much why this is happening, but they may face the fact that it is happening. Maybe some other people will finally listen to the basic findings of climate science.  I am not one of those who make a  rigid slogan out of "trust the science."  First of all, there is no such thing as "the science." Scientists, for any number of reasons on a scale from benign to corrupt, sometimes sell conclusions derived from bad science.  Science is not pure.  Human knowledge is much weaker than we like to pretend it is, and that's really true of western science.  You usually have to use your judgment in which "science" to believe.  

But climate science--which is really a name for those studying chemistry, biology, physics and various more complex hybrids of inquiry applied to climate--has come at its conclusions in a variety of ways, from measuring aspects of today's world to measuring aspects of the deep past, to modeling various possibilities.  Some requires sophisticated computation; but some is based on quite elementary physics and chemistry.  All of this should be clear to anyone who has read or seen An Inconvenient Truth since 2006, and there are more sciences involved now. 

For decades now, thousands of scientists of various kinds from every nation on the planet have come together to share their findings and put together a consensus in UN climate reports.  No subject has been studied more thoroughly by more people over a longer time in a cooperative way, and come to the same conclusions.  In comparison, your doctor's diagnosis is the equivalent of a coin toss.  

There are a number of practical lessons to be derived from this, including that the resistance to climate crisis conclusions is largely in the murky realm of the psychological (though it is excused and made easier and therefore more cynical and corrupt by politics.)  That should tell us that in order to address climate distortion, its effects and its causes, means exploring our inner distortions--fears, needs, desires as well as such unconscious drivers as denial and projection.  It means exploring the inner distortions related to social media, algorithms, group dynamics and so on.

Finally it means finding again the core of our beliefs in ourselves, what we're all about, our operating principles, our deep commitments and ideals, all of which may have been distorted by the rush of complexities around us.  It's not going to be easy, navigating the increasing number of hotheads around us (is it coincidence that mass shootings have gone up recently along with the temperature?) but in the end society and the individuals within societies will rise and fall on whether "you'd do the same for me" remains a transcendent impulse of what used to be called decency.