Hottest Ever
July 3 and 4, 2023 were the two hottest days ever recorded on Planet Earth. June 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded.
If you still deny that the planet is warming and that we are deep into a global climate crisis caused by human activity, you have no ability to comprehend factual information. You’ve had decades to figure this out, and you belligerently refuse to attempt to. So, the hell with you.
Make no mistake about how this happened and who is responsible.
Unrestrained, rapacious free-market capitalists did this. Authoritarian regimes of communists and socialists did this. Fascists did this.
Climate science deniers did this. Conspiracy theorists did this. Angry, racist white nationalists did this. Fundamentalist evangelical Christians did this.
The wealthy predator class did this. Selfish idiots did this.
Uniquely responsible are American Republicans and especially in the last decade the radical right, unhinged MAGA Nation. Republicans for the last 50 years have obstinately prevented the United States from taking a leadership position globally in combating the climate crisis we are now experiencing.
Many prominent Republicans for decades have denied the reality of climate change induced by greenhouse gases humans have discharged into the atmosphere. Republicans have taken massive campaign contributions from and have carefully protected the economic interests of the greatest corporate emitters of greenhouse gases.
And U.S. Democrats have ineffectually let these Republican “evil geniuses” have their way. The 6th grade level science of the heat trapping properties of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases has been well understood for over 100 years; the urgent warnings from climate experts began in earnest over 50 years ago.
Now the poor, children, elderly people, sick people, Indigenous populations and people of color suffer preferentially and disproportionately due to a climate crisis. And it will get much, much worse. The scale has been tipped. While adaptation and mitigation is possible, deep suffering will continue.
Ask yourself two critical questions. Who benefits? And who pays?
There now appears to be a reasonable possibility that Donald Trump may be re-elected President, in which case the United States will wantonly destroy the ecosystem that sustains life on our planet.
That’s what elections at all governmental levels now mean in the United States. Prosperity or austerity? Democracy or fascism? Equality and equity for all or white privilege aristocracy? Peace or violent chaos? Life or death?
Too extreme, you say? Too panicky? Overreacting?
Not one freaking bit.
It is a perfectly good time to panic. And vote as if life itself depended on it.
Because it does.
