Smokey Thursday

"Is global warming causing more extreme weather events of greater intensity, and is it causing sea levels to rise? The answer to both is an emphatic 'no.'"

-Jim Inhofe

Jim, you may want to come out here to the street and take a look at the sky.

Or I reckon you could just peek out the window from here inside the condo right now.

I guess the good news is that all this particulate has driven down the temperatures a bit. We hit 100 degrees in Corning on Tuesday, the second time we've reached three digits in the space of roughly two weeks. That last blast of heat was apparently what fanned the forest fires in Ontario that now blaze out of control, sending this wave of smoke south and mostly blotting out the sun.

Besides the depressing, insipid light cast in this thick haze, there are the burning eyes and constant need to clear one's throat. Oh, and the huge brown boogers, which are sort of fun.

This happened around the same time last year, but not nearly as bad as what we're living right now. And the scientific community has suggested it's time to buckle up and get ready for this to become the norm.

https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-15981715/scientists-predictions-life-earth-2100.html

At some point in the last half-century, the Republican Party went mad. The worst of their spiral was an emerging belief that they could alter physical reality by simply refusing to accept that it is in fact real, whether we're talking about vaccine science, the ambiguity of gender, or in this case anthropogenic climate change. Of course, that last one was the first delusional belief, paid for by oil companies that control our economy and our politics. Now that inaction and bad policy on this issue have had a half-century to percolate, we find ourselves in this moment, rubbing our eyes and wondering when this planet started turning into a hellscape.

And when a country elects these cranks and lunatics over and over, this is where we end up.

So screw you, Senator Inhofe. To quote the words of first officer of the Soviet attack submarine the Konovalov to his commanding officer during the climactic scene of The Hunt for Red October, in the last moment before they're blown to bits by their own torpedo, "You arrogant ass. You've killed us."

And so it goes.