MAUREEN DOWD: Apocalypse Right Now
Sunday, July 25, 2021 -- Remember when the weather was just a matter of small talk, or a cool lyric for a Cole Porter song, "Too Darn Hot," or a great double entendre title for a Billy Wilder comedy, "Some Like It Hot"? Now, the scariest thing on TV is the Weather Channel. We've been living in a culture of dread for a long time now. Republicans have been weaponizing fear, trying to scare us about gays and transgender rights and ambitious women and people with darker skin. When fear doesn't have a basis in reality, it is deeply irresponsible and causes great social damage. Republicans invent things to provoke paranoia. But when it comes to climate, the fear has a basis in reality. We should be scared out of our minds watching the weather run amok.
Posted — UpdatedHoly smokes! It feels like we are living through the first vertiginous 15 minutes of a disaster movie, maybe one called “The Day After Tomorrow Was Yesterday.”
It’s Mad Max apocalyptic. Crazy storms that used to hit every century now seem quotidian, overwhelming systems that cannot withstand such a battering.
As Angela Merkel and President Joe Biden touted a climate and energy partnership on her recent visit here, nature mocked them. While the two leaders had dinner, rains submerged huge swaths of Germany, including medieval towns.
After Jeff Bezos shot 65 miles above Texas in his priapic rocket, the richest earthling marveled about our atmosphere: “When you get up above it, what you see is, it’s actually incredibly thin. It’s this tiny, little fragile thing, and as we move about the planet, we’re damaging it. That’s a very profound — it’s one thing to recognize that intellectually. It’s another thing to actually see with your eyes how fragile it really is.”
Remember when the weather was just a matter of small talk, or a cool lyric for a Cole Porter song, “Too Darn Hot,” or a great double entendre title for a Billy Wilder comedy, “Some Like It Hot”? Now, the scariest thing on TV is the Weather Channel.
We’ve been living in a culture of dread for a long time now. Republicans have been weaponizing fear, trying to scare us about gays and transgender rights and ambitious women and people with darker skin.
When fear doesn’t have a basis in reality, it is deeply irresponsible and causes great social damage.
Republicans invent things to provoke paranoia. But when it comes to climate, the fear has a basis in reality. We should be scared out of our minds watching the weather run amok.
Some hope technology can save us.
In Dubai, scientists are plotting to combat heat waves in several ways: sending aircraft to fire chemicals such as silver iodide into clouds to spur precipitation, and sending drones to zap an electrical charge into the clouds to trigger rain.
Making waterfalls in the desert sounds cool until you think about it. Torquing Mother Nature to clean up our messes can’t end well.
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