“feel-like” temps in triple digits
here today, & i couldn’t be happier – seasonable weather. sort of. yesterday: hi: 93 norm: 87 lo: 72 norm: 66 @ least it feels like summer. e.p.a. on c.c. in ks., 2016: soil becomes drier rainfall, more intense floods, more severe alters crop yields summers increasingly hot: yup. on paper, anyway. . . . i.r.l., we go about our quotidianisms & nothing much seems different in the heart of the belly of the u.s.a. – but elsewhere: u.n. rapporteur coins “climate apartheid” – “travelling through chennai, it is not hard to find a row of empty pots dotting the pavements. deep in the slums of mylai, a long line collects behind a bright yellow tanker. the driver fills the public tank while people wait their turn to fill four pots of water. any more than four is risky & can provoke fights.” (this for past 2 months; & the little girl wants to know “why does the tanker have to tell me when to go to school and when not to?”) + those in lines lose wages or jobs; + water diverted to nearby apt. complex for wealthy; 5 million in the city 5 million more around it; farmers have no money to pay moneylenders; hotels have no water to wash dishes; villagers in maharashtra desperately digging into dry riverbed to try to find water; indian govt. report: 21 cities will run out of groundwater by 2020. . . . but that’s, like, next year. but the i.p.c.c. said we have 12 yrs. (well, ok, 11 yrs., 3 mo. now) to save the earth . . . from the who woulda thunkit dept.: moving glaciers form pop-up lakes in pakistan himalayas, & the lakes threaten villages w/floods (glacial lake outburst floods, or g.l.o.f.s) meanwhile, “we've never seen these types of temperatures in jamaica,” says the weatherman (those winds off the sahara); + more flooding in s.w. china (cars washed away “like toys,” 300k people evac’d); roads, bridges out in siberia; & low-income folks in miss. displaced due to flooding upstream “those poor people” “ain’t it a shame” but it’s not just the global south – tho you wouldn’t know about the european heatwave if you live on this side of the atlantic, unless maybe you have vacation plans, so here’s the news from a poem, like w.c.w. said: france hits all-time hi temp: 113 f; june record highs: germany, poland, czechia, luxembourg (giant hi pressure over greenland + n. central europe – same one that’s melting the glacier – plus hot air from sahara); & people are starting to die of heat wildfires in catalonia (“el infierno viene”); germany & greece, too; & becoming a weapon of war in the mideast “o come on, you can’t just say every weather event is climate change.” no. but every event is hitched up to every other one . . . hence missouri r. flooding continues as dams release more water (+ our little release of floodwater & sewage into creek & river here); & lower mississippi valley record flood duration, hi water near n.o.la. higher than 1927 flood, 30 levee breaches; & freshwater runoff into gulf: algal bloom toxin warnings, lo salinity, “hundreds of jobs in seafood harvesting & processing . . . impacts on family livelihoods are at risk” (there is a “shellfish growers climate coalition” - !) – & we won’t even mention the dolphins and sea turtles, just the human beings for now
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |