i hear on the radio
we’re going to have more heat waves & droughts in kansas. see, the heat waves cause the droughts – and the droughts make everything hotter: it’s what you call a “feedback loop” (it is happening in europe this summer): noaa is quick to say this is separate from & in addition to global warming; & i want to ask: how the hell can you tell? o well, we’re normal: hi 91 (norm 90) lo 73 (norm 68 – close enough) (more heat also means more water evaporates so more humidity so temps don’t go down as far at night) good news – the longest mississippi flood in history has come to an end! hurrah! & elsewhere: 7.9 m acres “went up in flames” in siberia on monday (lightning strikes), which makes 29.6 m so far this summer, unleashing stifling smoke across most of russia, creating massive CO2 emissions; “majority of fires in remote areas; authorities make decision to extinguish them only if estimated damage exceeds cost of the operation” or, as one pensioner put it, “i am choking and dizzy.” passenger at bus stop: “i felt like i was inside a gas chamber.” i can’t breathe. elsewhere in siberia: flooding near lake baikal: flows of mud and muddy water washing toxic sludge from old paper mill into the “pristine” lake; that evaporation again (causes more intense rain, too); hang on – i’m starting to scare myself here – meanwhile: the u.k. joins the highest-ever-temperature club: 101.6 f / 38.7 c in cambridge; flooding in manchester; in lincolnshire thousands of chickens have perished from heat – “critics said the chickens would have suffered terribly before dying,” but workers at the facility: “the freak weather has done this to them. please don’t turn this into anything bad.” & i don’t think i have to. meanwhile, the long-awaited monsoons are drowning people in peshawar, nepal, & bihar where “100s of villages are marooned” & need “tarpaulins, mosquito nets, bedsheets, soap, drinking water.” but the monsoons always cause floods, no? (but still not enough to break the drought) deluge in china, drought further south; wildfires followed by flooding in croatia. 38.5 f in regina – coldest ever temp for date; highs in hi 80s this week – more of that wacky jet stream! (we’re not going to talk about the sinkholes in the permafrost, causing methane and nitrous e- missions, exponentially accelerating this, that, or the other) meanwhile: guatemala: “this isn’t poverty – or even extreme poverty: this is a famine, and people are dying,” even as the coffee crop sickens with fungus in the thickening haze “we’re desperate . . . there’s no money and no food . . . my children have gone to bed hungry for the past 3 yrs” – so he does what people do during eras of climate change – migrates – in this case, north & so do lots of others – to avoid seeing their kids die slowly * analysis: “our brain is a get-out-of-the-way machine,” sez the psychologist. “that’s why we can duck a baseball in milliseconds. some say climate change is happening too fast. no, it’s happening too slowly – not quick enough to get our attention.” my aim is to pick up the pace of perception: consider all the preceding a foul ball off the bat of albert almora, & it is heading into the stands right at your row. as the saying goes: think fast
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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. |