New South Wales, Australia, planet earth: the butt-end of a butt-ugly year
(climate-wise, anyhow) . . . xmas day in n.e. kansas felt like my childhood xmasses in the 1970s in west tennessee, which in the 2010s feels like the 1970s in texas. ah nostalgia. right now (10 a.m.), 33 f; wind chill 23. & so it goes. but dig this: moscow stopped removing snow; they’re importing it now. yep. warmest winter since 1886 (no snow in dec. there like = no warm in texas – weird, un- natural); the animals hibernating at the zoo woke up; some flowers bloomed; so, they made fake snow, since the real thing hasn’t showed, & dumped it near the kremlin for a snowboard demo there, & putin sez climate change maybe caused by a shift in earth’s axis – “nobody really knows.” but alas, nobody does know. and i’m nobody, too, so i know there is a shift, but not to that kind of axis – jesus, what is this? bergman meets jerry bruckheimer? serious question, jesus – four australian states on fire: “an area twice the size of massachusetts” (and what if mass. were on fire? they voted for clinton), w/temps 100+ f – but t’storms on the way! but less rain than lightening in the forecast. never fear – sydney’s new year’s fireworks are a “go”! while 30 k urged to evac – “they didn’t realize they couldn’t get out by the main road. now they’re all locked in and they’re saying, ‘wow, we didn’t know this was going to happen’”; firefighters cut down trees to save trees – and houses, lives: "we just heard that the plan is that firefighters will set up trucks around us at the wharf & spray it to try to keep us safe" – like being stuck on the drawbridge, while the castle & the land & the moat are on fire; the actual massachusetts looks like an icebox: spin-outs, tree-falls, powerlines down – blizzards across the upper tier of states, a “no-travel” advisory in fargo, n.d. (fargo!). so, as janus, the god facing forward & backwards, both, ushers us into january & another two-faced double-dealing year, let us review: 2nd hottest yr on record (?); wettest yr on record in u.s.; 15 x-treme weather events cost $1 bn or more – 8 of those over $10 bn; calif. wildfires: $25 bn; cyclone idai killed 1300 people; 1900 people dead from monsoons in india; hurricane dorian: $11 bn; cyclone fani: $18 bn; typhoon lekima: $10 bn; 400 people dead of dengue in central america (107 k cases in honduras alone – 13x last year); & o yeah australia is burning up & the decade? last 5 yrs = hottest ever on this li’l planet; 4 out of 5 worst wildfires in calif. ever; 6 cat 5 atlantic hurricanes in 4 yrs straight; arctic sea ice? ↓ 13% (that don’t sound too bad, right?); lots of 1,000-year floods this decade; & 100 $10 bn disasters since 2010. & earthlings hit a new high for co2 emissions! (40.5 bn tons) . . . “climate emergency”; “climate strike”; “birth-strike”; “flygskam”; “pyrocene”; “degrowth”; “insect armageddon” – hell’s a poppin along w/the champagne corks, as round and round it goes, & when it stops, nobody knows
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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. |