Wednesday August 28th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
The Media and Two Simultaneous Environmental Crises…Dorian and the Amazon Fires
In the last week worldwide alarm bells have been going off concerning the Amazon fires, with a lot of finger pointing going towards Brazil’s President Bolsonaro. As of today we have Hurricane Dorian, which looks like it will threaten Florida or the U.S. Southeast as a major hurricane with some climate crisis aspects. Much will continue to be written on both subjects, but we have an interesting experiment now. I wonder how long it will take the media, particularly short attention span U.S. media, to drop mention of Brazilian fires should an Andrew type hurricane move through Florida?
You can bet that I think that the Brazilian fire are a bid deal. To be sure a major hurricane moving into Florida would deserve at least temporary top billing on nightly news shows and would be tragic. In the long run, though, as we move through the 21st century the health of the planet depends on rectifying the Amazonian situation, so that is what most news media should cover. If not, hurricanes like Dorian will only get worse and it’s my opinion, more common as sea surface temperatures rise from cabon pollution.
So, let’s see what happens with media with two obvious, simultaneous crises. Perhaps any people left on the climate crisis fence will get behind politics to change things given two extremely bad stories. Fear is always a great motivator. We will see.
Now here are many notes with links on both Dorian and the Amazon fires (with newer messages listed first as updates are made today):
Here is more climate and weather news from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
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Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”