The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of recently reported ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Dealing with a Polycrisis World
Dear Diary. Do many of you remember the story of Heracles and the Hydra? The Lernaean Hydra was a monster in Greek mythology. It had many heads and every time someone would cut off one of them, two more heads would grow out of the stump. Eventually Heracles overcame this beast but with a lot of effort involving some ingenuity.
Similarly in our modern world, ever since the advent of modern weapons, commerce and industrialization beginning in the 19th century, it seems like every time a big problem is solved, two problems pop up. For example, horses for transportation were dropped in favor of the faster and much more efficient internal combustion engine automobiles. A long-term problem solved? Nope…the two heads of environmental degradation and fossil fuel governmental corruption were grown in place of horses despite humanity experience much greater ease to get from points A to B.
We are now living in a polycrisis world with multiple threats coming at our civilization and personal wellbeing from just about every direction. Off hand, some of the biggest as of 2022 are the climate crisis, the covid pandemic and its supply chain disruption adding to inflation, Putin’s insane war against Ukraine leading to worldwide fuel shortages and energy inflation, and the rise of fascistic authoritarianism, which is a threat to democracy.
The following Financial Times article touches on all of these subjects and shows why we have been walking on proverbial eggshells for quite some time. It’s a good read (article not copied due to copywrite rules, but can be accessed here):
https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33
Opinion Global Economy
Welcome to the world of the polycrisis
Today disparate shocks interact so that the whole is worse than the sum of the parts
By ADAM TOOZE
Here are some “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks:
Here is some new October 2022 climatology:
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. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)
If you like these posts and my work please contribute via the PayPal widget, which has recently been added to this site. Thanks in advance for any support.)
Guy Walton… “The Climate Guy”