Tag Archives: climate change

“Final Payment” for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 656

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Image by Vitaly Taranov on Unsplash

Final Payment

Bees hum and die in brambles, hidden from our sight, 
and scrawled across the sky, untethered in their flight,
are birds swept by a tempest, urged on by its blast,
as down below, the earth cracks, and our future’s cast
in hurricanes and fires and climate change so vast 
that mankind’s ancient rituals no longer work their magic.
Our cut-down trampled forestlands foretell a future tragic.
We leap ahead to our own end, speed it on its way,
waiting for that reckoning for which we’ll have to pay.

For The Sunday Whirl the prompt words are: trample crack swept untethered hum urge scrawled bees sky ritual leap brambles

 

Voting Our Destruction

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Voting Our Destruction

Some birds will still sing and flora abide
no matter what human might reside
in the colorless house with the POTUS inside.
But not so for those that have already died.
In the past year, seven more
have ceased to run or swim or roar.

The outcome of our land and sea,
each animal , insect and tree
depends on policies they make.
Will Earth survive or will we bake
on the spit of reckless choices,
protests made by unheard voices?

Will we find, at end of day
we’ve voted our kids’ lives away?
These are the species lost to us
in last year’s sparring, useless fuss:

                      • Sumatran Rhino. …
                      • Chinese paddlefish. …
                      • Yangtze giant softshell turtle. …
                      • Indian Cheetah. …
                      • Spix Macaw. …
                      • Catarina Pupfish. …
                      • Indochinese tiger

What new denizens will perish
from this Earth we say we cherish?
Yet we vote its life away
And we’re the ones who’ll have to pay.

 

Today the loss of species is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times than that of the natural extinction rate. WWF reports that between 0.01% and 0.1% of all species go extinct every year. Considering the fact that there are around two million species on the planet, it means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year. And note, we are talking about species of which humans are one.

As per the 2018 report of World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), there’s a 60% decline in the population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians in just 40 years. As per the IUCN Red List, more than 30,000 species are threatened with extinction, which means 27% of the nearly 1,12,000 species accessed so far are under grave danger.

In the past ten years, 33 plant species have become extinct. The species listed above in my poem all vanished in 2019. I was unable to find a list for 2020.

 

Prompt words today are flora, outcome, fated and reside.
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Read the Signs

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Read the Signs

Days of wild adventure, pulsing with delights
are turning into zombie days that fade to zombie nights.
Nothing on our agendas. No traveling, no dates—
our calendars reduced to onerous empty slates.

It does no good to protest. God hears not when we ask.
We merely have to don that necessary mask.
Though every instinct urges camaraderie,
Mother Nature warns us that she will wait and see.

Will we clean up our messes? Put out every fire?
Calm her winds of warning before we all expire?
Ban plastic from her oceans, stop digging for black gold?
Cool the global warming and restore the cold?

If we will not listen, she’ll only turn deaf ears
to all our present pleadings, to all our future fears.
Oh foolish foolish children, just dealing with effects
instead of paying heed to what nature expects.

 

Prompt words today are instinct, nothing, protest, onerous and zombie.

Matthew Cooke Regarding Democracy. A Vital Message

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Knowledge by Committee

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Image by Louis Velazquez on Unsplash, Used with permission.

Knowledge by Committee

Any person worth their mettle
would not deign to ever settle
for any type of education
that offered no irradiation

of the true facts of subsistence,
even though at the insistence
of the elected powers that be
to hide the facts of history

and science and of common sense
in order to make kids more dense
to matters of ecology
and climate change and chemistry.

Minds should be buoyant and not settle
on myths of village or of shtetl
in place of those proven by science.
Minds can’t be shackled by compliance

to nonsense garnered from the dockets
of men who seek to line their pockets—
carpetbaggers and buffoons 
who spout untruths and whistle tunes

taught to them by corporations
who feed them piecemeal their orations
that they’re doing for our good
those things in fact which place a hood

over our heads to hide the truth.
When government has grown uncouth,
what’s left except to rail and shout
that we must throw the traitors out!

 

Prompt words today are buoyant, settle, irradiate and tune.

Beau of the Fifth Column and Climate Change

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Forgottenman posted a video of Beau talking about a new report on climate change on his blog last night, and I think this video is probably the most important thing anyone could post right now. I hope you will watch it over on FM’s blog HERE.

Payback Rhythms

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This picture is taken from my upstairs terrace. The dome you see covers the ceiling of my bedroom.

Payback Rhythms

The rhythm of the world as it tears us all asunder
is of hurricane and fire, rain and wind and thunder.
Fissures, ashes, ruins waterlogged and crumbled—
all advances of mankind his foolishness has tumbled.
What we do to it it does right back to us.
This scientific fact is not so nebulous.

 

Prompt words today are nebulous, fissure, sunder and rhythm. With the exception of the UPI photo of the hurricane, all photos taken by me. Click on any photo to enlarge all. Please give photos a few seconds to load and focus.

Are hurricanes increasing in strength and is climate change to blame?

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Excerpt from The Guardian. Go HERE to read entire article.

 

Is climate breakdown to blame?

A range of factors influence the number of hurricanes smashing into land, from localised weather to periodic climatic events such as El Niño. Prior to 2017, the US had experienced a hurricane “drought” that had stretched back to Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

But there is growing evidence that the warming of the atmosphere and upper ocean, due to human activity such as burning fossil fuels, is making conditions ripe for fiercer, more destructive hurricanes.

“The past few years have been highly unusual, such as Irma staying strong for so long, or the hurricane in Mozambique that dumped so much rain,” says Kossin. “All of these things are linked to a warming atmosphere. If you warm things up, over time you will get stronger storms.”

Climate breakdown is tinkering with hurricanes in a variety of ways. More moisture in the air means more rain, while storms are intensifying more quickly but often stalling once they hit land, resulting in torrential downpours that cause horrendous flooding.

Damage in the Rockaway neighbourhood of Queens, New York, where the boardwalk was washed away during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
 Damage in the Rockaway neighbourhood of Queens, New York, where the boardwalk was washed away during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Rising sea levels are aiding storm surge whipped up by hurricanes – one study found that Hurricane Sandy in 2012 probably wouldn’t have inundated lower Manhattan if it occurred a century previously because the sea was a foot lower then. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the maximum intensity of hurricanes will increase by about 5% this century.

The expanding band of warmth around the planet’s tropical midriff also means a larger area for hurricanes to develop, resulting in fierce storms further north than before, such as Florence. In the Pacific, this change means typhoons’ focal point is switching from the Philippines towards Japan.

Researchers are currently attempting to ascertain if climatic changes will help bend the path of hurricanes enough that more will charge in the direction of the UK in the future.

“This has implications for places that have historically been unaffected by tropical cyclones,” says Collins, who added these newly hit areas are likely to suffer a significantly higher risk of structural damage than traditional hurricane zones.

“We are already seeing effects of climate change,” says Collins. “While there is not consensus on the frequency of hurricanes in a warmer world, there is a consensus that the hurricanes are becoming more intense, and hence their impact will be worse.”

George Clooney on Climate Change and Dumbf…ery

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