Maureen dowd
07/28/2021 2:54 PM
Clarín.com
The New York Times International Weekly
Updated 07/28/2021 2:54 PM
WASHINGTON - Where there is smoke, there is fire.
We seem to be living through the dizzying first fifteen minutes of a disaster movie ... maybe one titled
"The Day After Tomorrow Was Yesterday."
The
heat waves
are becoming more intense.
The
forests do
burn.
The floods devastate.
Wildfires in the American West, including one burning in Oregon and currently the largest in the United States, are creating hazy skies as far away as New York.
Photo AP Photo / Shafkat Anowar.
An
iceberg
almost half the size of Puerto Rico broke off Antarctica.
Florida's “fleurs du mal,”
fungal
blooms
known as red tide, have become more toxic due to pollution and climate change.
They are responsible for the death of 600 tons of marine life and have caused the beaches to be littered with stinky dead fish.
It's the
Mad Max
apocalypse
.
The crazy
storms
that used to
hit
every century now seem everyday and overwhelm systems that cannot withstand such a scourge.
The heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest, killing nearly 200 people, was accompanied by lightning that set the dry land in
Oregon
on fire
.
The Bootleg fire has consumed 161,874 hectares, with flames so intense that they are creating their own weather pattern capable of starting new fires.
The smoke has traveled from the west to the east coast, polluting the air.
As
Angela Merkel
and President
Joe Biden
announced a collaboration on climate and energy in the recent visit of the German president to this country, they were mocked by nature.
When both leaders dined, the
rains
submerged huge swaths of Germany, including medieval cities.
The flood in
central China's
Henan
province
was so intense that it paralyzed a large hospital, left subway users up to their necks in water, affected three million people, displaced 250,000 from their homes and killed at least 33.
Flash floods forced the British to wade waist-deep in water on the
London
Underground
.
More scenes of devastation are taking place in
India
, where at least 112 people have died after the monsoon triggered landslides.
As an article in
The New York Times
pointed out
,
it didn't matter if the systems were remodeled, like the New York subway after Hurricane Sandy, or if they ran on Victorian-era materials, like the London drainage system.
The storms overwhelmed both the new and the old.
There are wildfires in
Siberia
, and
California
is being turned into a crematorium.
After
Jeff Bezo
s
towered
104.6 kilometers over Texas in his phallic rocket, the richest Earthman marveled at our atmosphere:
“When you rise above her, you see that she is actually incredibly thin.
It is a tiny and fragile thing, and as we move around the planet, we are damaging it.
That is very profound
: it is one thing to recognize it intellectually, and quite another to see directly how fragile it really is ”.
Remember when the weather was just small talk, or great lyrics for a
Cole Porter
song
,
“Too Darn Hot,” or a great double-meaning title for a
Billy Wilder
comedy
, “Some Like It Hot”?
Now, the
scariest thing
on television is the weather channel.
We have been living in a culture of fear for a long time.
Republicans have been using fear as a weapon, trying to scare us about gay people, transgender rights, ambitious women, and people with darker skin.
When fear is not based on reality, using it is deeply irresponsible and causes great social harm.
Republicans make things up to provoke paranoia.
However, when it comes to the weather, fear is grounded in reality.
We should be terrified watching the weather get out of
control.
"Everything that we were concerned about is happening, and everything is happening at the
higher
end
of projections
, even faster than previous pessimistic estimates," said John Holdren, professor of environmental policy
at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government,
in an interview with the
Los Angeles Times.
It may be too late to negotiate gradual change.
We have just passed through four years of the government of
Donald Trump
, a proudly unscientific man, who once told me:
"I don't believe in man-made climate change."
Who can forget when he attacked Greta Thunberg and said, "Shut up!"
As the planet sizzles, many Americans have gone from disinterest to nonchalance, from indifference to fatigue.
There have been flashes of progress.
Antediluvian Republicans can no longer destroy opponents who care about climate change by taunting them like tree huggers in sandals.
In January,
GM
shocked the auto industry by unveiling its plans to phase out gasoline-powered cars and trucks to make way for zero-emission vehicles by 2035.
The Times article on the matter was a forward-looking obituary for gasoline-guzzling vehicles:
The days of the internal combustion engine are numbered. "
However, there are still many Republicans who support Big Oil and oppose the climate change provisions in the big legislation before Congress.
As we go through the debilitating politics of COVID-19, we have to go through the debilitating politics of the environment.
Terrifying pests
are ravaging the planet while charlatans are babbling.
Some hope that
technology
can save us.
In Dubai, scientists are planning to combat heat waves in a number of ways: by sending planes to shoot chemicals like silver iodide into clouds to stimulate precipitation, and by sending drones to launch an electrical charge into clouds to provoke rain.
Cascading
waterfalls in the desert
sounds good until you think about it.
Torturing Mother Nature to clean up our disorders cannot end well.
Après moi, déluge him. (NdR: After me [us] the deluge, is a phrase attributed to Louis XV)
c.2021 The New York Times Company
Look also
No one is safe: Extreme weather hits the richest countries
"Unprecedented" disaster in Sardinia due to forest fires
