I went out on my bike today, for the first time in a month or so. I needed to move--I have been a bit sluggish lately and it's affecting my health.
I needed that movement and fresh air, and I was rewarded with a beautiful sight of glistening sleet falling in a sun shaft, moving like a sped-up snowfall.
Fortunately, the hailstones I encountered today were pea-size or smaller, so aside from an impromptu facial exfoliation I suffered no ill effects.
But I want to warn you about the hail.
It's going to get a lot larger, and it' going to happen sooner than anyone wants to think, maybe this year. Somewhere in the NorthWest, the weather that we have long
expected to be confined to the Southern States is going to come our way. That's because there is more energy and more moisture in the air now.
Hail that is golf-ball sized can hurt you badly, and the baseball-sized stuff will kill you. Meteorologists are warning California about atmospheric rivers, and we here in the NorthWest are going to get some of that as well. If you've lived in Oregon and Washington for a few years, you have doubless heard the term Pineapple Express, referring to huge current of moisture laden air streaking across the Pacific to flood us here on the West Coast. This is the same phenomenon, plus climate change; the Pineapple Express is getting teeth, and now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has had to create a ratings system for them from level one to level five, like hurricanes and tornadoes.
It's good news that the NOAA is on the ball with this kind of thing. But this sort of scientific and bureaucratic change also points to the fact that we all need to adjust to climate change now. If you're a bicyclist, for example, you need to watch the weather forecasts for the intensity of any expected hail storm, particularly in the Spring and Summer. The increasing scale and strength of the atmospheric river phenomenon means that you should take any necessary steps to protect your home from flooding events that could come, not just from swollen rivers and streams but from direct downpours. For example, I will be constructing water shields for my basement windows out of car windshields from the local junkyard, and I will put small sandbags those edges, and I'll check the storm drain outside my house, to see that it is still clear.
I was never good at heat stress, and my room air conditioner is getting older and less efficient--so I intend to look for a good used unit now, while the prices are still low. I will be blocking my East-facing bedroom windows with mylar if I can find affordable stuff, or failing that, I will again put up aluminum foil during the Summer. And I will be repairing my roof, if I can arrange the financing, using materials durable enough for larger hail.
It also means that climate change should be addressed as the real and present danger that it is. On the collective level, this means supporting the Green New Deal. (I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the thirty Dow Industrial corporations have been ripping off their employees and rewarding their rich investors with the proceeds. The three hundred eight five billion that they gave to the plutocrat class pencils out to forty-six thousand dollars for each of eight million workers. Think for a minute what your family, and your society, would look like if you and everyone you know and everyone you don't know, who works full time, had an additional forty six thousand dollars for each of the last dozen years or so. Do you think you'd be working three jobs, if one job paid you that well? Do you think people would be living in the streets? Do you think people would be managing their toothaches with clove oil and charcoal and whiskey, or would they just go to the dentist? That's half a million dollars per person I'm talking bout. How do you rip off a billion dollars? You take a thousand dollars from each of a million employees, that's how.)
The first thing that the terrified corporate press says about the Green New Deal is "How can it be paid for?" But that's not really an issue.
When the corporations that run the government want a nice profitable war, or when they want a multi-trillion-dollar handout to reward them for corrupt behavior, they literally have the system create the money. And the same can be done for the Green New Deal. It's not that it can't be easily done, it's that it redistributes power and wealth to the working class. The Green New Deal is Game Over for the oh-so-profitable immiseration game they've been running on us since Reagan. That's what they fear.
(tune in to Press**Watch on KBOO 90.7FM for more!)
- KBOO