We confront the endless coverage [1] of the fires raging through Hollywood in California with nothing but profound melancholy. For we had two of our most enjoyable holidays ever in that distant State of America, and many times experienced the kindness and intelligence of enlightened people. The trouble is that they were motoring holidays. We toured around vast areas, heedlessly filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other pollutants, and thereby contributed to the disaster that has befallen these unfortunate people.

And more disaster is to come. Any hopes that this trouble is exceptional and can be put down to an El Niño event, now look forlorn. Read this from Nature Briefings; and click on their link if you dare:

Is Global Warming Speeding Up? Earth shattered heat records in 2023 and 2024, with temperatures rising further than expected on the basis of previous trends and modelling. A mysterious reduction in cloud cover, combined with an El Niño weather pattern, could be responsible for temperature increases in 2023. However, scientists expected temperatures would decrease again in June 2024 when the El Niño subsided, which didn’t happen. Now they are racing to work out whether this sudden spike is just a blip in the climate data, or an early indicator that the planet is heating up at a faster pace than they thought.Nature | 6 min read
Reference: Science paper

Why, and how, are we bringing this catastrophe upon ourselves? One man who seeks to understand is John Vaillant. Fire Weather is his his study of the catastrophic fires that raged for a year in certain regions of northern Canada, regions that had devoted themselves to the extraction of fossil fuels. You can read a review of his work here from Wired [3] But it’s a weary chronicle of greed, short termism, butch manliness and wilful destruction; the substrates in which climate denialism thrives.

However we cannot close without a slightly hopeful thought. Every so often one still comes across, at least in this country, members of the proletariat who ask questions like”this climate chinge fing-der yew fink iss rilly ‘appenin?” Such people, hypnotised as they are by all things American, Celebrity and Hollywood, may now have to confront a reality. Yes, it really is.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5y81zyp1ext

[2]https://www.wired.com/story/fire-weather-book-canadian-wildfires/

[3]https://www.wired.com/story/fire-weather-book-canadian-wildfires/

#california #hollywood #global warming #fire weather #fossil fuels