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TICK TOCK THE CLIMATE CLOCK, PART FOUR



There’s good news and there's bad news this week.  First, the good news:

·        Bombs a Buzzing.  Today, I saw a fat, furry bee on our balcony.  An image search on Google leads me to believe it was a Bombous lapidarius, or red-tailed bumble bee (above).  It buzzed so close to my hand that I could feel the air disturbed by its beating wings!  Hope she comes back when our apple tree is in flower.   

Well, that was a nice, uplifting story, but it’s immediately on to the bad news.

·         Life Just Got Harder for Santa.  As reported in The Washington Post on 22.03.2019, the Selkirk caribou have gone quietly extinct in the lower 48.  
Selkirk Caribou
·       Wipe Out!  Biologists have believed for a while that we are in the middle of the sixth major mass extinction.   Each of the prior five has seen between 75% and 96% of all species wiped off the face of the earth.  Guess that will probably include us this time.

·         A Classic Shell Game.  Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Total spend $195M per year to brand themselves as supporters of action against climate change.  BUT.  This year they will spend $115B to extract oil and gas.  Playing Three Card Monte on the streets of petroleum. 
1957 Shell Oil Logo
 ·      Help!  I Can’t Breathe!  Last Sunday, The Guardian reported a study that tested the lung capacity of eight- and nine-year-old schoolchildren in East London and found that as a result of the high levels of traffic pollution, their lung capacity had been stunted by 5-10% and may never recover.  (See item on petroleum above.)

·         Will That be Paper or Plastic, Ma'am?  A Cuvier’s beaked whale that washed up on shore in the Philippines last week was found to have more than 88 pounds of waste in its stomach — grocery bags, plastic garbage bags, four banana plantation sacks, and 16 rice sacks.
 
Cuvier’s Beaked Whale
·        But, Baby, It’s Cold Outside.  The average daily temperature in Montana during the month of February was 27.5 degrees Fahrenheit below normal.

·         Bombogenesis.  The storm that hit the Plains states in mid-March was of “historic proportions,” according to the National Weather Service, noting that “its strength and rate of intensification is unusual for the Plains states.”  (Uh, maybe not anymore.)
 
Satellite Image of Bomb Cyclone
·       "It’s Probably Over for Us."  The bomb cyclone that hit the Plains states next headed eastward to produce record floods in the Midwest.  The New York Times reported on 18.03.2019  that “baby calves were swept into freezing floodwaters, washing up dead along the banks of swollen rivers…raising fears that this natural disaster will become a breaking point for farms weighed down by falling incomes, rising bankruptcies, and the fallout from President Trump’s trade policies.”  Unbearably sad, but worth reading:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/nebraska-floods.html
Nebraska Family Farm On Ice
·        Toasty, No Matter How You Slice It.  The Washington Post reported on Seattle’s unprecedented spring heat wave last week:  “Seattle’s high of 79 degrees was ‘above average,’ even based on July standards. The hottest ‘average’ high of the year falls on July 31, peaking at 77.4 degrees.  This means Tuesday’s high temperature is toasty no matter how you slice it.”

·         Life’s a Beach.  Cyclone Idai made landfall in Eastern Africa during the planting season last week, creating the worst humanitarian disaster in Mozambique's history and threatening to become one of the worst weather disasters to strike the Southern Hemisphere.  The UN estimates 1.6 million people have been affected and worries that the inland ocean left behind will bring cholera, malaria, and typhoid, as well as massive crop failures leading to famine. 
Mozambique’s Inland Ocean 
So sorry that the good news this week was dwarfed by the bad.  But that Bombous lapidarius was sure awesome!!!

Keep it real!
Marilyn

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