A C. T U. A L. L Y

Lest you thought the climate crisis had gone away, here’s a quick and dirty to disabuse you of that wishful thinking. OH, NO-O-O-O-(A)!   In early June, NOOA predicted that 2020 was shaping up to be the hottest on record in the lower 48 United States, which is saying something, since each of the last five summers has set a heat record. THE ARCTIC IS ON FIRE!   As the Guardian reported on June 25, There’s an Arctic heatwave: it’s 38° C in Siberia. Arctic sea ice coverage is the second lowest on record, and 2020 may be on course to be the hottest year since records began. The immediate effect is to increase wildfires. Siberia has seen “zombie fires” reignited from deep smouldering embers in peatland. This is bad news, releasing particulate air pollution and more carbon in 18 months than in the past 16 years.   THE CDC FAILS---AGAIN.   Heat kills.   Federal research predicts heatstroke and similar illnesses will claim tens of thous...

The Berlin chapter of Black Lives Matter organized a demonstration on Saturday, May 30, 2020, to protest the murder of George Floyd.   The word went out on Facebook and the plan was to meet in Pariser Platz , behind the Brandenburger Tor , in front of the U.S. Embassy.   When I arrived, the plaza was pretty empty, (no tourists in Berlin yet, which is as novel as the virus), but I followed some people carrying signs to where the protest had been moved, just a block away, across from Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews, sometimes called the Holocaust memorial. You can see a little bit of the Memorial peeking through the trees below.    H ere's a better photo of the memorial, taken in late Fall, courtesy of my husband. The Memorial consists of 2,711 polished concrete slabs of varying heights arranged in an undulating, claustrophobic grid covering 19,000 square meters of prime downtown commercial real estate, an entire square city block. If that’...