If only it was just the weather…
The outstanding question can be boiled down to: ‘How freakin’ weird is it going to get before things go back to something closer to normal?’
The unsettling answer is more likely ‘never’ than ‘soon.’
If we’re talking weather – and the only reason we wouldn’t be is because there’s even stranger stuff that needs airing – Nova Scotia is moving out of a blistering July and temperatures consistently above 25 C. and well into the 30s with the humidity, and into a sweltering August that promises the same. Get used to it.
Scientists don’t even bother with the usual disclaimer anymore. You know, the one that warns us against equating crazy weather with climate change. The global climatological community is shocked by the prevalence and extremity of the heat this summer, and so it threw in the sweat-soaked empirical towel.
The killer heat waves, floods, droughts, and fires from the Far East to the Middle East, across North America and Europe are clearly linked to humancaused climate change, according to the world’s leading climate scientists, and they add – just in case someone was about to say ‘I got this’ – that the near unlivable situation is only the beginning of what’s headed our way. You got that?
If you have a kid who isn’t a serious threat to save the world, get him or her into the air conditioning program at the community college.
There is a climate change denier in the White House, and most Republicans in Congress don’t take it seriously either, so mitigation is a long-lost cause. Humanity now needs to hunker down to the deadly serious business of surviving the new global climate.
In the Austrian Alps, folks are watching a timeless glacier melt in real time with the unaided eye. Temperatures have reached 32 C in northern Finland and Norway – at the edge of the Arctic Circle. Brit upper lips are glistening with sweat in 30 C-plus temperatures that stretch into Scotland, and folks who are used to extreme heat on the Iberian peninsula are just plain dropping dead.
California is on fire, a killer tornado thought Manitoba was Kansas and fish are dying in German rivers where water temperatures exceeded 27 C, or a full 10 degrees above normal for this time of year.
Canada’s moderate response to climate change is under challenge from a Neanderthal premier and the guy from Saskatchewan, too – with apologies to Neanderthals. Other premiers, Nova Scotia’s included, are just planning to cheat on their carbon emissions homework.
As for Trump and the GOP, denial of climate change doesn’t even make it to the top 10 of the most brazenly bizarre stuff these guys swallow without triggering the gag reflex that accompanies consuming bull in many of us.
Had you the misfortune of catching any of the Trump rally in Tampa last week, you got some of the usual schtick about “fake news” and how real journalists are “the enemy of the people.”
But you also saw, for the first time in numbers too large to ignore, where Americans whose grip on reality Trump has successfully pried loose are landing. Welcome to the Q, and we wish we were talking about a Halifax rock radio station. Qanon is hard to define, but it is sort of the mothership for all the crazy conspiracy theories central to the rise of, and continuing support for the Trump presidency.
The world’s best English-language newspaper, the Guardian calls Qanon “a kind of interactive fan fiction for the far right in which Trump is a heroic figure arrayed against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the “deep state,” which includes all the recent past presidents, who are said to have hatched a criminal plot to start wars and traffic drugs and humans for money. Updates in the story happen when an anonymous figure calling itself Q leaves “crumbs” online for fans to decode.”
You can’t make this up.
Q has established its legend as a government insider with top security clearance who knows “the truth” about a secret struggle for power involving Donald Trump, and his fight against the “deep state,” Robert Mueller, the Clintons, pedophile rings, Tom Hanks and other nefarious stuff.
And last Thursday, the White House refused yet again to deny that the legitimate press is the enemy of the people, as championed by Trump and taken as gospel in the Qanon universe.
The planet is getting perilously close to igniting, the most powerful nation on earth is in the clutches of a pathological liar who’s supported by a sizeable portion of Americans who have willingly untethered themselves from reality.
And yes, it can get weirder, ’cause it always does.