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| Image Source: The Nation - This Is Your Brain on Climate Change |
We are in an election cycle. A lot of memes have been generated, barring you support one "team" or the other. The chief concern when I was younger was "duck and cover" drills, as The Cold War and mass extinction wasn't a matter of ancient history: it was for me and my classmates our ever-present reality.
We still have those concerns as a country. We should vet our presidential candidates not just on what they can do for us locally, but what our example abroad - emulated for good or for ill - will mean to the human species.
I shuddered when I read The Nation's article: "This Is Your Brain on Climate Change" by Zoë Carpenter. If that was her intent, I think she accomplished it.
I didn't find any links to her reference to what the White House published this week, so I went searching:
FACT SHEET: What Climate Change Means for Your Health and Family was indeed published on Monday for immediate release. It is ironically my fifth year anniversary at my company, and the 48th year anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. Also on the Fact Sheet site - Climate and Health Assessment, from its first chapter:
Summary
Climate Change and Human Health
The influences of weather and climate on human health are significant and varied. Exposure to health hazards related to climate change affects different people and different communities to different degrees. While often assessed individually, exposure to multiple climate change threats can occur simultaneously, resulting in compounding or cascading health impacts (see Figure ES2).
With climate change, the frequency, severity, duration, and location of weather and climate phenomena—like rising temperatures, heavy rains and droughts, and some other kinds of severe weather—are changing. This means that areas already experiencing health-threatening weather and climate phenomena, such as severe heat or hurricanes, are likely to experience worsening impacts, such as higher temperatures and increased storm intensity, rainfall rates, and storm surge. It also means that some locations will experience new climate-related health threats. For example, areas previously unaffected by toxic algal blooms or waterborne diseases because of cooler water temperatures may face these hazards in the future as increasing water temperatures allow the organisms that cause these health risks to thrive. Even areas that currently experience these health threats may see a shift in the timing of the seasons that pose the greatest risk to human health.
Climate change can therefore affect human health in two main ways: first, by changing the severity or frequency of health problems that are already affected by climate or weather factors; and second, by creating unprecedented or unanticipated health problems or health threats in places where they have not previously occurred.
I experienced some of this personally and recently. This was without a doubt the sickest my wife and I have ever been. I've seen it affect coworkers and neighbors, spikes in temperature with chills and respiratory symptoms. All because of a change in temperature and our insistence on continuing fossil fuels to enrich a few that know no other way to make a living without collateral damage. The above photo is the imagined exaggeration of Earth as the Sahara Desert. When it gets that bad, there's nothing we can do, Paris or Kyoto. It's then over for us as a species...curtains...finis...kaput.
As I've said, we're in an election cycle and our instincts tend us towards tribalism, teaming, "us-versus-them"; cheers and trolling when our Avatars win or lose a primary or caucus; someone who we've falsely "friended," as if we'll be invited over to their homes for tea for an online $10 donation and a "promise."
In "Branches," I made my point quite clear: it's about the Supreme Court any candidate, then president will nominate and that it could affect us generations after her/his tenure. It's about the midterms that elects the legislatures that will forward your president's agenda, or in our most recent example, callously block it.
I am sick of the soundbites, the name-calling; one accusing another of lying (when that seems from the most observable evidence part of their training and job description); the well-rehearsed litany of talking points. It is well past time our candidates showed us their own science chops, and stop sending in their answers vetted by STEM Post Docs on staff. The willful ignorance encouraged by pseudoscience, pseudo-religion; science denial to ensure the reelection of a Congress we obviously DON'T like will not only weaken us as a republic, it may be our Chicxulub meteor as a species, and like the dinosaurs we still have no star ships to escape our own sizable hubris.
Lastly, to Mr. Nick Cannon and the rights your ancestors died for: your net worth has increased after your split with Maria Carey, far beyond mine in STEM as I'm not "Wilding Out" or hosting the revamped "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" (which includes you). You're not "too broke to vote," methinks you're just a narcissist that loves attention, and like Susan Sarandon - both of you at a net worth of $50 million - too rich to care who's president! The REST of us are voting, and demanding more from our representatives... as citizens of a republic; as humans while we still can. You nor "Louise" will be able to hide your wealth offshore on a crumbling, dysfunctional planet.
Octavia E. Butler:
Parable of the Sower
Parable of the Talents
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