<img src=“https://nice-marmot.net/Archives/2024/Images/Image 1.JPG” alt=““Show your stripes” graphic indicating the rising temperature annually due to antrhopogenic climate change”>

We made it to DC safely. A couple of interesting/scary moments. People are insane. Though for the most part, traffic was rather light and we encountered only a small amount of construction. Right at twelve hours door to door.

Apple Maps let me down on finding a rest area in North Carolina just over the border from South Carolina. There were two entries indicated on the map when I searched for rest stops, one indicated being closed, the other was a bit north on the map and indicated it was on I-95 North. Well, suffice to say, there is only one and it is closed.

Mitzi had been driving for a while and it's our custom to pull over at a rest area, stretch our legs and eat lunch before switching drivers. I relied on Apple Maps and was disappointed. We ended up eating standing up next to the car in the shade of a tree by the side of a road off one of the other exits.

It's hot here. Unsurprising.

Supposedly, one of the best things we can do about climate change is "talk about it." I do that a fair amount here, perhaps too much.

I get frustrated by "attribution" reports. That climate change has made a certain weather event X-percent "more likely."

It's not "more likely," because there is no "likely" climate that exists anymore, and hasn't for some time. But the cumulative effects are now being felt with regularity.

The climate system that produces the weather we experience today is unprecedented in earth's history. Not just human history, the history of the planet.

All of the weather we are experiencing is due to this new reality. It's not "more likely," it just is. It's not going to revert to some "normal" state.

Attribution analyses were kind of a response to denialism, but I think reality is a sufficient response to denialism and these attribution analyses seem misleading to me with these weasel words, "more likely." Likely compared to what? A climate that doesn't exist anymore?

The reality is that there is more energy in the climate system. Energy is the capacity to do work. Weather events will do "more work," be "more extreme" (Although even that's misleading because they're by no means "extreme" in the context of our present climate system.)

We have a civilization with a physical and economic infrastructure built for a climate that no longer exists and that we cannot return to. We can stop making it worse, and we must. But the sooner we wake up and accept the new reality and what brought it about, the sooner we can begin making the kinds of changes that will reduce suffering.

Anyway...

The beat goes on.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:01 Friday, 21 June 2024