...this was right outside the back door. It's a struggle to keep the garden alive, but during the past few years there's been a process of elimination, and any plants that can't tolerate pretty extreme temperatures have gradually died off, leaving just the hardy ones. So we do have a garden...
Those were captured just an hour ago -- in the "cool" (hahahaha) of the morning, before the sun burns off the overcast. The sky isn't clear, so we're simmering under clouds that look more or less tropical. A snapshot from the backyard makes it look like it ought to be quite cool (wrong!) or that there's a change in the weather happening (ditto) --
Nope. The truth of what's going on, weather-wise, in this country is actually this:
Uh huh. By 8:30am, you want to be done with whatever you were doing outside, get back in and get the a/c running. Just don't even think about the power bill. Even Zolie was ready to come in by half after eight --
-- which is saying a lot, because this cat seems to be solar powered. She'll usually lie on the pavers, soaking up the sun, in a heavy fur coat, until she's physically lassoed and brought in. Hunh.
Anyway ... we survive. I couldn't help noticing the comments on the SMH site. There must be "professional disinformation spreaders" out there -- probably in the pay of the power companies, or maybe that Clive Palmer idiot, who wants to mine coal and run the coal-burning power stations, which caused the problem in the first place.
If you want a liberal dose of stupid, daft enough to make you glaze right over, try this: "Earth's temperatures are primarily regulated by the amount of sulfur dioxide aerosol emissions in the atmosphere. If a high pressure condition stalls over an area, these emissions quickly settle out of the atmosphere , the air becomes cleaner, and temperatures soar. You Australians have been shutting down your fossil fueled power plants, so you are not replacing the needed cooling SO2 aerosol emissions. A quick fix would be to start up some of your plants, with any SO2 scrubbers turned off. Or pray for a large volcanic eruption to spew some SO2 aerosols into the stratosphere." Uh huh. He actually said that. Some lunatic calling himself Burl Henry, who probably gets paid for chiming in, in the comments on climate feature articles and hosing this idiocy around in the hopes of conning the daft or the unwary. Sigh.
We survive. What can you say? It's too hot to write or even mess about with much art, but my brain keeps ticking over:
There was a young dude from Dee Why,
Whose favorite was spicy-hot Thai.
Some fell off his fork
And before he could squawk
It'd burned a large hole through his thigh.
And
A biologist type from Madrid
Had a blazing affair with a squid.
The result of his sins
Was octuplets, not twins...
-- And a three-year research grant, full government funding --
To find out how he did what he did.
Okay, call it heatstroke. But, you gotta laugh. I'm outta here: cool tea coming up.
Boy do I understand the frustration. Our government official statement is deny, deny, deny. While hurricanes get bigger, hotter heat waves, colder cold snaps. Record heat and record rain. While I can rage against it there is nothing I can do except the tiny things I've done all my life. I'm an old woman with only a tiny voice who will be long dead when the next generation will be paying the price for what we did to our home.
ReplyDeleteYep. That says it all. In this country we have maniac politicians still trying to raise public support for coal mines to run the filthy old power stations. Why? Because coal puts $$$ in the pockets of the mega-rich who pull these politicians' strings! If there's a way to change the system, I've never spotted it yet. *sigh*
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