It’s hot outside - warm weather: scary, and bad for your health

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Posted on July 18, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Back from a few days at a conference in St. Paul, the biannual Sisters of the Earth gathering — a very prophetic group of people deeply involved in earth spirituality projects, organic farming and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), earth and cosmology education efforts, and more.  You can visit them at:  http://www.sistersofearth.org.

While there, I managed to experience some of the worst of this summer’s mega-heat wave (yesterday every state in the 48 contiguous states had temps over 90 degrees).  It was 102 in St. Paul on the last day of the conference.  Eastern Minnesota, as well as western Wisconsin, which I drove across to get there, are burning up, brown and crispy from drought and heat.

None of this proves global warming, of course.

While I was away from my blog, and you probably know this, the NOAA announced that the first 6 months of this year were the warmest ever recorded.  Here is the NOAA press release.  The scale of the record has really impressed climatologists and meteorologists — 3.4 degrees above the 20th century average.  Stunning.

I have posted before about how this heat will affect our health.  Researching this record year, I found this article from MSNBC dated Feb. 2005.  It will give you a picture of our health future.

Here in Milwaukee, where I am this week, the heat was broken last night — 97 degrees, dew point of 75.  We are in the low 80s today, lower humidity, cooler by the lake.  But what I noticed this morning (and this is my home town and state and I know it like my soul) is that the cold front did not clean the air.  It is hazy gray, plenty of ozone.  Where are the blue skies that used to be ushered in with these summer cold fronts?  Well, this article explains.

Just to round out today’s picture, it ain’t only the US that’s sweating.  England is also roasting, and you can read about it here.

Well, as I have been saying, life as we have known it is going to change, has already changed.  Ecological hope?  Well, if nothing else, I find it incredibly easy to talk to folks about global warming and climate change now, about peak oil, about the already-altered earth.  Now, if we can just rouse people to action — in their personal, social, economic, and political lives — and soon, very, very soon.

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