Once in a generation comes a leader like no other

When it comes to the global threat to the earth’s ecosystems and its inhabitants, including humans, today’s Climate Crisis can no longer be denied or ignored.  No one makes the case better for global and immediate action than Greta Thunberg.

Greta Thunberg (16 years old) sailed to New York in her father’s emissions-free sail boat to give her Climate speech before the UN, September 2019. She was widely quoted and highly edited in the media, and her short message to the entire UN assembly was, in a word, powerful.

But it was Greta’s previous presentation at R20 World Summit earlier the same year that told of a more complex and complete truth-telling of today’s Climate Crisis.   In clear-eyed and nonsense way, Greta left global leaders standing on their feet applauding.  As time runs out — her message to world leaders is clear enough, pick your Climate action priorities, but act now!

Here’s what vox.com says about climate change and hurricanes.

Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what’s really driving the events in the headlines.

The Arctic is in the throes of what sea-ice scientist Peter Wadhams called a “death spiral.” As the region’s once abundant ice melts, giving way to a less reflective surface, the Arctic heats up faster — now at a rate that is double the rest of the planet.

Polar meltdown and the polar jet stream connection — a river of wind that travels around the Northern hemisphere.

The air in the north wants to flow to the south, where the layer of air is hotter and thicker (hot air expands). The now-warmer Arctic makes it so there’s less of a pressure difference, so what once was a mountain in the sky becomes a gentle hill.  Like a river moving down a soft incline, the jet stream moves more slowly and more erratically.

In the United States, these changes in the jet stream are linked to a persistent “ridge” — like a hump in the sky. This causes weather patterns to linger, “perpetuating drought, heatwaves, and extensive wildfires across much of western North America,” according to the report.

This phenomenon, according to the NOAA report, brought a “parade of destructive nor’easters along the eastern seaboard” in the winters of 2013-14 and 2017-18. Most notably, it led to what has been dubbed the “bomb cyclone,” an intense blizzard along the East Coast in January 2018.

The same phenomenon is also responsible for so-called “Atmospheric Blocking” which produces all kind of severe weather, including the slower, more intense hurricanes we’ve seen of late. Harvey and Florence, which hovered over the mainland SE coast for days and dumped trillions of gallons of water, were dangerously stuck in place thanks to a “block.”

The rate of climate change clearly has gone beyond linear, as indicated by the presence of myriad self-reinforcing feedback loops, and now threatens our species with extinction in the near term. Anthropologist Louise Leakey ponders our near-term demise in her 5 July 2013 assessment at Huffington Post. In the face of near-term human extinction, most Americans view the threat as distant and irrelevant, as illustrated by a 22 April 2013 article in the Washington Post based on poll results that echo the long-held sentiment that elected officials should be focused on the industrial economy, not faraway minor nuisances such as climate change.