The Ice that Held the Rock Together

We thought we’d watch the movie Clue. It’s cinematic comfort food. Earlier in the day, my oldest texted me, RIP Wadsworth. I’ve made them watch it perhaps a thousand times, since well before they got most of the jokes.

I’m not sure they get the jokes still, but enough that they love Tim Curry.

I’d woken up that day to news of a massive flood along the borders of China, Nepal, and Tibet. By the time we sat down to watch Clue, videos of the chaos and destruction were filling up social media, and X in particular. The videos looked unreal, like a practical effect in a movie created with miniatures. A mountainscape built on a table in a studio with a fake-looking miniature structure being overtaken by a ridiculous amount of water.

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Remember Superman? The first one with Christopher Reeve? Remember when the Hoover Dam failed? The videos conveyed magnificent fiction, a dream-like depiction of a world that didn’t exist.

But it did exist. It was right there and you could watch it and it was horrifying.

Tim Curry lit up our TV screen, and my girls were sadly enraptured by his timing, the gags, the nostalgia of an old movie set in an even older time. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened above and through Nepal and Tibet.

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Trump and El Niño

Sam Osterhout · Aug 24

Our world is about to get weird, and nobody is ready. Not politicians. Not a hungry, thirsty third world. Certainly not the American political system. The coming 18 months will be a stress test for civilization as we know it.

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The Stress Test

Last week I wrote about the super El Niño taking shape in the Pacific. We’re in for it. We’re breaking temperature records seemingly every year. Heat-related deaths are up 84% since 1990. And as hot as this year was, thanks to the monster developing in the Pacific, 2027 will likely shatter records.

It’s important to say that next year’s temperatures at the surface and in the water will likely be a spike. When this El Niño ends, temps will probably drop again. But they won’t drop to pre-industrial levels. They won’t drop all that much, relatively speaking. Not nearly enough, at least.

So this El Niño will be an exception built on the foundation of the rule. It’s a period when weather patterns (those passing measures of day-to-day life on our planet) get all wonky, but it comes during a wonky period for our climate (the measure of weather patterns over time).

The next 10 to 18 months will be a stress test not only for Earth’s systems, but for human systems. How we respond will say a lot about the lives of my girls, and the lives of all humans going forward. ...