July Drought, Loss of All German Alpine Glaciers in "15 Years," Inflation Reduction Act, and Pakistan Government Requests Help

Donated to Fort Vancouver Regional Library Foundation.

My July clay art is about drought in a previous year, good for the next two ice ages if anyone is here to see it.  Some of my other pieces are at this link.

My favorite climate video I recently watched was How Earth’s Geography Will Change With Climate Change [in a 4 C World] with about two million views in the past two years. I recall a poem I read years ago where a man responded to environmental crisis by singing on a mountain. It seems there is more than one way to sing.

In addition to flood, fire, drought news this week, WION Climate Tracker made an August 23, 2022 video noting Germany's five alpine glaciers will disappear in the next 15 years according to Glaciologist Christoph Mayer of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He also noted, "The majority of the glaciers in the Alps will disappear in the next 55 years." As many reported, Germany's Rhine River had serious drought/transportation issues this summer.

People I met in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington expressed hope for President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act's response to our Climate Emergency. I had to say, as I said after the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, "Not even close given rate of change." I'm grateful to Masada Disenhouse, Executive Director and Cofounder of SanDiego350, for writing July 28, 2022 "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Quick Takes on the Surprise Federal Climate Deal ." 

The Government of Pakistan requested $300 million in immediate assistance for flood survivors. August 25, 2022, WION Gravitas reported "900 killed, 1300 injured: [as] Floods devastate Pakistan." The YouTube noted, "the EU has agreed to provide $348,000. China [also suffering severe drought and floods] plans to send some 25,000 tents and $300,000 in emergency cash. Pakistan needs all the help it can get at the moment." Today the UK government noted it will provide "up to £1.5 million" [$1,759,950.]. Pakistan OBSERVER reported August 26, 2022, on a tweet from U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, "[ . . . . ] In addition to $100,000 in immediate relief, the U.S. announced $1 million to build resilience against natural disasters, and we continue to work together to mitigate future impacts of the climate crisis."

Poetry as Prophecy

The recent idea to divert Mississippi River water (over objections of people who live there) to the Colorado River System reminds me of the bizarre no-music ballet scene in the film Amadeus. It seems more vital to greatly reduce GHGs (greenhouse gas emissions) instead, even if fossil fuel companies resist. I recall a story about a German noble who set all the clocks in his city-state to his own eccentric time – ignoring everyone else on Earth. Regarding climate reality and unreality, this is what Big Oil has been doing for too long.

Below, my 2014 poem “Global Warming Serpent,” from the book Industrial Oz, is in Satan's voice. I’m not saying Big Oil is Satan. I’m saying Big Oil has been used by energies that, for insanely selfish reasons, have so far chosen to harm instead of help.

I'm grateful my last blog post (on water issues) had over a thousand views.

I’m grateful to editors Adeline Johns-Putra of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China, and Kelly Sultzbach of University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, for a positive review of this blog in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate (March 23, 2022): “Starbuck also writes about his dreams (one describes koalas with human voices asking for a seat at the United Nations!) [ . . . ]" They noted, “If idiosyncratic, the blog’s homespun nature offers, to its audience, an effective, comprehensive, and multifaceted picture of the personal impact of diminished fish stocks in American rivers.”

I’m grateful to Pamela S. Ellis for asking me to provide a short review of Climate Connection: American Student Voices, featuring the “twenty-three top climate student essay finalists in the 2022 National Climate Essay Student Competition” along with “inaugural works of the 2019, 2020, and 2021 National Climate Student Essayists included [to] demonstrate a climate urgency for a response trajectory synchronizing individual concerns, present-day humanity, and biodiversity survival realities.”

"Global Warming Serpent" fits recent news about many rivers: WION Climate Tracker | Reports: 66 rivers [dry] up in China [ . . . ], "Heatwave: 13 rivers in England at lowest level ever recorded [ . . . ]," and "The world's rivers are drying up from extreme weather. See how 6 look from space" [Colorado River, Yangtze River, Rhine River, River Po, Loire River, and Danube River].

Global Warming Serpent

 “Study: California Drought Most Severe Dry Spell in at least 1,200Years”-  Alex Emslie in KQED Science, 12/4/14

Soon, there will be no
rain on a dry riverbed
or wild jasmine in summer.

Together we shall desecrate land
as sex-starved soldiers
desecrate virgins.

In my name
we will kill circles, songs, light,
feet, voices, trees, rivers,

children, parents, lovers
and, most of all,
capacity to resist.

We will corrupt the Nile,
Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi,
Ob, Yenisei, Yellow River,

Congo, Amur, Parana,
Lena, Mackenzie, Niger,
Mekong, Volga, Murray-Darling,

and Rio-Grande.
Glaciers will melt.
Groundwater will be fracked

until pure water costs more than gas.
There will be no end
until permanent damage is done

to the blue gem you call home.
Do you doubt me?
Does sky have nerve endings?

Can your rock breathe?

The fight for water | DW Documentary Aug 10, 2022

Used with permission of DW.

It seems no one told these water managers from California to Germany to Afghanistan about the importance of distraction, sugarcoating, and when politically needed, bold-faced lies. 

In a more serious tone, the desperation reminds me of when William Shatner, Star Trek's original Captain James Kirk, in 2015 wanted a water pipeline from Seattle to Lake Mead since California had a widely-reported year of above-ground-water left. March 20 of that year, LA Times reporter Tony Barboza, citing NASA Jet Propulsion senior water scientist and UC Irvine professor Jay Famiglietti (also in the above video), noted, "decades worth of groundwater remain [unless rate of use increases]." July 28, 2022, Famiglietti, now a hydrologist who directs the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, was quoted in a phys.org article by Elizabeth Weise, "The speed at which the severity of the drought increases, the pace of groundwater depletion, the pace at which ice is melting, these are all things that are changing much faster than we can keep up with." In the same article, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, "We need to have greater imaginations when thinking about the hazards. We need to be thinking about climate change everywhere all the time in the context of all the infrastructure we have, both existing and especially new." 

This is like a comment by British climate scientist and University of Manchester professor Kevin Anderson in a recent video, "Even if it's more expensive, let's put in the infrastructure that can both deal with 1.5 [C over 1850 preindustrial level] but also deal with, say what looks like, 3 degrees centigrade of warming in our local environment [over 1850 preindustrial level]." This idea fits UK meteorologist John Hammond's comments linked in my previous post regarding what became a UK record-breaking heatwave of 104.4 degrees Fahrenheit (40.2 degrees Celsius) at London’s Heathrow Airport, "[ . . . ] potentially railway lines becoming buckled, and lots of infrastructure disruption. Am I going to get to work? Should I be getting to work?"

The same idea of preparing for 3 degrees centigrade of warming could be useful for businesses, nonprofits, hospitals, colleges and universities, homeowners, and concerned citizens, given fast rate of icemelt in the Arctic and Antarctic which may soon leave darker surfaces, and therefore accelerated warming, with or without much feared, but controversial, potential huge methane releases. 

Imagine, by 2053

 

I'm grateful Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington accepted my Clay Salmon Poem in their art collection.  I recently donated other pieces to Washington State University, Vancouver Library, and Columbia Basin Fish & Wildlife Library, a program of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. 

Imagine, by 2053

if IPCC reports

at current rates

are true,

 

and if our high

carbon emissions

continue,

 

no police,

banks,

Internet,

 

electricity,

gas stations,

shopping centers,

 

schools,

hospitals,

maintained roads,

 

water faucets,

toilets,

iPhones,

 

ammunition,

propane,

kerosene.

 

Trains, planes, cars

will be converted

to shelters.

 

911 emergency call,

Jamie Dimon,

Bill Gates,

 

President of

United States

of America

 

less relevant

than diseased

mosquitoes

 

or food

and water.

People huddle,

 

tell stories

to their children

of Santa Claus,

 

Easter Bunny,

snowy mountains,

vast rivers,

 

aisles of low-cost

fruits

and vegetables,

 

seafood, meats,

breads, honey,

items from everywhere,

 

local farmers’ markets

selling a

Nature buffet.

 

Worshipped Dragon

that nearly killed

everyone on Earth.

My favorite climate article I recently read is Andrew Y. Glikson's April 11, 2022 "Global Warming and the Fermi Paradox" published in LA Progressive. I must add the troubling "tense interaction between a British meteorologist and anchor over the deadly UK heat wave" as reported by cnn.com, which was noted like a real-life scene of the film Don't Look Up. The full exchange is even more problematic.

Severe fires and droughts have been reported in many areas, and July 2022 flooding in Kentucky as well as recent floods in China, Japan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, South Korea, The Philippines, Australia, South Africa, Houston, Detroit, St. Louis, Yellowstone National Park, and Death Valley. 

August 1, 2022, Damian Carrington, Environment Editor at The Guardian, reported in his article, "Climate endgame: risk of human extinction ‘dangerously underexplored'," "The current trend of greenhouse gas emissions would cause a rise of 2.1-3.9C by 2100. But if existing pledges of action are fully implemented, the range would be 1.9-3C. Achieving all long-term targets set to date would mean 1.7-2.6C of warming." He quoted scientists recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences who he said claimed "Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories.” Carrington added, "Temperatures more than 2C above pre-industrial levels had not been sustained on Earth for more than 2.6m years, they said, far before the rise of human civilisation, which had risen in a 'narrow climatic envelope' over the past 10,000 years." November 13, 2021 in my post "COP26 Report from Tim Crosland, Extinction Rebellion spokesperson and Director of Plan B.Earth," Crosland responded to Sky News reporter Adam Boulton, "What about taking everyone along from the Marshall Islands, and from Tuvalu, countries that are going to disappear if that 1.5 limit is exceeded? People in Bangladesh. Whole regions of the world are going to be uninhabitable. How are those people feeling right now when they see it ['emissions rising by 13.7 % by 2030' in the deal] going in the opposite direction [of scientific report to limit warming to 1.5 C by 'reducing carbon emissions 45% by 2030'] ? And how would you be feeling?"