Since I refuse to go back to bed, Prince has decided that sleeping on top of the human bed isn't going to be as nice as he had thought, and he has retreated to his little kitty bed in the cave underneath the human bed.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about the weird weather. Those who still think that #ClimateChange isn't going to be a big problem in Central Europe have no idea what's coming. A day ago we thought we might get temperatures as low as -20°C very soon, today it looks more like we're going to have +20°C instead.
This is the current state of the global climate regime, and it's not going to get much better for hundreds of years, provided we do everything we can to help the biosphere heal itself and sequester carbon while doing so; otherwise it'll be thousands or even tens of thousands of years before it gets any better. Just think about it.
We're lucky if we get only the +20°C _or_ the -20°C this time. Getting hit first with one and then with the other is something we will have to deal with in the future, as it will eventually happen in late winters and early springs in the future. And it will be fucking deadly to many organisms out there, including our food. If you think food is too expensive now, just wait and see. Heatwaves with extremely high temperatures over a couple of weeks are also good at killing crops. Or long periods of rain that drown anything. It's not just sudden extreme weather that's a problem, it's also extremely long periods of exactly the same bloody weather.
If we don't want to starve, we need to remember that we're omnivores. Very few animals can eat such a wide range of foods as we can, yet we eat only a tiny, ever shrinking window of organisms. We grow fewer and fewer species of plants for food, and we grow fewer and fewer cultivars of each species. We replace robust old breeds of pigs or chickens with new ones that are suffering from hereditary diseases which make them grow faster (as long as they get their antibiotics so they don't die from a random germ that's making the rounds). And most of us in the West don't even think about eatings worms or grubs or snails.
Do you know why traditional Chinese cuisine is so full of recipes that use ingredients which seem weird and disgusting to Westerners? It's because there were so many famines in Chinese history that they never forgot that humans are omnivores. When the weird and disgusting stuff is all you have left, you can at least use every trick in your sleeve to make it as tasty as possible. And many ingredients only seem disgusting if you have never tasted them. Anyway, we really need to find out how not to starve when #ClimateChaos and #WeatherWhiplash kill our crops. We need to work on it before it happens. We haven't got much time left, we don't know how much.

And now we need to #FightFascism while trying to survive #GlobalWeirding at the same time, because one global catastrophe isn't enough, so we get at least half a dozen catastrophes at once, the most deadly of which is the #SixthExtinction , of course. And fascism, one of those catastrophes, will blame the foreigners, socialists, Muslims, Jews, the brown-skinned Untermenschen, the liberals, the queers, and the catastrophe will "solve" the other catastrophes by killing "useless eaters" in death camps, we've seen it before. Maybe they'll sell them as Soylent Green afterwards.

We're headed in this completely atrocious direction, and we got here because we always wanted only the moderate futures, the ones that weren't radically different from the present. Moderate futures are completely sold out though, all possible futures are radical ones.
And I really wish I was a cat and didn't have to think about all this shit.

#πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis

It’s all global warming,
it’s weird to have attribution hesitation when we are so deep in the crisis.

But yes, it’s ’global weirding’ also works because it’s become so obvious, that we can no longer ignore it. The ‘change’ also has no consistency. It’s a reflection of how dynamic the ecosystem of Earth is when it’s handling so much more energy than the pre-crisis era.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/what-is-global-weirding-how-normal-is-becoming-more-extreme/rl8k19za5
#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #GlobalWarming #GlobalWeirding

#GlobalWeirding

Rare #snowstorm hits US south forcing mass flight cancellations

"A rare winter storm is bringing snow and freezing rain to parts of the US deep south, closing highways and airports in Texas and prompting a first-ever #blizzard warning in southwest #Louisiana.

The NWS cautioned that the rare storm could continue to cause "widespread" disruptions in both air and land travel for several days even after the snowfall stops."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c391jmgmev4o

'Death by 1,000 paper cuts': How 2024 became such a wild year for #Tornadoes

The U.S. recorded the most tornadoes in at least a decade this year. Researchers are trying to figure out why.

Dec. 28, 2024, 5:30 PM EST
By Denise Chow and Kathryn Prociv

"In a year full of extreme weather, experts say 2024’s spate of tornado outbreaks, in particular, set it apart.

From January through November (the latest month for which official counts are available), the U.S. recorded 1,762 tornadoes — the highest number in a decade, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"The twisters tended to be strong and destructive, the records show, especially the unusually powerful tornadoes that spawned from Hurricane Milton in October.

"'It was kind of like death by 1,000 paper cuts,' said Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University. 'We didn’t have an unprecedented number of violent tornadoes, and there wasn’t a month with absolutely stellar activity — outbreak after outbreak after outbreak — but when you start aggregating them all together, what you get is a pretty significant year for severe weather.'

"Tornado outbreaks were among the nation’s costliest weather and climate disasters this year. As of Nov. 1, NOAA had tallied a total of 24 weather disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damage. Of those events, six were tornado outbreaks, including a cluster of storms over three days in July that produced more than 79 tornadoes across Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and New York. An outbreak that hit Iowa in May also made the list — it spawned a devastating tornado that killed five people and cut a 44-mile path across the southeastern part of the state.

"The flurry of tornado activity adds to an already sizable and growing set of concerns about the increasing frequency and severity of #ExtremeWeather. But unlike events like heat waves or wildfires, which have clear links to rising temperatures, researchers are still working to understand why this was such an exceptional tornado year, including possible connections to climate change."

Read more:
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/2024-tornado-outbreaks-activity-high-rcna185446?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

#2024Weather #ExtremeWx #USWeather #USWx #ClimateCatastrophe #GlobalWeirding #ClimateChange

A neighbor in his mid-70s came over with seed potatoes for me and passed on an interesting/scary statistic: if we make it through May without a frost — and that looks likely — it will be only the second time that has happened since he moved here in the early 1970s.

#ClimateChange #GlobalWeirding #Vermont #ClimateChangeIsNow

Here comes the mountain banana in Seattle in March and this is not good.

#GlobalWeirding

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge #heat #anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00816-z

Anomalies are complicated and confusing and *confounding* these days. A lot is going off, effects are bouncing off each other.

#climate
#globalWeirding