Climate Change Images And Outcomes

 

Hurricane Irma:

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Above is Island Barbuda with 95% or more of everything damaged, including homes, businesses, infrastructure and more. Electricity is expected to be gone for six months, I read. … More deaths are expected as there is no food and no fresh water. So the destruction is gargantuan in scale.

Below is Anguilla Island with Irma.

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Below are three pictures of Saint-Martin in the same storm.

 

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Below is Hurricane Harvey:

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PHOTO: Aerial footage shows damage to Salt Grass Landing Apartments in Rockport, Tx.

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Aerial view of Hurricane Harvey damage in Port Aransas

How about Katrina?

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What about Hurricane Sandy?

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If anyone thinks that it is only the water and the storm force with climate change factors, I have news …

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The largest wildfire in Los Angeles County history had consumed 7,000 acres by Sunday evening, prompting California Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency earlier that day.

I’ll be frank and as clear as I can be. This sort of news leaves me emotionally raw.

The reason is that I’ve been through this sort of event. I had to clean up my mother’s destroyed home in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

My father, who built it, was told by the U.S. National Weather Service representative that he should build to 170 mph gales. He built to 200 mph and the perfectly calibrated meteorological equipment placed on the atoll where my mother’s home was located clocked in at 220 mph.

The force was so strong that it tore dresser drawers out of her dresser and flung them a mile away with her clothes up in palm trees.

The copper plumbing was torn out of the wall behind the toilet and dangled six inches in the air at the side of a toilet. The sink had been torn from the wall and was hung out in the room.

My neighbor’s refrigerator — a big heavy item — tore through her one foot thick concrete wall. It left a new window space there in the size and shape of the refrigerator.

Terry, one of my Virgin islands friends, huddled in her basement with her children. Here’s what she and they experienced:

The floorboards above the basement rose up and slapped down in place. They sounded like some sort of loud wood percussion instrument. The joints of her home foundation would pull apart and then slam back together with almost shattering force with a big banging smack upon rejoining.

The worst sound, though, was the giant freight train sound. It was almost ear shattering and everyone covered their ears with their hands as the ground, air, house and landscape all shook from this freight train impact from the storm.

The clean-up is horrendous from this sort of mess. I know it from day after day of work,

The heartbreak is even worse. You cry and you clean and you cry and you clean.

So I have a few simple requests. They’re not complex.

First, limit your fossil fuel consumption. If you don’t need the extra heat in winter or air conditioning in the summer, suffer a little discomfort.

Do you really need to drive, take a train or fly there? Limit your travel to limit fossil fuel consumption.

We are all energy eaters and the longer that we live — the more that we need and use. … As it is, we have 7.5+ humans all like vampires for energy, especially the fossil fuel based ones. So how about limiting procreation and finding alternative ways to intimately satisfy partners and be satisfied?

Really, we are heading into a world with 11 billion to 15.8 billion people by century’s end. What happens afterwords? (Imagine about where the limit is in human numbers and the means by which those curtailed numbers are created.)

It is too late for my mother’s home that my father built. It is too late for trying to rebuild after both Hurricane Hugo and Hurricane Marilyn did descimation as both of my parents are now dead and, if not, the home would have been hit again by Hurricane Irma, with its top speed clocked at 189 miles per hour.

However, it is not too late to do your part to try your best effort to curtail or stop more Irma’s, Harvey’s, gargantuan tornadoes, floods and wildfires. I can’t stop this mess alone. So I’m counting on others.

Sitting back and expecting someone else to handle problems is not an option. It never was. (Trust my opinion since I have done the tremendous clean-up and had to tell my devastated elderly mother that her home was gone forever.) Instead we need to collectively fight current trends in weather and climate miseries.

Sally Dugman is a writer in MA, USA.

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