At the risk of making fun of the world’s most serious crisis, pardon me for getting a chuckle out of a recent story in the Washington Post, which ran with the headline that July 2019 was the hottest month “humans have ever recorded.”
Just how hot was it?
Well, according to the story, “a local television station in the Netherlands aired nonstop images of wintry landscapes to help viewers momentarily forget the heat wave outside. Officials in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe painted stretches of rail tracks white, hoping to keep them from buckling in the extreme heat. Wildfires raged across millions of acres in the Arctic. A massive ice melt in Greenland sent 197 billion tons of water pouring into the Atlantic Ocean, raising sea levels. And temperature records evaporated, one after another: 101.7 degrees Fahrenheit in Cambridge, England, and 108.7 in Paris. The same in Lingen, Germany.”
That’s hot.
But the kicker was this: In the port of Antwerp, Belgium, two alleged drug dealers called police for help after they got stuck inside a sweltering shipping container filled with cocaine.
That’s desperation, and it’s an apt sentiment for the world today on the climate front.
Angelo Lynn