I’m not the one who should be writing about weather. Daily, I read about unprecedented heat in Arizona and millennial flooding in Vermont. Let the Arizona and Vermont bloggers write the weather posts, I thought. It’s pleasant in Gettysburg—high eighties, low nineties. Yes, that’s a little hot, but it’s July, it’s supposed to be hot. No worries, we have air conditioning in our house and cars, ceiling fans on our back porch, and since I pulled a calf muscle two weeks ago running, all my outdoor exercise is on my bike with its constant breeze. I like weather like this.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, people are getting carted into the ER with third-degree burns from the pavement. I never knew this was a thing until a month ago. My high school friend Mary called to let me know her brother died. He got heat exhaustion while mountain biking in the California desert. Since he couldn’t get himself back to his car, he baked in the sun. They rescued him with third degree sunburn and cooked organs. He spent his last two weeks fading away in the ICU.

Early in 2017, I wrote a post called The Cost of Doing Nothing about climate change. I posted a graph of the Land-Ocean Temperature Index. It showed a sharp spike of three years of runaway global heating ending in 2016—the hottest year in modern history. In my post, I wrote about the theoretical ‘tipping point.’ The planet gets so hot that the trapped carbon and methane in the arctic tundra and under the ocean floor releases into the atmosphere. The added greenhouse gasses further heat the world. More gasses are released, more heating. Suddenly, the Hollywood strikes no longer matter. Looking at the graph, I posed the question, “How do we know it (the tipping point) hasn’t already started?”

I assure you that it has. Being a typical self-centered American, I have a tendency to focus on what’s going on at home. So my apologies to those of you living in other countries experiencing the exact same thing. Your climate crisis matters too. The American west and south are dealing with unrelenting heat waves. We’ve already talked about the flooding in the northeast. Canada is on fire. The Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico surrounding Florida resemble a hot tub. Like 2016, 2023 is an El Niño year. El Niño is a cyclical phenomenon that causes dramatically higher temperatures in many parts of the world. In terms of heat, 2023 is expected to blow 2016 out of the water.

Today I got in a fight with one of my favorite bloggers. We started talking about climate change, and we argued about the tactics the group Just Stop Oil takes to raise climate awareness. Maybe you read about them this week. One of their members ran onto Centre Court at Wimbledon during a match and threw confetti up in the air.

I don’t really care about Wimbledon. I actually think this disruption was a harmless but high-profile way to bring awareness to climate change, but I draw a big fat line in the sand at one of their previous stunts. Two activists threw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting in London’s National Gallery last fall. The painting wasn’t harmed, it is covered with glass, but that glass is there to protect it from touchy tourists and UV light, not tomato soup. As much as I hate what we’ve done to the world, I can’t stand the thought of that magnificent painting being vandalized.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the podcast Binchtopia. In an episode I listened to recently, the Binchies (what they call themselves) talked about the Just Stop Oil attack on Sunflowers. I paraphrase:

“People are upset about Just Stop Oil throwing tomato soup on a painting.”
“Yeah, like a painting is more important than the earth.”
“People need to get over themselves.”

This flawed thinking pisses me off. Of course the earth is more important than the painting. You can say the earth is more important than pretty much anything, even human life, but we don’t kill people to raise awareness on climate change. Not yet anyway.

Here’s my dirty little secret. I don’t care about stopping oil. I’ve given up on reducing greenhouse gasses. It isn’t going to happen. People/nations are too selfish. There isn’t a global will to spend money today to solve a problem in the future. If we stop emitting carbon now, it will take decades before we see gains. Our climate will get worse whether we stop or not. More important than reducing carbon output is figuring out how to pull the existing carbon out of the atmosphere. That’s where we should be spending our money and political capital.

As we plod through summer in the northern hemisphere, we’ll continue to be shocked by the coming disasters—hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, record breaking temperatures. Then this year’s El Niño will pass, and the weather will plateau for a few years. It won’t get better, but it probably won’t get worse. Our new records will sit unbroken, and we’ll let out a sigh of relief. But in six or seven years, when El Niño returns, our temperature charts will spike once more. Our new normal, the one that’s starting this very summer will again be eclipsed.