global weirding comes to the US big-time.

As someone who thought I’d be a successful playwright/screenwriter by now, I read a lot of obscure history. At one point I was working on a musical play about the US Cavalry men that finally brought down the Apache nation (especially Geronimo). This was back in the 1980’s, but I got enough hints that maybe this wasn’t a White Man’s story to share on Broadway. Anyway, in my research I fell in love with a quote from US Cavalry General George Crook, who ran the Indian Wars. Crook was not fond of Texas. When assigned there by the Army, he said if he owned both Hell and Texas, He’d live in Hell and rent Texas out. I suspect that were it not for the inventive genius of Willis Carrier, Texas would still be pretty empty. It also helped that Texans were sitting on a lot of fossil fuels. So they weren’t as concerned about fueling all that AC as the folks in other parts of the country were. Texans couldn’t imagine Texas without ‘lectric power.

And some of the rest of us remember Texan scorn during the energy shortages of the 1970. ‘Cut off the gas and let a Yankee freeze to death in the Dark’! https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/let_the_bastards_freeze_in_the_dark_drive_80_mph_and_freeze_a_yankee . It seems ironic that it’s Texan GOP stupidity that let them watch their electrical power system fall apart and leave them to first Freeze and then boil in horrible summer temperatures. Gonna be your own Country now? Good luck with that. This is a meme making its way through the blogosphere:

And sadly, this is happening to the whole SouthWest. a chart from the National Weather Service in one locale gives a sense of what’s happening across the country.

The chart is not unique to this one spot of the US. People who know better than to send me FB dispatches about weather (‘Don’t encourage him–He believes we’re facing Doom FFS’) are doing so.

A blogger named Scott Duncan put together this pic. In case you don’t know, Texas and Cali weren’t the only places sweating through a massive heat wave on June 15:

That 107 F temp in Salt Lake City was a record. So was the 124F in Death Valley. I guess that there’s nowhere left in the American Southwest that would be amenable to the likes of General Crook. It’s ALL hotter than Hell. And we aren’t even in July yet.

By the way, Dr. Guy McPherson presented evidence that a third of our heat-related deaths are due to global warming. Source is in NY Times. https://youtu.be/t6mNjhICqF4. And not to underplay the McPherson report, but the future of a life of die-off brought by wet-bulb heat due to global warming was reported back in 2016 by activist Kevin Hester.

Keep the AC running as long as you can.