There’s a lot going on right now, as usual, but something just hit my radar (get it?!), which is a tropical storm they’re calling Marie forming out in the Pacific Ocean, way down south of the Baja California peninsula.
Marie looks like she might be heading up ol’ Southern California’s pooper with a vengeance.
For those of you in other parts of the country who might have been going around blissfully unaware, we have all been struggling through sweltering temperatures and some of the highest humidity ever experienced in Southern California — for the last several weeks. It’s been awful, borderline unbearable. I guess that the very warm seawaters that caused all that humidity have now birthed this potential hurricane.
So what does that mean for California? Maybe nothing, this time around. But if there’s a worst-case scenario, we’re going to see a lot of flooding and it’s going to be riiiiight around Labor Day. So now climate change isn’t just going to roast us in our own homes or boil us in our beds like soggy old milk-steaks, it’s going to fuck up our barbecues too.
The good news is that by the time it hits shore, even as a worst-case scenario, it probably won’t be a hurricane. The bad news is, you don’t need a ton of winds to flood the absolute shit out of a place without much of an infrastructure in place for rain!
Once upon a time, not so long ago, this was completely aberrant and abnormal but now it seems to happen every year so I guess the climate has changed, baby, no matter what the GOP says!
Climate change denial is a form of particularly potent disinformation — not misinformation, which implies that people might have made some honest mistakes — but disinformation with a “D,” as in “deliberate.” It’s been documented time and again how insidious those lies have been, and yet those liars get to go walking around free with their heads still on their shoulders and moneys still in their bank accounts while those of us with lower incomes are still bailing out our living rooms with plastic buckets.
I think a lot of people are familiar with one kind of disinformation about climate change, which is when bad actors look at the facts arrayed neatly out in front of them and then just simply issue blanket denials, but there are other kinds to be aware of as well. In fact, the climate disinformation machine is highly organized, global, and extremely well-funded.
Here are some real-world, recent examples of climate disinformation, brought to you by the same shitheels who hate books, women in the workplace, our trans siblings, and so many more of the exact things that once made this country a place people actually wanted to live!
“Heat waves have always been this way! You’re just getting older and less heat-tolerant.” This oldie is a fun one because it manages to wrap up an insult within the lie, casting you — yes, you — as a fuckwitted, feeble-minded dipshit who can’t remember what summers used to be like, unlike Techbro Mike over there with his strong male alpha-brain. Oh, and you can’t handle the heat, either? You old fuck.
Anyway, that’s bullshit so don’t let Techbro Mike get to you! Heat waves have been unprecedented everywhere, and I do mean everywhere! I recommend just walking away from people like that and shunning them, because we don’t need people like that in our lives! But if you must respond to someone like that, ask them about the last time they went on a nice long summer hike all by themselves, because maybe they should try one. Maybe they should try one this weekend, especially if they live in Southern California!
“A warming planet is good, actually!” I first heard that one years and years ago from a Russian diplomat who was visiting Alaska at the time, back when I was a wee reporter. This diplomat, who was probably drunk and whose name I can’t remember because I was drunk too, went on for some time about how northern latitudes would become arable and green, which would take all that extra CO2 and create more oxygen in the atmosphere. Cattle and grass could replace the permafrost, he said. Trees and birds would flourish where today there was only ice.
Well, this was years ago, so there’s probably no ice left in those places by now! I used to really enjoy this one glacier when I lived in Alaska. It was just outside Anchorage and was very pretty, and it was called Portage Glacier. Well, I stopped by there about a decade ago to take a photo for old times sake, and there’s no goddamn glacier left. It’s Portage Lake now.
Apparently you can still take a boat out to the glacier and get a look at it that way. But it’s nothing like it used to be — you could see it from the highway and see pieces of ice on it most of the year at the turn of the century. I know, because I was there. This time, though, all I saw was a big lake, no ice chunks, a new-to-me sign, and friends, I’m not going to lie, I cried.
You know what else I didn’t see? Any fucking farmland! Turns out that was all bullshit, too. So remember that the next time you get drunk with Russian diplomats in Alaska circa 2003 and find out what they think about climate change.
“What about the people in more southern latitudes?” I remember asking this gentleman. “What about the birds that are already in the north? What about the fish?” I don’t remember whether he answered, but I'm not sure his answer would have made a difference. I hope he had a terrible hangover the next morning.
I would offer a suggested rejoinder here, but I’m not sure you can talk to people like that for any reason, ever. I recommend flinging poo into their faces, but you would have to sort of come prepared for that one. I personally deal with it by issuing a long, hollow laugh and walking away. The trick is to start walking away before you start crying!
The final, extremely common climate disinformation line is the one that makes me the angriest and gives me the most angst.
“Yes, climate change is real, but it’s too late to do anything about it now.” Are you fucking kidding me? Since when is it too late to do anything about anything? This lifetime is filled to the brim with do-overs and second chances! There are only sixteen novel plots! If anybody ever says that to your face, tell them that perhaps they want to be lazy and hopeless, and they are welcome to curl up and die. But the rest of us are going to do something about this. We owe it to our huge beautiful complicated planet to do something nice for it for a change, don’t you think?
The problem with that one is that we are living through a very despairing time. It might be the strongest piece of disinformation being circulated of all, because disinfo always, always plays on emotion. And there is a lot of emotion in watching the world around you get destroyed, reshaped, drowned in rains. It’s tough to not feel despair. After I lived in Alaska, I eventually made my way to Altadena, a beautiful place in Los Angeles County, and fell in love with its incredible people and history. I lived in a gorgeous old home at the top of a hill in a neighborhood that no longer exists because it got destroyed in the Eaton Fire — burned straight to the ground.
And that’s not even the first time this has happened to a place I lived in! It’s like the fifth one! I swear I am not doing it, I just love living near open spaces, which apparently now means you have to prepare yourself for heartbreak down the line at the very least.
But I am digressing! I’m just trying to say that this is an easy time to be despairing, and climate deniers know this and are using it against you in order to get their way and amass all sorts of resources while we are still reeling. So don’t let them do it. Don’t let them tell you it’s too late. They just want all our water and to do creepy surveillance shit and sniff our underwear or whatever it is climate deniers do with their spare time.
How do you handle despair? Well, I can’t speak for you, of course, but the way I do it is through spite. I will clean up this goddamn planet myself just to fuck these assholes off. I will live forever simply for the joy of outliving them. I will breathe clean air and eat good food and drink clean water just so techbro billionaires and their allies can’t. I will fucking do this! And most of all, I will do what we must do in order to survive this time, which is to build climate and social resilience and work together so that we can survive together. (More on that in future articles.)
But don’t forget the spite. Some days it’s all that gets me out of bed in the mornings to fight another day!
Stay dry out there, friends.
And don’t forget: Climate denial is a far-right project, so if we all miss out on tasty BBQ that’s on them — and it’s never, ever too late to fight those fuckers.
With a lot of these MAGA types, there is also a bad theological aspect (a bad faith argument, as it were), combined with a naturalistic fallacy through a lens of American jingoism.
1. Jesus won't let this happen to us, just like Jesus made our kid's team win last week, if He cares that much about us he will turn back floods.
2. Nature heals itself naturally
3. We will tough it out because we're tough American alpha men, like they way Hegseth and his church believes wars are won.
For the idiot who says you are old and less heat tolerant, older people often have slower circulatory systems and tend to be less tolerant of COLD not heat.