The Global Climate Strike Will Be Epic, and More Recaps
Updated: Sep 21, 2019
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2019: Good afternoon, climate strikers all! I got back to Seattle from my birthday/vacation in east Tennessee on Tuesday night; and a heck of a lot has been happening ever since! There's so much blog-worthy stories regarding climate out there, my jet-lagged head is still spinning! Unfortunately, all I have time to do today is a quick recap of some of them...
1) GLOBAL CLIMATE STRIKE: SIX DAYS AND COUNTING: Better save up your energy, folks; September 20 is nearly upon us! Strikes are happening on all continents, and in darn-near every country! Wherever you are, if you plan on striking, you can be sure that you'll have plenty of company. We here in the U.S. are blessed to have Greta Thunberg, fresh off the sailboat, leading protests in New York next week, ahead of the U.N. Climate Action Summit. Of course, she's getting plenty of hate messages on social media from grumpy cynical types who call her a "foolish child", and claim that she "doesn't know what she's talking about." This, of course, merely proves that she's having a major impact, and making jaded sticks-in-the-mud uncomfortable. Newsflash: the fact that she's a teenager certainly does NOT mean she doesn't know what she's talking about; she's been researching environmental and climate science with a passion since age 11. What's more, adult professional ecologists, organic chemists and climate scientists agree with her. What the hell do her detractors know about climate change? Anyway...Here in Seattle, we'll be out in Cal Anderson Park bright and early next Friday (beginning at 9:00 AM); and a march from there to City Hall will beginning around noon.
2) CLIMATE CHANGE KILLS, AND HURRICANE SEASON 2019 IS JUST GETTING STARTED: While I was visiting my Mom in Tennessee, we spent a lot of time during the hot and humid days keeping an eye on Hurricane Dorian, particularly as it sat there between two high-pressure zones over Freeport, Bahamas for over forty hours. A Category 5 storm, Dorian packed wind speeds up to 185 mph at its strongest, with some wind gusts reaching 220 mph. As the nearly-destroyed island nation struggles to rebuild itself with assistance from numerous other countries, it's been faced with a large tropical storm with the Bahamas right in its path; and this year's storm season isn't even close to being over yet. And go figure that Donald Trump is insisting that any Bahamian refugees trying to reach the U.S. must have passports and entry visas on them, claiming that some of them might be "really bad people." Sigh...best he speak for himself.
UPDATE--SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2019: Folks, the Global Climate Strike was indeed amazing! Night owl that I am, I had to drag my butt out of bed and head up to Cal Anderson Park yesterday morning, cellphone in hand, to document it as well as I could! I've completely forgotten what else I was going to include in this post; but there will, of course, be a report-back post coming shortly on Climate Strike day. The Seattle school system refused to excuse youth climate activists' school strike, but the students of Seattle were well-represented at our rally nonetheless, some of them even accompanied by their teachers. The point of the School Strike, obviously, is that the students are willing to bear any consequences that will come from their skipping school for the Climate Strike. I was, however, rather concerned to learn how many of them are in a state of intense anxiety over the state of the global climate, and our planet as a whole. Anyway, I will be posting very soon on our own little contribution to the global movement for Climate Action; and I'm proud to say that my night-owl tendencies did not stop me from attending the early (for me) morning rally, for at least as long as my cellphone battery stayed alive...
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