"One plague, when big enough, occludes others, and the coronavirus pandemic has, for six months now, almost fully eclipsed the very real, very large, and very pressing threat of climate change." (1/x) https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/what-climate-alarm-has-already-achieved.html

"Since the beginning of the year, billions of locusts produced by climate disruptions to local weather patterns have descended in clouds of as many as 80 million insects on some of the world’s most food-insecure regions..."

"...chewing up the croplands of the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, India, and Pakistan, pushing perhaps 5 million people to the brink of starvation and threatening the livelihood of as much as 10 percent of the world’s population."

"Just months after a historic cyclone 'pummeled' the country, about a third of Bangladesh was underwater from torrential rains and flooding, while temperatures across the Middle East soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit."

"In Iraq, where it reached 125, the heat wave was compounded by power outages depriving Iraqis of air-conditioning that was, in these circumstances, almost literally a lifeline."

"Last month, as many as 38 million were evacuated to avoid hundreds of simultaneous river floods in China, where the massive Three Gorges Dam was sufficiently stressed by the excess rainfall it has produced fears, likely premature, that the epic dam itself might collapse."

"In the Atlantic, there have been already nine named storms this season, a mark that is typically reached only in October."

"The updated NOAA forecast for the remainder of the year projects between three and six major hurricanes, and a total of 19 to 25 storms — meaning there’s a decent chance we will fully exhaust the English alphabet in our naming of storms and move on to Greek."

"As a whole, the hurricane season is expected to be twice as intense as 'normal.' In the midst of a pandemic, in a country that can’t muster the logistical capacity to control it, we will be functionally facing down two serious hurricane seasons at once."

"And the president is now, ahead of those likely disasters, literally pilfering FEMA’s disaster-relief funds to cover the very minimal amount of unemployment insurance Senate Republicans are unwilling to provide."

"Over the past six months, the coronavirus has often been called a 'fire drill' for climate change. But at present it looks more like a white-noise machine, drowning out what would be, in any other year, the unmistakable signal of a climate emergency."

"This process of normalization was not unforeseeable, and yet it is nevertheless disorienting to watch extreme weather and natural disaster big enough to once define whole generations become merely grim wallpaper to the ever-scarier and more immediate news we doomscroll nightly."

"And yet it is just as important, I think, to note that we are witnessing, simultaneously, another kind of normalization, indeed a good normalization — the normalization of climate alarm."

"Even as we fail to make time to reckon explicitly with the present tense of the climate crisis, intuitions about it, and the future it portends for us, have grown much more central to political and social discourse, in America and elsewhere."

"Indeed, while the world’s attention has been focused on the coronavirus, with little apparent appetite for discussion or debate about warming, our collective, planetary response to the pandemic has brought along with it a sort of secret sidecar of unprecedented climate action."

"Even when we don’t make time for news about locust plagues or fires in the Amazon, foreboding about the climate crisis has come to shape the country’s political, social, and emotional relationship to its own future much more profoundly than ever before."

"Our politics and policy can’t help but reflect those priorities now, even when we aren’t debating them directly."

"We are now alarmed enough about climate change, collectively, that even when we aren’t particularly freaking out about it, we still find ourselves drifting rapidly, as in a very fast stream, toward dramatic action. Times really have changed, and quickly." (x/x)