The New Reality Of Climate And COVID
Imagine A World With Climate Shifts And Sars Cov2 Before The Internet, And You Become Grateful For Information And Connections Technology Provides.
Callin' out around the world
Are you ready for a brand new beat
Summer's here and the time is right
For dancing in the street
“Dancing In The Street”
Songwriters: Stevenson William / Gaye Marvin P / Hunter Ivy George
Welcome to the scorching hot Summer of 2022.
For some reason, the echoes of the iconic pop hit by Martha and The Vandellas (and later covered by Van Halen) keep bouncing around in the caverns of my imagination, especially when, early on, it looks like it’s going to be unusually dry and hot. So hot it may be unprecedented.
“Dancing In The Street,” a song synonymous with Summer forever, evokes lifetime memories of boundless possibility, excitement, and freedom, but has somehow been replaced by anxiety and trepidation. It’s too hot to sit, much less dance.
Growing up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, it used to be a matter of carefree choices: Should I go to the pool, or the beach to body surf and swim? Maybe cruise “The Strip” in air-conditioned comfort in a freind’s car? Walking or biking on the “Boardwalk?”
The refrain from my Aunts on Summer visits to Georgia was “Go out and play!”, usually Baseball, which, to me, felt more like toil than play, but the antidote was always close by: air-conditioned comfort at a relative’s welcoming home.
The sequence was likely the same for all of us.
Once overheated, baking under the sun, you cool down (if you’re lucky) with a swim, and then right back to “soak it up,” with the idea that burned skin, like tanned rawhide, exudes health.
Perhaps one of the greatest lies perpetrated by Madison Avenue, specifically related to “Coppertone” tanning products, is that with their “protective” oil, you don’t burn, you slow baste. Much more preferable.
I recall the full slogan as “Tan Don’t Burn, Get A Coppertone Tan! In fact, as anyone with any amount of common sense knows now, that’s exactly what happens, your skin is burned as you slow roast under UV exposure. Sunscreen was for wimps. In addition to that, they got away with insulting the long-suffering Native American population by throwing “Don’t Be A Paleface!” into the advertising mix. No one blinked.
Last week in my little Universe, I, along with millions, faced a new reality about climate change and its implications. I saw heat advisories being issued for my part of Northeastern Florida and much of the South. What triggered panic for me is that extreme heat nearly got me a chauffeured ambulance ride when I was working an outdoor concert after a scorching 115-degree day last year.
The relentless heat, in fact, came on fiercely and without mercy, even in the early morning and afternoon hours. The AC seemingly whirred on without really stopping to rest. I frantically tried micromanaging the thermostat, an even bigger mistake. It just got hotter anyway. Temps forecast in the low to mid-90s had a heat index value that “feels like” 10 or 15 degrees higher.
I spent each day modifying the house with thermal blackout curtains and experimenting with fan placement to help the AC along. Fans won’t cool the air, but they are more efficient than an AC blower in moving it. At least that’s what I gleaned from reading multiple articles on HVAC cooling. Suddenly things I never considered or gave any serious thought to became vital information. It’s literally a matter of survival.
A technician from a reputable company came by to make sure the AC system wasn’t on its last legs and assured me that there were no refrigerant leaks or pressure problems. “It’s just REALLY hot, and it’s an older system,” he said as he wiped the sweat off his brow. He acknowledged that the curtains and fans were a help to cooling.
I had an intense realization at that point. The realities of climate change are here. In your face. They are no longer theories. I am feeling it. I am living it. We are living it.
Perceptions of Summer as a welcoming adventure in my youth changed to Summer climate as a threat. The house, as a result of being frantically reactive on my part, is much cooler, but it feels sort of alien and slightly funereal to shut out the light. Light, however, equates to heat, and at 97 to 100-degree temperatures, heat is the enemy.
For people out there still isolated due to COVID, or alone through other circumstances of life, having a community of people to interact with can save your psychological sanity. You start doubting your perspective because of false narratives. For me, that’s the community of followers and like-minded folk on Twitter. To be clear, I’m grateful for the access to people, even if it’s just sharing mutual concerns.
As it turns out, another fellow Floridian mirrored my concern. It is unprecedented. Air Conditioners ARE working harder. We reassured each other as best we could. It helps to know that you aren’t imagining things.
As I mentioned above, back in the day there was usually a respite from the heat in terms of cooling off in a nearby body of water. Even last year, the heat inevitably resulted in creating warm, moist air that resulted in intense thunderstorms with cooling rain. It was every other day, if not an everyday occurrence.
It’s hurricane season here, but tropical storm threats are literally being held at bay by the intense heat. The cooling cycle is not happening. Things may have irrevocably changed. All I know is that it doesn’t feel like previous Summers. It’s a perceptible shift.
A hurricane heat shield forms
Florida’s weather between May and September is an exercise in poison picking, with the options limited to hot and wet, hotter and dry, and the wildcard influence of the Tropics. For the upcoming week to ten days, we will be squarely in the second camp.
Thunderstorm coverage will be less than normal as high temperatures soar into the mid- and upper-90s. Spotty triple-digit heat is even expected this weekend across North Florida and the Deep South.
A more typically miserable pattern will probably resume sometime in the last week of June.
Madison Avenue may have pulled the wool over people’s eyes with their Coppertone ad campaign decades back, but that pales (no pun intended) in comparison to the great COVID disappearance campaign perpetrated by Western governments and corporations. They have used great deception and sacrificed public health across the board, in order to squeeze profit from an irrevocably corrupted economic system, in a heinous and short-sighted approach.
It’s hard to look at certain social media and see people, friends, and former co-workers, more than willing to participate in the self-deceptive amnesiac exercise that COVID is over, especially in terms of masking. Indoor and outdoor venues are packing the crowds in as the music and concert promotions industry jumps on the bandwagon to squeeze out as much money as possible.
Personally, I have had breaks with reality and questioned my own sanity multiple times over the past year as everyone, seemingly, is now able to go about their business, intermingling without consequences. “Live your life!” random strangers admonish.
Thankfully, two things happened to ease my urge to throw caution to the wind.
This revelatory article written by William Silvermith at Cosmonaut Magazine comes at the reader from a time when COVID concern was part of the everyday dialog in 2020 but has largely disappeared in an era of forced return to normal. The popular pretense or perception of COVID as being in the rearview and decidedly part of the past, as well as gaslighting by medical professionals that have abandoned ethics and minimal standards of doing harm, is at an all-time high. So hearing a cautious, rational voice is a godsend.
Some of the most important ideas in the article express that we are headed for an inevitable return to square one. That is, we will, through our ignorance and inaction at a policy level, be forced to return to all the pandemic protections and mitigations that we have abandoned due to selfishness and “inconvenience”.
Consider that the CDC itself is actively encouraging the continued spread of COVID, and deceptively urges people to look at their “revised” map that downplays real-life, real-time metrics which show the spread. Actual high risk is now “low risk”.
“On the CDC website, attempts are being made to dissuade people from looking at the original community transmission maps by claiming they are for “healthcare facility use only.” This is being done to guide people to view their new “Community Levels” standard map. In the new map, the term “low risk” has been so distorted that it includes transmission levels which were formerly termed “high risk.”2”
I am firmly part of the reality-based community when it comes to masking and staying away from crowds. Silversmith could have read my mind when stating:
“For the reality-based community, things feel hopeless now. No one is wearing masks and no one is social distancing. It’s a common experience that simply wearing a mask invites criticism by perfect strangers. The CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky, said “…the scarlet letter of this pandemic is the mask.” Nearly all protections have been dropped, quarantines are so short as to be useless, and testing is being cut back (exemplified by the end of free testing for the uninsured). A huge chunk of the U.S. will not get vaccinated. We’ve surpassed 1 million excess domestic deaths since the start of the pandemic with between 14 to 24 million globally.”
It would seem that there are cracks in the veneer. Older, veteran musicians from my era who jumped back into the touring game, based on the advice of the CDC and an eagerness to return to life before 2020, are dealing with the consequences. This isn’t “I told you so” vindication for the cautious, nor implying that these artists are not cautious.
After all, musicians have to eat and pay bills and salaries, but at what cost? Ringo Starr and his All Starr Band had numerous musicians succumb to COVID and will be postponing their tour, which was rolling along without incident for a few months. The Rolling Stones vocalist Mick Jagger similarly contracted COVID and the band canceled a major, once-in-a-lifetime date in Switzerland. No one is sure about the state of his health, but one infection can do a lot of damage. Even with young people. Articles like this from two years ago have all but disappeared in the current climate,
How long before the realization occurs that tours can’t operate at a profit, stopping and starting because COVID has infected a key player or crew that supports them?
The second thing that happened was the overwhelming, mostly positive response to my concerns about COVID reality. It turns out I am not alone, and while we, the reality-based community are fraught with doubt, the responses told me unequivocally that there are more of us than I thought. We all have the same frustrations, concerns, and anxiety that nothing will be done. In fact, any further spending by the US government is, according to Senator Mitt Romney, effectively dead. Disease prevention is off the table.
I want to personally thank the many people who took the time to reach out and respond to me. Technology and the internet can be enlightening, or debilitating, I suppose, depending on how you use them. It would be hard to imagine living through these unprecedented times without support.
Stay cool and stay safe.
Some additional perspectives. This is a global phenomenon:
Update: 06/21/2022 Just one day after posting this, it looks like yet another heat dome is poised to park itself over the country with temperatures far above normal. High-temperature records could be broken in many cities. Stay safe and please look out for those that can’t look out for themselves.
“Meteorologists are warning a heat dome will park itself over parts of the country, pushing temperatures into the 90s and 100s for many cities. More than 100 high-temperature records could be broken this week in cities around the U.S., CNN reports.”