"This is the greatest statewide heat wave ever recorded in California. Records set from Bay Area t

[riversedge]

Jim Roberts?Verified account @nycjim 18h18 hours ago

"This is the greatest statewide heat wave ever recorded in California.” Records set from Bay Area to Palm Springs. https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/heat-smoke-and-fire-assault-western-states-all-time-record-heat-california …

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Portland, Oregon is expecting its first-ever Labor Day weekend with temperatures of 90°F or better on all three days. The city hit 98°F on Saturday, and WU is predicting 90s in Portland through at least Tuesday.
MODIS satellite image of California smoke, 9/2/2017

[Hulk]

1. This is getting scary

The winter was the wettest and most miserable I can remember in my 65 years of living in the pnw, but the summer started waaay too early and has been dry and hot since early spring. It will be 102 on Tuesday, and it's been unbearably hot nearly all summer, with weeks after weeks in the mid 90s. This is not normal.
At least we are not on fire in the metro areas, but record fires across the state.

[Hortensis]

2. So many up there don't have air conditioning either. At least we're

in September now. Time for some to consider putting it in for the future. I'm remembering the 70K deaths in Europe in 2003 when a heat dome settled down over much of Eurasia. (In France, it happened during the national summer holiday when the government was shut down). Europe named its latest heat wave, just a couple weeks ago, "Lucifer."

The dread effects of global warming are no longer a threat for the future. They're here.

[sharedvalues]

4. Global warming effects are here

Good thing Exxon Mobile spent so much money denying climate change for decades. I hope politicians that took that money bought something nice with it.

[Hulk]

5. We were there in 2003..

I remember making our way to the Dingle Penninsula in western Ireland in August. It was hotter than hell. When we returned to JFK to catch our cinnection to the west coast, the whole Northest power grid went down for three days, and we were stuck at the airport until dark, and NYC for days.
What a bummer finish to our travels.

[Hortensis]

6. Boy, no kidding. That's a real shame about Ireland. Not sure how to evaluate

a description of "hotter than hell" from someone from the PNW, though. We'd moved from SoCal to the hot, steamy, cream-soup summers of Georgia shortly before then. Fry pan into the pot.

To go from that to grid-down, though. What a series of events to be caught in. Bet some of those stuck in the airport with you were expecting/hoping to be rescued by the Rapture any minute.

A thought that poppped into my head because of this article. Apparently this young woman grew up in a fundamentalist Christian culture in Iraq and found herself part of an American version that was very different. This was her remembrance of her Oklahoma church around 1989:

“We live in end times!” our congregation often said, instead of “the end is near”. Now the Rapture wasn’t just on the horizon; it was a daily possibility. Though I was young, I was surprised to hear the language of the refugee in their mouths: “We are exiles on Earth,” they said, as if to deny involvement. “We’re citizens of heaven.” This casual disavowal was like a pantomime of displacement, containing nothing of the reluctance of the true refugee, the sorrow of being forced to leave home. “We’re leaving soon!” they said happily.

Over time, something else needled at me: here, the Rapture talk wasn’t so much about finding escape from frightening politics, as it had been in Iran. Here, the talk was a way of engaging with politics. The most ardent in the church carried out a side-by-side exegesis of newspapers and scripture with a certain thrill, as if fitting a puzzle piece into place. This habit often led to a rejection of any programme or policy that would contradict the end-times narrative. There was no need to slow climate change, protect against scarcity or pursue global peace – because wars, famines and natural disasters are foretold and therefore unavoidable.

It’s easier to focus on what we can see than to try to imagine an unknown future. Though we yearned for otherworldly love and beauty, and to be removed from an ugly world, we were soon lost in a voyeuristic fascination with its fate. I began to notice that all the anticipation was focused on what would happen to the Earth, to the unbelieving hordes left behind, and not on what awaited the righteous in heaven. Perhaps, too, it was a contempt for the unbelieving, who lived as if they had every option. Our rapturous longings had morphed from rescue to reckoning, our image of the future from a better Earth to a scorched one."

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/25/yearning-for-the-end-of-the-world

A Pew study a couple of years ago said some 30 million Americans are looking forward to being proven right in this. Fixing the earth is not on their or God's agenda.

[JimGinPA]

3. Climate Change Is Fake News Created By China

I heard the pResident say so.