More of the same will not solve a problem

The robins are back! (unless the flock I saw this morning was a bunch that overwintered). Without banding and recapture, can we be sure which?

Most local waters are now open, if not ice free. Then again, there are still patches of snow and/or ice in the shadowed woods and ditches, despite recent daytime temperatures in the mid-60s. The return of robins and open waters should mean it’s time to watch for red-winged blackbirds returning.

return of the redwings, mid-March

Photo by J. Harrington

We’re now just a little over two weeks from Spring Equinox and we continue to be harassed by cloudy skies lacking meaningful precipitation. Our Spring fire threat continues. A couple of nice Spring rains are in order, but, unfortunately, not yet in the forecast.

After a historically weird winter, I wonder if spring and summer will bring a return to some semblance of normalcy, or has climate weirding finally taken over our weather patterns and what might that actually be like. Meanwhile, Exxon CEO blames public for failure to fix climate change shortly after the end of this:

The COP28 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, was the biggest of its kind. Some 85,000 participants, including more than 150 Heads of State and Government, were among the representatives of national delegations, civil society, business, Indigenous Peoples, youth, philanthropy, and international organizations in attendance at the Conference from 30 November to 13 December 2023.

COP28 was particularly momentous as it marked the conclusion of the first ‘global stocktake’ of the world’s efforts to address climate change under the Paris Agreement. Having shown that progress was too slow across all areas of climate action – from reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to strengthening resilience to a changing climate, to getting the financial and technological support to vulnerable nations – countries responded with a decision on how to accelerate action across all areas by 2030. This includes a call on governments to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels to renewables such as wind and solar power in their next round of climate commitments.

Of course, any public failure could have nothing to do with decades of disinformation from the oil industry about the existence, causes and effects of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Haven’t we reached the time when ecocide should be made a capital crime for corporations?

The “Change” in Climate Change

By Jacob Shores-Argüello

My cousin WhatsApps me from Costa Rica, fits the family

into the rectangle of video as they wave from the balcony.

He turns the phone, shows me a swirl of birds in the hurting sky.

But they are not birds. They are neighbor Tinoco’s roof tiles

flying in a storm’s rotary energy. My family is calling because

I’m in Oklahoma, which, to them, is synonym for tornado.

Te amo, I say as my cousin lowers the phone for our grandmother

to hear. She’s scared because she’s lived in the town for 80 years

and can’t recognize all these new skies. Because a year before,

a hurricane reaved its way across this country for the first time

in recorded history. Tornado or torbellino or something else,

I ask her about the valley’s strange wind. And she laughs, says

that she was calling to ask me the same thing. I don’t know why

I keep forgetting the change in climate change. My grandmother

sighs as the sky darkens to the color of rum. Why I still think

that we’ll have names for all the things that will come.

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