OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS #237, JUNE 30, 2025.

 

 

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS #237, JUNE 30, 2025.    Compiled by Dick Bennett.

 

3 Items from OMNI CLIMATE URGENCY ANTHOLOGY  #2.  JUNE 30, 2025.
Neil Faulkner.  “Covid, climate, and ‘dual metabolic rupture’.”
Tom Engelhardt.  “Our Not-So-Slow-Motion Apocalypse”
Dick.  More Urgencies: Lexicography.

 

Neil Faulkner.  “Covid, climate, and ‘dual metabolic rupture’.” 

We thought climate catastrophe the main danger. Now we know there is another. A double-whammy ecological crisis threatens collapse into dystopian chaos.  | more…

 Pathogens, a great and terrible global threat to human and many a non-human alike, [are] as much a Sword of Damocles hovering above civilisation as climate change.

 

Tom Engelhardt.  “Our [all species] Not-So-Slow-Motion Apocalypse: My Extreme World and (Un)Welcome to It.”  TomDispatch, Tomgram.  August 12, 2021.          ...Floods, megadrought, the fiercest of forest fires, unprecedented storms — you name it and it seems to be happening not in 2100 or even 2031, but now.  A recent study suggests that, in 2020 (not 2040 or 2080), more than a quarter of Americans had suffered in some fashion from the effects of extreme heat, already the greatest weather-based killer of Americans and, given this blazing summer, 2021 is only likely to be worse.  By the way, don’t imagine that it’s just us humans who are suffering. Consider, for instance, the estimated billion or more — yes, one billion! — mussels, barnacles, and other small sea creatures that were estimated to have died off the coast of Vancouver, Canada, during the unprecedented heat wave there earlier in the summer. . . .

Dick Bennett.  What words are adequate?  
     If climate and pandemic happen simultaneously, what word in the English language will be adequate?    Emergency?  What name (or names) is proportionately accurate for coronaclimate?    Chaos?  But what shall we call chronic coronaclimate, as described by Andreas Malm in Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency?
     The precise vocabulary for snow developed over hundreds of years, and continues (although snow is disappearing), so I expect with great hope our lexicographers are already busy collecting a dictionary for pandemics and climate change.   For how can we think without words to reference our extraordinary variety of experience? 
     And what word for pandemicclimatewars?  Pandemicclimatewarspopulationgrowth?  Nuclearwar?!  
Dick