More wildfires in California. The reports are on a conveyor belt. More destruction, more people trapped in their homes and more people and pets dying. Hundreds of thousands of acres burnt. This is California to outsiders. It can’t be as bad as it looks but the impression we get is that California is burning and the temperatures are rising. The fires this weekend came on heat warnings in which temperature records for September were broken in several parts of the state. Temperatures reached 50 degrees centigrade in Palm Springs and Death Valley reached 54 degrees centigrade. The National Weather Service in Los Angeles warned of “kiln-like” conditions.
I suspect that everybody is staying indoors if they can with the air conditioning turned up to the maximum. A friend of mine told me that it cost them $400 a month to run the air conditioning in Texas (8 years ago). Everyone and their cat and dog is at home and the air conditioning is saving them. But this is an air-conditioning climate feedback loop in technical language.
Air-conditioning is energy intensive and the emissions that it produces contributes to higher global temperatures. And because the temperatures are going up air-conditioning is used more and so you have this upward spiral leading humankind to Armageddon.
I’m sure that there will be a rush on sales of cooling blankets for cats and dogs. There’s also talk of weaponizing air conditioning units. The idea is to get the devices to pull in carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere instead of chucking it up into the air. It appears to be a feasible technology. The utopian dream of air-conditioning units capturing carbon dioxide and transforming it into a fuel for powering vehicles which are difficult to electrify like cargo ships is something to aim for in the interests of people and their pets.
People don’t need reminding that global warming is very relevant to human and animal welfare. It dramatically affects wildlife and its ability to survive. The species are adapted to a certain temperature; when the temperature warms up they struggle to survive. It’s a global phenomenon and it negatively affects, for example, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (the world’s largest coral reef system). The sad aspect of global warming is that nowhere near enough is being done about it by the governments of all countries. They simply cannot work together effectively which is a great barrier to global harmony.
