What is happening in North America is not a regional aberration; it’s part of a global departure — what climate scientists call a phase shift. The past year has seen virtually every metric of planetary distress lurch into uncharted territory: sea surface temperature, air temperature, polar ice loss, fire intensity — you name it, it is off the charts. It was 72 degrees Fahrenheit in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Paraguay; large portions of the North Pacific and the South Atlantic are running more than five degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at the London School of Economics, summed it up this way for the BBC in July, “I’m not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory.” And with these extremes comes lethality: More than 130 souls perished last month in wildfires outside Valparaiso, Chile — more than the number of dead in the Maui fire last August or the Paradise, Calif., fire in 2018 — making them the world’s deadliest since Australia’s Black Saturday fires in 2009.

Damn. That’s depressing.

Probably just screaming into the void about “freedom” and “owning the libs” as they either freeze, burn, or drown while voting yet again to restrict the rights of women/LGBTQ/POC.

Thanks for volunteering to do that. It seems like y’all respond to just about any kind of emergency.

So she’s a classical kind of girl?

Too lenient.

Credit to them for not wanting to move to 98 either.

I don’t doubt it. I’m a woman in Texas and while this news gives me some hope, these are the same people who make creative ways of banning abortion without “banning abortion” an Olympic sport.

Another method of expressing sarcasm is by placing a tilde (~) adjacent to the punctuation. This allows for easy use with any keyboard, as well as variation. Variations include dry sarcasm (~.)

TIL - I’m an engineer & when I email colleagues, I will use ~ in a sentence to mean “about” - as in estimate, roughly, not quite equal to but close enough, etc.

Granted, the symbol is in a different place to denote sarcasm, but now I’m wondering how popular the usage of ~ is in the context of sarcasm, and have I ever confused someone because they only knew this context?

Interesting.

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