Darling, I Don't Know Why I Go To Extremes
Let's talk more about weather extremes and what to do about them.
Billy Joel’s song “I Go to Extremes” was the fourth track on his 1989 album, Storm Front. Talk about foreshadowing… This song was released as the second single from the album and reached the number-six spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.
Speaking of hot, the lyrics go:
Darling I don't know why I go to extremes
Too high or too low there ain't no in-betweens
And if I stand or I fall
It's all or nothing at all
Feels a little like our current weather emergency, except scientists have warned us for years (decades even) about these too high temps.
Temperatures in the U.K. topped 40C for the first time yesterday. For my American friends, that’s about 104 degrees.
As the BBC explains, “Emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels have been trapping heat in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial era. This extra heat isn't evenly distributed across the globe, and bursts out extreme weather events. Unless global emissions are cut, this cycle will continue.”
A dangerous heat wave is spreading throughout the U.S. this week too, as nearly 110 million people are under heat alerts in 28 states from California to New England with many areas expecting temps in the triple digits.
The most intense heat is expected in the Southwest and south-central U.S., with highs expected to top 100 degrees in parts of Oklahoma and Texas, where sweltering conditions have spurred record levels of power consumption. I imagine many Texans are weary from grid issues and still wary from February's 2021 winter outage.
Our heatwaves are not just hotter; they're also lasting longer. Warm spells have more than doubled in length in the past 50 years.
Isn’t It Supposed To Be Hot This Time Of Year?
Yes, it’s summer. Yes, temps get hotter. But these kind of extremes cause transportation disruptions, risks to crops, water shortages and even deaths.
Heat is one of the top weather-related causes of death in the U.S., according to Kimberly McMahon, public weather services program manager with the National Weather Service.
Those who are more vulnerable to the high temperatures include outdoor workers, pregnant women, people with heart or lung conditions, young children, older adults and athletes, according to the CDC.
I liked what U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had to say on Twitter:

Now is the time to transform our relationship with nature.
We can’t keep taking, extracting, and removing natural resources from this planet and burning them for fuel. We can’t keep abandoning polluted sites and think this won’t come back to bite us.
Unless society sharply alters course, studies show, 40C days in a country that operates largely without air conditioning will become events that occur every few years, warns the U.K. Met Office.
A recent New York Times piece reported on a Gallup poll finding that one-third of all Americans have been exposed to extreme weather events since 2020.
According to New York Times reporter Derrick Bryson Taylor:
“Thirty-three percent of U.S. adults said they had been affected by extreme weather since 2020… according to the survey, which was based on interviews conducted last month with about 1,000 adults living in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Hurricanes and winter weather, such as snow, ice storms and blizzards, were the most common extreme weather events cited, followed by extreme heat and floods.”
I encourage everyone who can this summer to take a few days in nature. Sit by a stream, get quiet in a forest and look up at the trees, or spend time in a field stargazing. Notice how your body feels after a day outside in nature versus a day staring at screens.
Yes, we need better climate policy, but first we need to remember that we are nature. We must lead with our hearts and our desire to preserve the natural world as best we can.
Don’t forget the recent images of the Carina Nebula captured by the Near-Infrared Camera on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
It’s time to get real. Are your efforts contributing to the beauty of this galaxy or the demise of it?
Yes, weather will always be variable, but we don’t have to go to these extremes.
The challenge is not just figuring out solutions for the future but how to adapt and face the challenges right here at our door. That’s why I’m always harping on improvements to infrastructure, more funding for research and science, and to enforce the environmental laws we already have written.
Climate change is helping us see the interdependence and the beautiful complexity of the natural and human systems we have unthinkingly relied on, at the moment those systems are threatening to fall apart.
And if I stand or I fall
It's all or nothing at all
I’m still holding onto to the hope that if more of us stand up, we still might have a chance to preserve our precious world.
Feeling hopeful or totally panicked? Let’s talk about it in the comments below.
Another great subject and we have proven that numbers make a difference. We must all stand together regardless of which political party we belong to
We need to do this before it is too late
During hot weather the cumulative effect of off-gassing of normalized and illegally legalized toxic chemicals in many consumer products increases most significantly. According to publicized by Erin Brockovich book by Dr. Swan “COUNT DOWN”, the data points to the horrifying fact that remains under-publicized: ZERO SPERM BY 2045 (in Dr. Levi study). The math is extremely simple: grandchildren of today’s adults won’t have birthright
However, nothings is being done about this, while the impression of dealing with petrochemical pollution is made to be ever misleading. Indeed, the recent US Bill on 40% decrease of carbon emissions by 2030 is finally a reality, but it is too little and too late type of bandaid for the enormity of environmental illnesses that are not merely labeled with this true name. This legislation had nothing to provide protection of consumers from horrible impact of cumulative effects that are expected to INCREASE, accelerating the rate of plummeting sperm from current 1%/year further.
Denial of reality has to stop, while there is tiny window of opportunity left. Indeed, the problem is very complex and involves development of new health standards, relevant to reality, creating new safe technologies and detoxing the existing products to the best level, while no healthy replacements are available.
And most importantly, THE ROOT CAUSE for pursuing Environmental Insanity - Sensory Complicity to toxicity, due to collectively practiced Sensory Shutdown, has to be addressed in less than expected manner - through Sensory Reawakening. Indeed, paradoxically, our lacking priority for making our health and safety to be #1 aspect of our life comes from disrupted inter hemispheric balance, as the result of Sensory Deactivation. Essentially, the loss of full clarity of perception, in the face of such hard to grasp calamity, results in primitive linear grasp of the world vs integrative mindset that can perceive polyphony of our complex reality.
My observational research study (just presented at the ISME Research Commission at 25th World Conference for Intl Society for Music Education demonstrated the evidence for this to the raise elusive process through the analysis of compilation of recordings with the same collectively practiced interpretive error in the fugue by J.S.Bach, revealing SOCIOSOMATICS of social influences on the activity of our perceptive abilities...
it is similar to the shutdown of the pain alarm that informs our self preservation instinct to make us pull away our hand upon feeling pain alarm from touching the flame.
This type of pain alarm is no longer existent in our body, when it come to the same instinct for toxic chemicals
Using ancestral gift of music contrary to entertainment industry, but instead, through music based modalities to improve the sensory perception may appear as the long path to prioritizing health and safety of our indoor and outdoor environments, but it is the path through the fundamental, determining our brain function rout.
Essentially, our conscious efforts to maintain our humanity through arts practices for sensory reawakening, as the path away from self destructive fast track we are on right now.
These complex subjects, based on vibrational nature of our universe and Music Instinct, need to be publicized ASAP, and enacted. We have the only alternative to tad dressing this complexity of human brain - the end of human civilizations, forecasted by fertility experts in just about two decades.
People like Erin Brockovich is our only hope to begin dealing with the culprit of the self destructive patterns of evolutionary young human brain. And now activists like her could get to the roots of the problem and begin resolving it for self and for the world. Thank you in advance for your urgent support in my dire situation