On Last Legs, 3rd Day of Midsommer, 526 M.E. (Electra): It's another lovely, sunny, non-humid day today, albeit a tad warmer but still comfortably in the 70s. Of course, it still hasn't rained and we're over six inches below normal on the year.

Wildfires are still raging down in South Georgia, although firefighters have made some progress on the Hwy. 82 fire. It's now 75% contained and they've reduced its size by over 50 acres, although it still covers 22,471 acres. The Pineland Road fire is 32,575 acres and 44% contained.

Yes, it's a beautiful day, even as the planet is warming, wildfires are raging, and sea levels are rising. Sea-level rise and the erosion of wetlands in occurring so rapidly in southern Louisiana that a recent paper published in the journal, Nature Sustainability, calls the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world" and advises immediate action to begin evacuating people away from New Orleans to safer ground.

New Orleans will be swallowed up by the sea within a few generations, and the city may be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century. That's still some 75 years away and our mammalian brains, evolved to react to immediate threats while ignoring longer-term dangers, files that information away as nothing to worry about right now. Maybe we shouldn't invest our money into New Orleans condominiums right now, we reason, but other than that, why should we change our current behviour?   

Billions of dollars have already been spent to fortify New Orleans with a vast network of levees, floodgates and pumps erected after Hurricane Katrina. But coastal Louisiana has already crossed a point of no return according to the paper, and the growing threats to the area mean the levees, which already require hefty upgrades to remain sufficient, will not be able to save the city in the long run. Even if climate change ended today, New Orleans still couldn't be saved. It will be surrounded by open water and it's impossible to keep an island situated below sea level afloat. No amount of money can do that.

Here's a lesson I learned decades ago in Geology 101: levees built on soft Mississippi delta sediments have weight which causes them to sink, so the Corps of Engineers builds them higher, which increases the weight, which makes them subside more, which requires them to be built still higher, and so on and so forth in a never-ending cycle. This isn't some Al Gore inconvenient truth or Greta Thunberg alarmism - this was boring, basic geology as taught in the 1970s.

The Stable Genius has got the United States military locked into a strategic stalemate with Iran in the Gulf of Hormuz, through which some 20% of the world's oil moves, or used to move. The effects of the blockades will be felt for years, even if the crisis were to be resolved today. Last Wednesday, the Stable Genius held a 90-minute telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin, and then on Friday, announced he was pulling 5,000 U.S. troops out of Germany, fulfilling at least one bucket-list item from Putin's wish list. The Supreme Court has thrown gasoline onto the gerrymander redistricting war by basically voiding the Voting Rights Act, and things won't go well as millions of Americans realize they've either been disenfranchised or their votes have become meaningless as they're forced to vote in districts in which their preferred candidate is predestined to lose.  

So in short, yes, the world's going to hell and none of this is going to end well for anybody, but it's a beautiful day and birds are singing and the sun is shining. Why can't I just be happy with that?