Tag Archives: climate

A World View

I recently created an acrylic on canvas painting. I thought lots about it before picking up a brush and thought I might share what I think it means. First, just take a look and see all the bright colors, flowers and creatures!

My view? The trellis is a community or city. The the flowers are what sustains the folks in the area, the grocery store. The hummingbird, butterfly, caterpillar and bees are us, people of all kinds and characteristics. They gather peacefully, don’t they? At least these do.

One thing folks don’t notice is that the flower vines have stems that have roots into the ground, aka the earth. What if that very bright sun with dagger rays shined for weeks with no rain? Drought is increasing. Of course floods are on the rise (ahem…) as well. What if petroleum or other pollution got to the roots? Happens too much.

If the flowers die, the whole system dies. And please see the flowers are all curved away from that hot sun; the planet’s already warming. I started considering this painting as a metaphor for love and light, the critters all getting together so well and all. It still does I suppose, love our planet and let the light shine on our correcting the harm done over the decades so those who come after us can have a safe and beautiful planet to live on.

I just love flowers! This is from the variousentityshoppe collection.

Little Ita Whams Solomon Islands, then Australia

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As cyclones (southern hemisphere hurricanes) go Ita packed strong winds into a tiny package.  Cyclone Ita drowned the Solomon Islanders, then zeroed in on Cooktown in Queensland and blew trees and roofs around before heading south for the city of Cairns. Haiyan (super-powerful) recently smashed the Philippines, Sandy (super-sized) inundated New Jersey and New York last year and the Gulf Coast including New Orleans hasn’t recovered from Katrina yet. Some data says we’re getting stronger storms because of climate change while other data implies that there is too much natural variation to confirm one way or another. Weather Underground has a great discussion on the question.

In Neighbors, the fourth of my Elise t’Hoot science fiction books, I had the north Atlantic coast of South America hit by two Ita-sized hurricanes in a row, destroying all the families there possessed. They became refugees and were exiled along with lots of other ‘excess’ people. It may be hard for scientists to state for sure that any given hurricane or cyclone or typhoon is more vicious because of climate change, but when the sea level rises a few feet, these storms and their flooding storm surges will certainly get closer to more people. With the jet stream going loopy, these storms may romp outside their typical tracks. For example, three strong wintertime storms just pummeled England only a day or two apart, revealing World War 2 ordinance and 10,000 year old forest remains.