May I mention the personal toll it has taken? I give you my hair, which used to be obedient smoothable dark materials and is now openly my enemy, the way a sweet-natured 11-year-old turns into a sullen uncontrollable teenager overnight. I had always battled my curly hair — “I will defeat you,” I used to say, and I did — but my hair had a quiet chat with extreme humidity and now openly smirks at regulation.
I weep bitterly. With only the left eye, because, you see, my pirate eye is back. My right eye, which has an allergic reaction during heat waves, can only be calmed by an ice pack strapped to my head with an old hairband.
Needlesss to say, I look like a lunatic, a person with an expanded head, a one-eyed war vet whose reading glasses won’t fit vertically, and I’ve tried. This is what your brain looks like on drugs? No, this is what your hair looks like when it’s 42 in the shade.
You take my point, one made out of passionate self-pity. From the worldwide to the continental to the personal, we are seeing proof of global warming.
Saying it isn’t happening is like CEO Thorsten Heins saying RIM is not in a “death spiral.” The fact that you have to deny it means it’s probably true.
I lack the space to blast you with science so I will blast you with advice. If a third of the Toronto year is going to be hotter than we can tolerate and function well in, we have to alter our conduct.
Please, no more whining about taxes. It’s taxation that is paying for our excellent electrical grid and subsidized use of same for air conditioning, for the office that issues heat alerts, city cooling centres and the upgrading of water mains, fire services when wildfires start up, street lighting that guides the fire engine to your door, well-paid firefighters to risk their lives for you.
I laughed when I read Monday about voters in a U.S. city named Colorado Springs, which cut sales taxes and rejected a property tax hike. When the wildfires came, they had a straitened ability to fight them. The city, home of the notorious hard-right Focus on the Family and the Taxpayer Bill of Rights and highly libertarian in voting patterns, as Reuters reports, now looks like your campsite firepit the morning after you roasted all your wieners. They’re begging for federal money to rebuild.
Global warming requires communal work, not individuals crossing their fingers and hoping it never happens. This was impossible internationally, partly because of hidebound no-global-warming leaders like Stephen Harper, a resentful China and a skeptical U.S. But locally, there’s no other way.
I live in an air-conditioned vine-covered brick house and it gets hot in here. I look at the cheaply built glass condo towers popping up all over Toronto and imagine the sun baking those see-through rooms all day. Gee, I hope they can afford drapes. We need “curtain solutions,” as they’re called, for an ill-run city that failed to regulate and advise on the condo explosion.
What if we had a power outage? I look at the millions of Americans without electricity for a fourth straight day and I don’t think spoiled food — who’s dining at this point? — I think hot coffin air and mildewed lung.
Meantime, I cannot fit my head and right eye into an ice bucket (tried but failed). For my birthday this month, I want a personal power generator just big enough to keep the central air going in an emergency. We’ll all want one this Christmas.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Heather Mallick
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