It's Gotta Be Climate Change

One of the latest and most significant events blamed on climate change is turbulence affecting commercial aircraft. A Singapore Airlines flight from London to Singapore encountered turbulence so serious that about 70 passengers were injured and one died, apparently of a heart attack. US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has said publically that climate change is the culprit for an increasing amount of air turbulence that must affect commercial aircraft at an altitude of 30,000 ft. since that's where they fly. The Transportation Secretary is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford Universities but his fields of study were in politics and economics rather than atmospheric physics.

 “Looking forward into the future, in terms of managing water resources and flood control, we should be anticipating that the wetter extremes will be wetter and the dry extremes will get drier,” said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University....

According to the American Psychological Association:    

• Gender-based violence: In 2022, researchers at the University of Cambridge analyzed 41 studies that explored several types of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires. They found that gender-based violence appears to be exacerbated by extreme weather and climate events. Contributing factors include economic shock, social instability, enabling environments, and stress.
• Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Survivors of the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history, had rates of PTSD on par with war veterans, and they were at increased risk for depression and anxiety, according to a 2021 study from the University of California–San Diego. Survivors of hurricanes and floods suffer similar rates of depression and PTSD.
• Suicide: The economic impacts of droughts lead to increases in suicide, particularly among farmers. Further, authors of a 2018 study in the journal Nature predicted warmer temperatures could lead to as many as 40,000 additional suicides in the United States and Mexico by 2050.
• Aggression: Higher temperatures lead to more aggressive behaviors. A 2021 study published in the Journal of Public Economics found that violent crime in Los Angeles increased by 5.7% on days when temperatures rose above 85°F compared with cooler days.
• Anxiety: Even some Americans who have not been directly affected by a climate disaster are experiencing climate anxiety—an overwhelming sense of fear, sadness, and dread in the face of a warming planet or anxiety and worry about climate change and its effects. A 2020 APA survey found that 56% of U.S. adults said climate change is the most important issue facing the world today. Nearly half of young adults ages 18 to 34 said they felt stress over climate change in their daily lives.  ____________________ Edward Narayan of the University of Queensland in Australia points out that pets are also likely to suffer adverse effects from climate change and that their owners or partners or whatever should be aware of the discomfort faced by tropical fish and birds, as well as dogs and cats. Let's face it, climate change is probably also putting pressure on inanimate factors in our lives. Our automobiles are likely running less efficiently, the color on our television sets may be fading, the songs on the radio just don't seem as great as they once did. This climate change thing is a bear.