A Refusal to Celebrate the First Folio’s Last Centenary
As I write, 34 people are known to have died in the past week in Buffalo, New York, the area worst hit by winter storms that have affected vast swathes of the United States. The snow has continued to fall, and it may be some weeks before we know the full death toll from this catastrophic weather eve...
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford University Press (OUP)
2023
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| Online Access: | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/357574 https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.101717 |
| Summary: | As I write, 34 people are known to have died in the past week in Buffalo, New York, the area worst hit by winter storms that have affected vast swathes of the United States. The snow has continued to fall, and it may be some weeks before we know the full death toll from this catastrophic weather event, in which a “bomb cyclone”—a rapid decrease in atmospheric pressure—carried temperatures far below zero and knocked out electricity supplies across the country. Bad weather of course depends on a multitude of factors, but commentators have been quick to detect the influence of an errant jet-stream that carried Arctic air southwards, in all likelihood a consequence of global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the emission of greenhouse gases. The deaths in Buffalo fit into a new pattern in which extremes of weather create situations that render emergency services effectively useless. Climate breakdown is upending formerly relatively predictable weather-patterns and it is eroding the safety mechanisms that we take for granted. It is not hard to imagine a similar event, whether of heat or cold, that would kill hundreds if not thousands of people, a die-off along the lines that Kim Stanley Robinson projects at the beginning of his 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future. We are entering a new and terrifying territory. None. |
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