So it has been a couple weeks as usual since my last missive and, man, shit just keeps getting crazier in the United States, doesn’t it? I mean, yesterday, in the space of one day, A) it was reported that Donald Trump knew about a Russian bounty on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan and did nothing about it, B) also reported that he purposefully and knowingly allowed flawed Covid-19 antibody tests to circulate which led to inaccurate data about how quickly the virus spread, and C) also he retweeted a video of somebody shouting “white power” because he’s a huge racist asshole. In one day, all of that!

IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE WE TALKED ABOUT BAD CLIMATE CHANGE NEWS

But anyway, let’s talk about all the bad climate news of the past couple weeks. You remember climate change, right? The giant crisis that makes the coronavirus look like mild headache in comparison, and which will require a much more comprehensive, global effort and sacrifice to combat enough to ensure the survival of the human species? That climate change? Yeah, things are bad on that front.

Most notable right now is the problems in Arctic regions around the world, which are setting record temperature highs. In May, surface temperatures in Siberia were ten degrees Celsius above average, which is a mammoth increase; one town, which normally has a temperature of around zero degrees this time of year, recorded a temperature of 25 degrees Celsius. All of these are of course chartbreaking records that would be extremely unlikely to happen (in the mathematical sense) were climate change not involved. And it’s not just Siberia, either; most of the Canadian Arctic spent the month recording temperatures in between ten and fifteen defrees above the normal average.

These sorts of temperatures were predicted in most climate change models; however, most models until very recently projected these temperature rises happening by the end of the century. So we’re running ahead of schedule on the warming front - and not for the first time, as most major climate model revisions over the past twenty years have all had to adjust the severity level upwards as humanity keeps resolutely not doing nearly enough to reduce carbon emissions, to the point where most recent models have to include scenarios which reflect nine degrees of warming by 2100, which would be enough to drive humanity extinct in multiple ways, most prominently by destroying a lot of Earth’s oxygen generation capacity.

Sooo… all of this is bad.

THE CORONAVIRUS WORLD TOUR

Of course, Covid-19 is still a thing, obviously, and at this point you are probably aware of how bad things have gotten in the United States. (If you haven’t, the short version is that most of the country ended their lockdown prematurely, allowing the virus to re-surge to the point where new case growth is currently growing faster than ever hitting new records on a daily basis, and we haven’t even hit the worst part of it yet because the new cases mostly aren’t at the point - yet - where people start dying.) But let’s do a quick jaunt around the rest of the world and see how everybody else is doing, shall we?

In general, most of Europe is currently doing reasonably well and seeing their caseload peak or actively decrease. The outliers are Sweden (where they didn’t put lockdown policies in place and where the death count is relatively horrific) and the UK (which put lockdown policies in place much later than they should have). Similarly, in East Asia and Oceania things are mostly okay at this point. There have been new outbreaks (including one in China) but generally they have been quickly contained, because now people know what the signs look like and most of these countries have put contact tracing protocols in place to enable quick quarantine of anybody potentially infected in such circumstances. Where countries are still seeing caseload increases (like in Indonesia), the cases are growing slowly, which is a sign that quarantine protocols are working.

That is the good news. The middle news is in Africa, where most countries are doing relatively okay, in part because once first world travel shut down a lot of potential exposure for African countries went with it, and in part because one of the secrets of epidemiology nobody really talks about is that African countries are mostly very good at pandemic prevention because they have had to learn to be, given that a lot of the most dangerous epidemics of the twentieth century started in Africa and stopped there as well. There are a couple of countries with still-growing case curves - Ghana and South Africa are the big ones - but even in those countries, the new caseload is increasing far more slowly than it is in, say, Russia.

Speaking of Russia, it’s one of the “bad news” parts of a worldwide Covid update, mostly because at this point there is a general certainty among experts that Russia is lying about its case numbers for PR purposes. Russia’s official case numbers are steep, but generally decreasing; their death numbers, on the other hand, aren’t really decreasing at all - both their “official” Covid death count and their excess mortality rate. That speaks to a lack of testing or a lack of formal reporting in place.

Also bad: South Asia and the Middle East generally. India is the worst off right now, with new cases spiking over the last month (they have more new cases right now than anybody else, even the USA) and their healthcare system reportedly at maximum capacity with a lot more likely coming down the bend, which is a serious problem given how urbanized much of India is. But Pakistan and Bangladesh are still dealing with growth patterns that, while not as bad as unchecked growth, are still pretty bad (especially in Bangladesh, which is a very poor country). Iran and Israel are both dealing with what appear to be second waves, and Saudi Arabia’s growth pattern is pretty bad.

The worst, however, is probably in Latin and South America. You may have read about how putting an incompetent fascist-wannabe like Jair Bolsonaro in charge in Brazil may not have been a good idea, and it is certainly true that Brazil’s Covid growth has been rampant and that Bolsonaro has fired two health ministers who suggested that quarantines were necessary and that he ordered the government to take down the official Covid numbers website (a court later ordered it reinstated) and that he’s been in heavy conflict with regional officials who put lockdown protocols in place and he’s been touting hydroxychloroquine as a cure and that due to dramatic undertesting the case counts and death totals are definitely much larger than officially reported and wow that’s a whole lot.

But the problems in the region don’t start and end with Brazil. Mexico’s numbers are terrible, growing faster than anybody could be satisfied with, are almost certainly dramatically underreported and in spite of all that their Covid-19 fatality rate is more than double the global average. Chile, Colombia, Peru and Argentina are all having to deal with the same problem Canada has, which is that their very large and important neighbor (Brazil) is dealing with the pandemic very poorly, so even though their numbers are gradually slowing down they still have to implement very strict quarantine conditions because of the crazies next door just to keep things from exploding.

Basically, the end is nowhere in sight for most of the world.

OTHER STUFF THAT DOESN’T RATE A SUBHEADER OF ITS OWN BUT SHOULD BE MENTIONED

1. In Russia, there’s currently a referendum campaign which will A) enshrine opposite-sex marriage into the country’s constitution, B) hamstring term limits for the Presidency and C) specifically allow Vladimir Putin to run for even more terms as President. Putin has campaigned on his pension reforms, framing opposition to his continued ability to rule the country as opposition to old people getting pensions. The referendum looks likely to succeed, so that sucks.

2. Local elections happened in France this week, and the good news is that Greens and socialists were the big winners across the board, racking up a lot of wins and taking over a lot of municipal governance jobs. The bad news is that the National Rally (the current name for Marine Le Pen’s racist right-wing party) is calling themselves these days managed to win their first major municipal election, so that sucks. In both cases, though, the failure of Emmanuel Macron’s centrist LREM party to win any major victories at the municipal level bodes poorly for the next national election in 2022 (although two years is of course a lifetime in politics).

3. Poland is going to a second round of Presidential elections, with the current President, a merry right-wing dickhead named Andrzej Duda, going up against Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, after no candidate got 50% of the vote. Duda will still probably win another term in the runoff election and outperformed his first-round vote share in 2015.

4. Ontario’s legislative response to Covid-19, after saying it was important to reform private nursing homes (where most of the epidemic did its worst) and protect renters from eviction, was to table legislation weakening regulation on private nursing homes and make it easier for landlords to evict renters. Doug Ford: he ain’t shit and he ain’t ever been shit.

5. The “Dafonte Miller trial” happened, and I put the quotes there because Dafonte Miller was not actually the one on trial in this case, given that he is the civilian who got the crap kicked out of him an permanently blinded in one eye by off-duty cop Michael Theriault and Michael’s brother Christian. Christian Theriaut was found not guilty on all charges; Michael was only found guilty on the least charge of basic assault. Putting my lawyer hat on for a second, my general feeling is that Justice Di Luca wanted to extinguish any chance of appeal by taking the most piece-by-piece approach to the offenses (his spoken ruling lasted for well over four hours), which meant that most of the charges ended up not sticking - but Justice Di Luca also stated repeatedly that although he was unable to convict based on reasonable doubts, he also believed that on a balance of probabilities (which isn’t enough to convict) the Theriauts were indeed guilty, which is judge for “if you sue them, Mr. Miller, you will win.” So it’s not the best result, could be a lot better all things considered, but it is definitely a ruling that preserves the reasonable doubt standard (which does matter) and makes an appeal by the defendants enormously difficult while setting up a civil case that will likely succeed.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

We’re still binging our way through old seasons of Top Chef, in part enabled by my wife’s enormous crush on Tom Colicchio. But other than that, mostly it’s games news from me, in quick bites: Assemble With Care is very short and moderately easy but a sweet, satisfying and pleasant little journey. Griftlands is still in early access, but looks like a winner from Klei (who mostly make very good games, and this deckbuilding RPG is no exception). Star Wars Battlefront 2 is, like most of the Battlefront games, not very good; Divinity: Original Sin II is a subpar riff on Baldur’s Gate-style isometric RPGs. Black Mesa doesn’t do enough to update the original Half-Life to make it worth the price tag for me right now, although were it a couple bucks instead I might consider it in future.

Oh, and we started watching that new Perry Mason on HBO, and while two episodes is too early to really comment on any series, it’s good so far.

See you soon.