A twitter thread about an article in Business Insider.
Originally tweeted by Insider (@thisisinsider) on July 28, 2022.
Earlier this month, a monster Midwestern thunderstorm called a derecho turned the skies over South Dakota a sickly green.
The new colors of the sky are so terrifying, they will spur us to action, @jetjocko says.
Here’s why. 
Images from the storm went viral and hit the news.
It all moved even faster than the storm itself — just as it did two years ago, when massive wildfires turned the skies over San Francisco a shade of Golden Gate orange.
Derechos, wildfires, and sandstorms have happened before, but not like this.
The difference: climate change, @jetjocko says.
Unseasonable, bigger, and more dangerous are hallmarks of the new world, where city skies are the color of a dead planet.
Climate change has been going on for a century and a half.
For most of that time, it has been so subtle that people couldn’t see it, or could ignore it.
But our color vision is tailored for survival.
When the sky turns green, we notice.
The colors we pay the most attention to were the ones that mattered most to our survival, @jetjocko say.
Not the ordinary colors that make up most of our world, like blue (sky, water) or green (plants).
Which means that, in a way, we stop noticing it.
We’re going to owe a kind of thank-you to the Earth’s scary new colorways — and to the evolutionary quirks of our eyes and brains that let us see color in the first place, @jetjocko writes.
We might not be built to attend to every incremental climate-change blip, but we’re built to notice (finally!) when the planet we evolved to see doesn’t exist anymore.
That’s probably what it will take, if anything is going to change, @jetjocko says.
Around the world, people living in countries on the front lines of the climate crisis and its effects — poorer countries in the global south, primarily — report more anxiety about climate overall.
They’re seeing the evidence more clearly.
If a single recalcitrant Democratic senator (and all the Republican ones) can stymie even the most basic policy changes to avert a planetary disaster of our own making, it’ll take pressure from all of us to change course, @jetjocko writes.
.@jetjocko‘s hope is that the new colors of the sky are so terrifying, they will spur us to action.
Subscribe to @thisisinsider to read more.
Originally tweeted by Insider (@thisisinsider) on July 28, 2022.
via Watts Up With That?
July 31, 2022
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