Climate Crisis in 2021

It’s crazy and terrifying how bad the environment has gotten. Wildfires on the west coast of North America, floods in Germany, fires in Greece, and more. Have any of you guys experienced this first hand this year? Or maybe just watching it from the news? For me I spent most of the summer in Vermont and the rest of the summer in Nebraska. It was hazy for several days in Vermont. I thought it was fog until I learned it was smoke coming all the way from the wildfires in the west coast. It was the first time I had been to Vermont so I didn’t really have anything to compare it to, but I was told it was unusually hot in June. Then July was cooler than June, which I thought was strange. When I came back to Nebraska, it was hazy for the first few days I got back. The haziness was also from the fires and it was super eerie and ominous. A few days after I got back, we got hit with a massive storm. Big thunderstorms are pretty normal here, but this one was really intense. I looked outside during it and the street was like a river. The water was so strong it was running uphill. A lot of downtown ended up getting flooded. My uncle lives downtown and his car was wrecked. There were people trapped in the basement of his apartment complex and they had to get divers to rescue them. I don’t know if you’ve seen the viral video of the people trapped in an elevator with water up to their necks, but that was in his apartment complex. Here’s the video, actually:

I don’t want to be a doomer. I really don’t. But this doesn’t feel like the planet I grew up on. Maybe it’s the climate crisis mixed with everything that’s happened these last two years, but it all seems so foreign to me. I get this feeling of dissociation, of unreality, that is terrifying. Does anyone else feel this way? Sometimes I feel like the only one. I don’t know, man. I’m just young and fear for the future.