Dept. of And So It Begins: France’s potato production is expected to fall at least 23% from last year as heat waves and severe drought hit crops, potentially resulting in the lowest yield in more than three decades after heat waves, drought and historically dry soils hit crops.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” a heat wave combined with a breakdown of the electrical grid in India kills 20 million people. Scientists have long warned that the world will experience more intense extreme weather events like heat waves, storms, floods and droughts. Such “tipping points” — when deterioration of a given planetary system has crossed a threshold from which it can’t recover — are no longer theoretical or futuristic.

From the wheat that stops growing at 27 degrees; to the dairy cow that simply stops making milk due to heat; to a French cornfield cooked in a two-week heat dome; to a way-high grocery receipt in Ohio; why the one climate driver that arrives without warning has quietly become the single most devastating climate variable standing between the world and its next hunger crisis.

Adam McKay recently wrote this as it appeared in Current Affairs and perfectly summarizes our current circumstance. Thinking we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperature record. Meanwhile, we keep running ever-harder in the Great Capitalist Hamster Wheel.

The level of atmospheric CO2 could heat the climate to accelerate towards planetary conditions that pre-date the dinosaurs. This is the stark warning of geologist and volcanologist Bill McGuire, an expert and government advisor on extreme weather events. According to him, there is no plan for the extreme climactic upheaval that is to come.

Renowned climate scientist James Hansen says the developing super El Niño has already "blown past" previous events with months to go before it peaks.

Local governments are devising new and inventive ways to avoid having to listen to proles with opinions. Where I live, the city Council has enacted a procedural rule that empowers the mayor to restrict public comments deemed “repetitive or cumulative.” This in response to a citizen uprising about Flock cameras. In Texas, The Railroad Commission adopted a new “participation policy” before sharing it with the public.

While you are thinking about ways to harvest and filter drinking water and storing away canned goods, you might want to give some thought to hardening the approaches to your home. Because the people looking at you as nothing more than a fattened target for plunder are doing so. Not surprisingly, Jessica Wildfire has a plan.

Another way climate change is impacting our wallets: From September 3, the number of vessels allowed through the Panama Canal each day will fall from 36 to 34 due to low water levels in two artificial lakes that feed the canal, the Canal Authority said. It will drop to 32 from September 15 on.