Happy "Fri-yay" to everyone! 
Over the past week ago, the world was shocked out of its focus on evolving virus strains when the media launched an all-out assault on our sensibilities with headlines that screamed "Code RED for humanity!"
What they were referring to was not an alien invasion or zombie apocalypse but the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the climate crisis was propelling us to a point where, even with our best efforts, we would not be able to prevent an increase in global temperatures to over 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial times.
While such news may mean little to those who live inland on large expanses of land masses called continents, it does more than raise an eyebrow for small island developing states like ours which dot the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.
Our homes are where tropical cyclones go to visit on summer vacation and rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change have created an almost apocalyptic scene in several of our Caribbean territories during the past 5 years alone. (Dominica, Barbuda, Abaco remind us of the tragedy wrought by such climate-fuelled events.)
From seeing Category 5 hurricanes once in several decades, the Caribbean and Latin America have experienced at least 5 in as many years.
Hence, this post on climate anxiety caught my eye. Whether we acknowledge it or not, that sums up what many of our Caribbean people experience every year from 1st June to 1st December.
Hurricane season, as it is fondly called, is not a time for relaxation but for a flurry of activity such as heightened disaster preparation, monitoring of weather channels and purchasing of sandbags. A seemingly benign tropical storm can evolve into a menacing and destructive hurricane in a matter of hours and devastate a developing economy with loss of life and livelihood and leave in its wake damage to infrastructure worth billions of dollars - many times more than the victimised nation's annual GDP.
The author of the post on Mashable, Rebecca Ruiz, writes from a US perspective as she relates accounts of high temperatures triggering melting of ice sheets, deadly heat waves, wildfires that devour millions of acres of forest. However, her concerns of climate change and the resulting climate trauma can be applied to the Caribbean, the Asia Pacific region and other places where tropical cyclones love to party.
Take careful note of the following: "Burying negative emotions is commonplace in a culture that discourages pessimism about the future. It's hard to be the downer who talks about a world that could turn apocalyptic in a few short decades. What makes that conversation doubly difficult is the feeling that individual action can seem futile when politicians hedge their bets and refuse to act, whittling away the precious time we have left to stop releasing carbon into the earth's atmosphere...
Experts who study mental health and climate change say there are ways to cope with emotions and experiences that can be otherwise debilitating. The goal is to calm the body and mind, make meaning out of confusion and tragedy, and transform our own understanding of what the future may hold so that we can act in meaningful ways, individually and collectively."
https://mashable.com/article/h...with-climate-anxiety
Stay safe, Caribbean people. 
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