Thread by @SnarkySteff

Getting real tired of people who don't understand that climate change is about more than just temperature. Weather patterns are changing, and it's killing people. The Dengue Fever outbreak in Southeast Asia is killing thousands this year and it's not going to stop. /1

But mosquitoes aren't weather, you say. Did you know that mosquito eggs can hatch in just a thimble / bottlecap full of water? That's all it takes to hatch dormant eggs. The great thing about the tropics was they had a dry season followed by the beautiful stormy wet season. /2

The trouble is, that's changed. Now, short bursts of rain happen periodically in the dry season - they didn't used to, not like this. And now it means that mosquitoes are hatching year-round, their populations are growing year-round, and their diseases are rampant. /3

See, I was in Cambodia just 19 months ago, and Thailand and Laos for 5 months before that. The Cambodian guest house I was in, they told me they used to get 7,000 mosquitoes caught in their property's pheremone traps each week -- but a decade later, & it's over 100,000 weekly. /4

And this year, Dengue Fever is killing people by the thousands in Southeast Asia. There is no effective vaccine. In the Philippines, Dengue has killed 120% more people in 2019 than in 2018 -- and at only 8 months into the year. /5 gulfnews.com/world/asia/phi…

But that's the really nefarious thing about climate change. It's not the big, horrible storms like the one that decimated the Bahamas recently -- it's the small, quiet ways it is destroying lives daily, like in how every mosquito bite can put the fear of death into you.

Mosquitoes aren't just a pest that fuck up your camping trip, they're the world's deadliest animal. And they're hatching more frequently, spreading more diseases, all because of weather patterns altering thanks to human behaviours. And that's a FRACTION of climate change. /6

A lot of places were experiencing a recent phenomenon, even my home city of Vancouver and other places here in Canada, where it seems like spring and fall have vanished -- that hot and cold seasons bled into one another with little "in between" anymore. /7

People love summer, sure, but what happens when you have those fast, skyrocketing transitions into summer is, food grows all at the same time instead of spacing out over a season. So you get multiple crops all ripening at the same time -- faster harvests, more rot. /8

With so much all ripening at once, it's hard for farmers to get the help they need to harvest, so more fruit are going bad on vines. It's hurting our food supply, yes, but it's also contributing to more climate change since food rot releases 23x more greenhouse gases than c02. /9

I mean, I've been to 25 countries in four years, and every single one was experiencing new climate patterns, new struggles, from changing weather, worsening storms, and severe shifts in temperature.

Climate change is happening. Denial is killing us. /10

But those of you denying climate change, what are you getting out of it? If you're WRONG, and we're RIGHT, and the world goes in the direction we're saying it is -- then what? A fucking horror show. That's what. How is gambling on us being right affecting YOUR life now? /11

I don't know, man. I don't have a solution. But there's another climate protest this Friday, and as much as it'll fuck up my week if I attend, because I'm self-employed and I'll have to work on my birthday weekend to make up for it, I'm gonna go. We have one planet. /FIN

APOLOGIES for tweeting a few of these a couple times -- my thread was broken and I had to repair it. Thanks for reading/retweeting.

For more information on my thread's main point about mosquitoes, please read:

macleans.ca/culture/books/…

@threadreaderapp Unroll, please