Coronavirus certainly continues to be the main thing going on in current events globally. I just don’t have a lot of new or insightful things to say about it. Here’s some other stuff I read and thought about in July. WITH THE STUPID WORDPRESS BLOCK EDITOR, I CAN’T SEEM TO PUT A SPACE BETWEEN THESE PARAGRAPHS NO MATTER WHAT I DO. Most frightening and/or depressing story:

• Here’s the elevator pitch for why even the most hardened skeptic should care about climate change. We are on a path to (1) lose both polar ice caps, (2) lose the Amazon rain forest, (3) lose our productive farmland, and (4) lose our coastal population centers. If all this comes to pass it will lead to mass starvation, mass refugee flows, and possibly warfare. Unlike even major crises like wars and pandemics, by the time it is obvious to everyone that something needs to be done, there will be very little that can be done.

Most hopeful story:

• In the U.S. every week since schools and businesses shut down in March, about 85 children lived who would otherwise have died. Most of these would have died in and around motor vehicles.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

• The world seems to be experiencing a major drop in the fertility rate. This will lead to a decrease in the rate of population growth, changes to the size of the work force relative to the population, and eventually a decrease in the population itself.