Aquarius Full Moon, Leo Solar Festival,
August 2019 Cosmic Weather Forecast
Welcome to the August 2019 Cosmic Weather Forecast, celebrating this month's Aquarius Full Moon and the Leo Solar Festival. Warm greetings from your co-editors, Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry.
Here in South Florida, it's been a long hot, humid summer. The Palm Beach International Airport registered 18.6 inches of rain so far this August. That's an average of 1.7 inches a day, 300% of normal rainy season rainfall. Jane and I have been swimming and gardening every morning in scorching steamy sunshine, and every afternoon like clockwork fast moving arrays of cumulus, nimbocumulus and cirrus clouds parade across the sky, followed by thunder and lightning and tropical downpours.
Last Sunday, the Universe treated us to a rare double rainbow perched over our house that lasted for a good hour or more, so we are confident we won't have to build an Ark anytime soon. (LOL) Jane is cleaning up the garden in preparation for another planting season next month. It's great weather for ducks but bad weather for gardening.
We are very very lucky so far this hurricane season, but elsewhere around the world extreme weather events are much more severe than our extraordinary rainy August.
In May the strongest cyclone to hit India in years, Cyclone Fani, made landfall, prompting the evacuation of more than a million people. Two days ago, Typhoon Lekima made landfall in China, displacing millions from their homes and killing at least 49 people.
Nearly half of India is suffering from severe drought this year. Much of India endured a killer heatwave in June, and on June 19, India's premier technology hub, the city of Chennai, with a population of 7 million, declared Day Zero, as all four major water reservoirs ran dry. Residents have been relying mainly upon water tankers to survive. Two years of deficient monsoon rainfall led to the crisis, which is ongoing.
Indian scientists say that this year's monsoon is also deficient, despite causing widespread flooding in Chennai and killing hundreds across wide areas of flooded South India. Scientists said that in the next few years, as many as a dozen of India's major cities could experience similar water crises. Indian scientists say climate change is occurring much faster than they predicted.
Western Europe and Scandinavia experienced brutal heatwaves in June and again in July, with record temperatures in many cities that have never had the need for widespread air conditioning. High barometric pressure accompanying winds sweeping in from the Sahara Desert triggered record temperatures across the Continent.
"Combining information from models and observations, we find that such heatwaves in France and the Netherlands would have had . . .extremely little chance to occur without human influence on climate," according to the multi-national study entitled Human contribution to the record-breaking July 2019 heat wave in Western Europe.
"It is noteworthy that every heatwave analysed so far in Europe in recent years (2003, 2010, 2015, 2017, 2018, June 2019, this study) was found to be made much more likely and more intense due to human-induced climate change," the report concludes.
Here in the United States, scientists are warning that numerous states are already experiencing the effects of a 2°C increase in temperatures, a level of warming that most scientists agree we must avoid in order to maintain an ecosystem equilibrium favorable to human beings and other oxygen breathing entities here on planet Earth.
"New Jersey may seem an unlikely place to measure climate change, but it is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation," according to an article that first appeared in yesterday's Washington Post. "Its average temperature has climbed by close to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1895 - double the average for the Lower 48 states."
"Over the past two decades, the 2 degrees Celsius number has emerged as a critical threshold for global warming. In the 2015 Paris accord, international leaders agreed that the world should act urgently to keep the Earth's average temperature increases 'well below' 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 to avoid a host of catastrophic changes."
The Post article points out that in 1895, before refrigerators, New Jersey was the ice producing capital of the Northeast, providing New York city and other metropolitan areas with the ice they needed for refrigeration. Skate sailing in New Jersey is about as common today as a medieval astrolabe at an astronomy convention, but it was once a signature sport there.
"The potential consequences are daunting," according to the Post article. "The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 2 degrees Celsius, virtually all the world's coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear."
"Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans - 34 million people - are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius mark," the Post article concludes.
Despite mounting evidence of accelerating climate change, and widespread calls around the world for immediate action to address the ongoing global climate emergency, climate has yet to become a significant political issue in the 2019 American Presidential primaries. President Trump continues to gut environmental protections and the Republicans are now the party of unlimited fracking and climate change denial.
Democrats in control of the House of Representatives have yet to pass any significant legislation designed to address the climate emergency, and Democratic leadership is determined to exclude any discussion of climate change from the Democratic Presidential primaries, despite the fact that there is overwhelming concern about climate change among Democratic voters.
Climate change action is the top issue for Democratic voters, according to an April national CNN poll.
"CNN found that 82 percent of registered voters who identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents listed climate change as a 'very important' top priority they’d like to see get the focus of a presidential candidate," according to Miranda Green writing for The Hill, a news organization dedicated to inside baseball reportage of all activities Congressional.
Democratic leaders haven't listened to their constituents at all.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez plans to introduce a resolution this week "that activists say would kill chances of a formal, DNC-sponsored debate devoted to climate change," according to Rebecca Leber, reporting for Mother Jones. "[P]erez has been reluctant to hold a climate debate, fearing it would lead to a proliferation of single-issue debates."
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has given us a clue.
The United States has spent more money in recent years subsidizing fossil fuels than it has on defense spending to perpetuate its global Empire.
"The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion," according to a recent article by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone.
Many experts define fossil fuel subsidies as financial or tax support for those producing or consuming fossil fuels. The IMF includes the cost of the damage the use of fossil fuels causes to health and the Earth's climate in their estimate of the total cost of fossil fuel subsidies.
This leads to an IMF estimate of $5.2 trillion of global fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, or $10m a minute. Ending the subsidies could cut global emissions by approximately 25%, according to IMF estimates, and cut the number of early deaths from fossil fuel air pollution in half.
“What we are doing is using taxpayers’ money – which means our money – to boost hurricanes, to spread droughts, to melt glaciers, to bleach corals. In one word: to destroy the world,” UN secretary general António Guterres contended in a speech at a May climate change conference in Vienna.
"These subsidies are largely invisible to the public, and don’t appear in national budgets. But according the the IMF, the world spent $4.7 trillion — or 6.3 percent of global GDP — in 2015 to subsidize fossil fuel use, a figure it estimated rose to $5.2 trillion in 2017," Rolling Stone's Dickinson reports. "China, which is heavily reliant on coal and has major air-pollution problems, was the largest subsidizer by far, at $1.4 trillion in 2015. But the U.S. ranked second in the world."
"Oil, gas and coal companies — and their stooges in public office — have long argued that making consumers pay for the full impacts of fossil fuel use would cripple the economy," Dickinson continues. "The IMF experts call bullshit on this idea, revealing that the world would, in fact, be more prosperous. Eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels would have created global 'net economic welfare gains' in 2015 of 'more than $1.3 trillion, or 1.7 percent of global GDP,' the study found. (These net gains are 'calculated as the benefits from reduced environmental damage and higher revenue minus the losses from consumers facing higher energy prices.')"
In fact, switching these subsidies to development of renewable resources and green technologies would trigger a global clean energy revolution, according to a new report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).
Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, according to the June IISD report entitled Reforming Subsidies Could Help Pay for a Clean Energy Revolution.
Who among the Washington elites has the strength of will and courage to confront the fossil fuel producers and their powerful lobbyists? Who will come forward and demand that we use our tax dollars to stabilize the Earth's ecosystems during a climate emergency instead of using our tax dollars to destroy the only human friendly climate system we know of in the Universe?
That is a question worth asking of every Presidential candidate, every candidate for Congress, and every candidate for public office across America in 2019 and 2020!
It is clear that only mass organizing and a mass movement across America will prod our leadership into action. The facts have been well known for decades. Exxon knew. Shell knew. So the top politicians must have known too. And they have not acted, but that is typical of American politics.
Look at the history of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. It was not the fact of economic collapse and depression or widespread suffering that caused America's leaders to act. Oh, no. It was a mass movement they found threatening.
"It was only after three and a half years of organizing had also created a political crisis, that the government began taking halting steps at serious change, marked by the policies associated with the First New Deal," explains Professor of Economics Martin Hart-Landsberg, in his article in the August issue of Monthly Review. In terms of contemporary lessons, this history should serve to dispel any illusions that simply establishing the seriousness of our current multifaceted crisis will be enough to win elite consideration of a transformative Green New Deal.”
It's the Aquarius Full Moon. Any one of us could be the hundredth monkey, any one of us could make a contribution to local election campaigns, local activist groups or local environmental organizations that could later prove prove decisive in shifting the balance of power in our own hometown.
During this Aquarius Full Moon week, let us join together in a global meditation to send love, light, wisdom and an energy stream conveying higher consciousness to leaders around the world, especially those who currently are too venal, too frightened, or simply too attached to the status quo to lead humanity into a New Age of Solar Energy.
Let us join our Guides, Teachers and Angels in meditation this Full Moon and let us send our prayers, our energy and our love in a highly directed stream to everyone in the world, with the intention that we may all be energized to join together to take courageous action to end the dominance of the fossil fuel aristocracy and replace their destructive products with new sources of energy.
Let us offer our gratitude to all those working tirelessly in one way or another to bring about a safe, successful transition from the Age of Hydrocarbons and Rampant Individualism to the New Solar Age of Aquarian Collective Consciousness, Compassion and Cooperation.
Let us resolve to join them! We are not dependent upon the powers in Washington to address this existential climate emergency. Our collective fate ultimately rests in our own hands, and it is time to own the responsibility for that! It is time to join with our neighbors, friends and family in demanding that politicians take the decisive action needed if humanity is to survive.
The Aquarius Full Moon, Leo Solar Festival is about Unity in Diversity. Each of us is part of a potentially limitless group potential, a collective consciousness that relies upon individual initiative to unlock the Divine Potential we all share as our birthright. Let us join together in meditation and in individual and collective action to address this climate emergency. That is our collective task and our collective responsibility -- and our collective path toward the manifestation of our Divine Potential and Higher Purpose here on Earth!
Join us in sending torrents of Violet Flame to humanity's collective consciousness this Full Moon, and in sending the purifying, cleansing and healing power of the Violet Flame to Mother Earth, for the Earth itself and all its elementals, devas, nature spirits and creatures are sorely in need of our assistance, our wisdom, our love, and our collective action.
Pisces Full Moon, Virgo Solar Festival Cosmic Weather Forecast
The Full Moon occurs on Thursday August 15 at 8:29 am Eastern time, at 22°24' of Aquarius, opposed by Sun conjunct Venus in Leo.
This spiritual festival brings an increased awareness of the polarization between Leonine individuality and individual empowerment, and Aquarian collective consciousness and Universal values.
We are each asked to meditate upon the ways we as individuals can achieve individual empowerment by participating in collective action designed to advance the common good, either through spiritual practices, selfless service to those in need, or political action designed to liberate humanity from suffering, injustice, greed, and war.
This is an auspicious time to join a group of individuals who share your values and begin to work together to improve conditions for everyone in the area where you live.
This is an auspicious time for group meditations, Reiki circles, and rituals to celebrate life!
Let us all be given golden opportunities to participate in the celebration!
The first three weeks of August there is a preponderance of fire energy, with Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars in Leo, all trine Jupiter in Sagittarius.
We all would like to move forward with our plans this month, especially after what has been for many a frustrating, fearful and challenging first half of the year. Many of us may be called to be of service to others during this fiery month of August, in true Aquarian fashion, and we will find we have renewed energy to help those most in need around us.
With retrograde Uranus in Taurus square Mercury in Leo, we may become involved in unexpected, highly volatile arguments with loved ones, family, friends and associates, so it's best to think before reacting to any provocations.
On a more positive note, Uranus-Mercury squares stimulate creativity. We may find ourselves inspired to try unconventional and even eccentric solutions to longstanding problems, and we may find that thinking outside the box leads to unexpected successes! So stay positive and be ready for flashes of intuitive insight that illuminate entirely new facets of intractable problems, and stimulate action in areas of your life where you've been stuck.
The Full Moon in Aquarius opposes Venus this week, and we may feel ourselves in the mood for loving, as sexual tension rises and we all experience increased desire to share and receive love in all its many forms.
This Full Moon week could signal the onset of a hot and steamy lovefest, but be careful not to let desires overcome common sense.
When Moon opposes Venus, relationship tensions can surface so it's best to practice patience, discernment and tolerance when dealing with loved ones. Moon opposite Mars provides a tremendous amount of energy which, if improperly handled, could be channeled into arguments that we would be better off avoiding.
There is immense positive energy available at this time to help us achieve more satisfying love life, enhanced creativity, and more productive financial arrangements. Any excess fiery energy could support athletic achievement or be directed into the upper chakras.
Spiritual practices designed to open the heart and connect with Unity Consciousness are especially favored, and the energy of the time is extremely favorable for connecting with a new community, new friends, new lovers, and new teachers or companions on our path of Spirit.
Meditation Moment: Love and Universal Life
"It is obviously not wrong for men and women to seek fulfilment in love. But why, then, do they so rarely find it?
After a moment of exaltation, of bliss, why do they meet with disappointment and bitterness? Because their love is not linked to the universal life.
In loving each other, their only thought is to separate from everyone and everything, even from heaven and all the intelligent entities who maintain and distribute the energies of love throughout the universe.
A love in which the forces of heaven do not participate already bears the seeds of its own destruction.
When they strive through their love to enter into cosmic harmony, to unite themselves with the universal soul by offering thanks and glory to heaven, lovers will find the plenitude they are seeking."
