July Was Officially the Hottest Month in Recorded History — NOW WHAT?
Introduction
I’ve been an environmentalist since college in the late 20th century. I have worked professionally, off and on, toward clean air and water through public policy. That actually kind of worked until it didn’t. Clean air requirements put in place in the 1970’s led Midwestern American factories to build higher smokestacks to disperse pollution so no local area fell above a certain limit of particulates. Then we found the side-effect was to hit New England in the form of acid rain, the first hint of a global problem. Ten years later came the dawning awareness of global warming.
At that point, I decided a more personal response was needed. I looked at solar panels for our single-family detached home, but ultimately decided to buy wind power from the local utility, so our household electricity is renewably sourced (still have gas heat and hot water). Then I bought a plug-in electric car, the Chevy Volt. (Later, my wife bought a Nissan Leaf.) And so, we made a dent in our personal carbon footprint. And unlike UN negotiations, this was all something we could do personally.
I was all self-congratulatory, and even spent time volunteering at “Drive Electric Week” events to try to get more people interested, and to push local governments to build more community charging infrastructure. It was a tough sale. (Most people would say, “um I’d like to BUT what about…” — more on that later.)
Then 2021 came along, and I thought, I need to rethink this. It’s taken me a whole year. This is the first part of an essay in three parts:
- The Unthinkable is Here; Thinking About the Unthinkable
- What I Did to Help (Not Enough); Who’s Not Actually Helping
- What You Can Do, What Can Be Done; How to Change Minds
THE UNTHINKABLE IS HERE
A frog in a frying pan, gradually heated, will burn to death rather than leap to safety. Or so goes the myth. But the effects of climate change are distributed and diffuse, and mostly happen to others (until recently). But the evidence is accumulating, and more people being directly impacted.
As we left for vacation in the COVID summer of 2021, I saw news reports that “July was officially the hottest month in recorded history. Well, not a surprise at this point, but eye-catching nevertheless. I live at the edge of Rocky Mountain area National Forests, watching with concern growing numbers of wildfires like the ones taking lives along the West Coast. This one, in 2019, was a mile away north of our house, and destroyed 10 or 20 homes. (Two others in last 20 years have burned up to the edge of the neighborhood.)
Shortly thereafter, we were at the beach on Cape Cod as the U.S. braced for Hurricane Ida. The flooding was bad in Louisiana but levees held in New Orleans. A sigh of relief, but then the tropical storm just kept moving north, losing hurricane force but not it’s accumulation of moisture.
We got the tornado warning on Cape Cod during the night, but mostly we were in the middle of the most intense rainfall I’d ever experienced, for hours on end. Then we found out about carnage before it hit Massachusetts. When it was over, more people were killed by Hurricane Ida in New York New Jersey and Pennsylvania than in Louisiana. Cape Cod was never considered hurricane territory. Before now.
A New Jersey resident posted — “So weird that that footage is not in tornado alley,” said John Emm, in a social media post, commenting on the Mullica Hill, NJ twister. This comment reminded me of an observation years ago by writer Bruce Sterling, that when “hottest ever” or “most moisture ever” statements appear in the news, it’s a sign right up in your face that climate change is real. I’ve been seeing those statements for some 20 years now, but it’s getting so much more frequent and the consequences more deadly.
As I was halfway through this article, another wildfire hit two neighboring communities in Colorado, completely destroying almost one thousand suburban homes, in neighborhoods that looked exactly like mine and now look like this.
It’s not that wildfires haven’t always been a part of nature. But they are occurring more frequently, are burning well beyond remote forest locations, and are displaying far more intense destructive power. It is a miracle that only two people died in a fire that destroyed 1,000 suburban homes. Paradise, California was not nearly so lucky.
THINKING ABOUT THE UNTHINKABLE — SEEING THE UNSEEN
Not only do I feel that I haven’t done enough, I’ve been struggling with how to even think about what’s happening and formulate some better responses. Maybe one thing that is starting to impact the popular consciousness is a whole new vocabulary.
- Snow-i-cane
Among other unusual makers of change, tropical storm Larry last year ended up reaching Greenland and causing snow for the first time. Several forecasters, described it as a “snow-i-cane.” Snow-i-cane is among the latest in the vocabulary of climate change, which maybe started with the word Anthropocene, but there are many more colloquial ones popping up on my radar in just last year or two.
- Monsoonal Rain
- Fireshed
- Heat Domes
- Rain Bombs
- Atmospheric River
The accumulating vocabulary helps, but the effects of climate change in people’s everyday life still is sporadic, and impacts happening elsewhere don’t feel immediate, no matter how many of the above neologisms or “hottest ever” headlines we see. I’ve observed some slight change in individuals who used to take the path of calling climate change a hoax — “I don’t think there’s a hoax. I do think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s man-made.” But overall attitudes in the U.SA. haven’t changed in 20 years. If we’re at 60% of the public seeing a problem, that underscores how hard it is to change public policy in this country on this issue given the current political gridlock. (More on this in Parts Two and Three.)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) turns out to have been right — we are living in their projections from 30 years ago. They predicted if we did not cut carbon emissions, and we haven’t, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere would rise from 354 parts per million (ppm) to 412 ppm in the summer of 2021.
And yet, who can wade through the density of data in the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Literally 3,675 pages. Even the ducks-and-bunnies version, titled “For Policymakers” (i.e. Congress or European parliament), is too dense to throw in front of a constituent. Are average joes getting it? More important, how do we know if our individual actions will mean anything?
Newspapers (or most web sites) are precisely about “NEWS.” Slow motion events are hard for them to convey or us to absorb. I found it interesting that exponential curves taught us to act in response to COVID — “flatten the curve”, and you could actually see it happening, and seeing the effects between states that acted aggressively and those that didn’t.
For climate, I have found “CO2_Earth” to be an interesting citizen-led initiative which puts out a Twitter feed with daily updates of today’s CO2 reading from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, compared to a year ago today. After watching about 6 months of depressing increases, usually around half of one percent, I recently noticed periodic reports that actually show a decrease for that day vs a year ago.
This might be a glimmer of hope. Also could be statistical noise, but I’m going to take it. While I am working on my personal efforts, there is also a patchwork of statewide (Colorado), national and international efforts at carbon emissions reduction which seem to be accelerating. Even unlikely states such as Texas are generating a much higher percentage of their electricity from renewables.
“Wind turbines and solar panels contributed nearly 39 percent of the power on the statewide grid, which is run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas,” reported the San Antonio Express News. “Solar generated 2,390 gigawatt hours of power, up 70 percent from the same time a year ago. That exceeded the total amount of solar power generated in Texas in all of 2017.”
At this point, signaling the good news is becoming more important than haranguing about the worst. The worst is already happening.
Part 2 of this essay will survey the nature and shortfalls of our current interventions, both personal and political, and Part 3 a call to individual action.
