Friday, June 25, 2021

OF HEAT WAVES AND TRAIN WRECKS

I’m on a train and I know it’s about to crash.  There is no way to stop the crash or to get off the train.  I can only brace myself and hope I will survive.

No. I’m not describing a vivid dream.   I’m describing how I have felt this week while compulsively checking and rechecking the weather forecast.

 

Here’s what it looks like today:

 


OK, so maybe the train wreck analogy is a bit dramatic.  I don’t expect to die of this heat wave or even sustain injuries.  But, I do feel like a sitting duck – nowhere to hide—and, come on, this is the Pacific Northwest, not Arizona.  

 

When I moved out here from New Jersey many years ago, I had lots of reasons, not least among which was NJ’s heat and humidity.  I may have grown up there, but (in those pre-air-conditioning days) I never got used to the summer weather.  The PNW would be perfect for me – the climate much like Scotland, the country my folks had left behind.   

 

And it worked out well for me.  Most years we would have one heat wave—generally in August—usually in the 90s – very occasionally over 100, and almost never lasting more than three or four days.

 

And then things started to change.  Was it two years ago or three that we had more than one heat wave?  I think we had three last year and we’re into our third one this year.  

 

Friends, it’s only June. 

 

What the ever-loving #&*%  ?

 

Last year, I finally gave in to my husband’s lobbying and agreed to have AC installed in the form of a heat pump.  I was not gracious about this.  Our house, after all, is surrounded by trees and generally stays quite cool.  Only our bedroom would get hot, and this only during the above-mentioned one heat wave per year.  For those few days, we could sleep in our lower level, which is always cool.

 

The truth is I don’t like air conditioning.  I am always cold when it is on.  But, I will be glad to have it this weekend.  Big trees notwithstanding, three days of 100+ temps, followed by multiple days in the 90s will cause quite a heat build-up.   

 

And there’s this.  The train wreck won’t kill us this weekend, but the wrecks will keep coming; they will keep piling on.  Heat waves and fires here.  Drought in California.  Melting glaciers causing rising sea levels.  You know the litany. I don’t need to spell out the dangers.

 

Climate change isn’t going to come in some far-off future. It’s here now. Last summer’s fires and accompanying smoke (which kept us indoors for a week) and this year’s heat waves have brought this home to me. 

 

I have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the JFK and MLK and RFK assassinations, the Viet Nam war, the gulf wars, 9/11, and four years of you-know-who in the White House.  All of these were awful.  But, nothing has scared or shaken me quite as much as climate change bringing its train wreck to my doorstep.  

 

I recently read a novel called The Ministry For the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.  It takes place in the near future, and opens with a description of an unsurvivable heat wave in India that kills a huge number of people.  The  description was so horrific that I had to walk away from the book for a while.  When I returned to it, I was relieved to find that the novel went on to posit many climate fixes.  In fact, it turned near utopian.  

 

Utopia seems unlikely. My wish today is simply that we and our leaders will wake up in time to stop the train wreck. 


May it be so.

 

 

 

 

4 comments:

  1. Yes, the climate is changing but it's still unclear whether this is due to human activities - just kidding! As even Pres. Biden has stated, climate change is an existential problem. Fortunately even skeptics are starting to see that it's more cost effective to deal with it than to bear the staggering costs of drought, wildfires and supersized weather disasters. I like to say there's always hope - until there's not. In his book "Collapse", Jared Diamond likens our current situation to a horse race and it remains to be seen who will win. Sort of like your runaway train metaphor.

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