Last summer was my first in my new apartment. I’d moved into the building in the fall, several weeks into a cool Vancouver November. The trees were bare, and our famous winter rain had set in for its months-long stay, but I stood on my balcony, looking out over the cityscape and mountains behind it, and thought: This will be heaven in summer.

Buildings in the Pacific Northwest are built for cold, despite our relatively mild winters. They’re made of wood and insulated, or of concrete, which retains heat naturally. Mine, a big block complex in a dense urban area, was concrete, completed only a year prior. When the building manager handed me my apartment keys, she explained the heating system. I asked about air conditioning, and she said the building didn’t have it, but that it wouldn’t be a problem. We were in Canada, after all.

Five months later, I received a notification on my phone’s weather app: An extreme heat alert was in effect for British Columbia. A spring heatwave was headed for the province, with temperatures expected over 30 C (86 F), nearly 20 degrees above the seasonal average. On May 14, I awoke in the morning from a fitful sleep and checked my thermostat: 29 C (84 F). An uncomfortable indoor temperature for a Southern Californian, but hell for a Northwesterner. My concrete home had become a sauna. That afternoon, I encountered neighbors in the elevator carrying box fans and portable air conditioners; the higher the floor they were stopping at, the more their agitation level seemed to rise. It unsettled me, but I still believed my building manager: I could survive the summer heat.

I was born in Vancouver in the late 1980s and have lived in the city most of my life. Vancouverites regularly bemoan our dreary climate, but anyone who’s lived in the Pacific Northwest long enough knows what makes living here worth it. When the rain finally lifts and the trees turn green, our corner of the planet transforms into a northern paradise. Summer’s long, light-filled days—even if they have historically lasted only a couple months—are enough to forgive the rest. When a cool ocean breeze blows in at 10 p.m. on a July evening, the sky still filled with color, anything feels possible.

Summer was always my favorite season here. As a child, I anticipated it with mounting excitement each spring, certain of its transformative potential. Summer meant freedom from school and the confines of a world determined by adults; it meant water parks and beaches, crushes and bike rides late into the night.

Two decades later, I feel differently. Like many in the Northwest, I’ve come to dread summer.

Solastalgia is a word many of us have learned, as the places we grew up in and the seasons we spent there have been irrevocably altered by climate change. It’s a word drawn from the past (the Latin solacium—“comfort” or “solace”—and the Greek algos: “pain”) to describe our present. It holds both our current grief for what has been lost and anticipatory grief for a world that will be even more changed.

Where Vancouver summers were once associated with clear afternoons and gentle temperatures—a calling card that made the Pacific Northwest a promising option for climate apocalypse preppers—they’ve become seasons of extreme heat, fires, and smoke. June, July, August, and increasingly even May and September now often bring long, scorching days and the distinctive orange haze of a smoke-blanketed sun.

For many British Columbians, the summer of 2021 was a psychological turning point. Fifteen years ago, I can’t remember a June day in Vancouver reaching anywhere near 30 C; in fact, between 1976 and 2005, the city averaged just one day over 30 C per year. But in late June 2021, British Columbia experienced a heat dome that saw inland temperatures soar to nearly 50 C (122 F), shattering heat records, killing hundreds of people, and sparking fires across the province, one of which destroyed the entire town of Lytton within hours.

In Vancouver, temperatures hovered at nearly 40 C (104 F) for days, with wildfire smoke adding to the suffocating claustrophobia. Public libraries became cooling centers, and stores across the province sold out of air conditioners. Climate data analysis suggested that the event would have been 150 times less likely without human-induced climate change.

Last year, while I baked in my apartment during the May heatwave, parts of British Columbia and neighboring Alberta again burned—an early start to a Western wildfire season that would be Canada’s worst yet. In June, Canada made international headlines when smoke from wildfires in Quebec traveled south, enveloping New York City and large swaths of the Northeast for days. By the fall, flames had scorched 16.5 million hectares.

I couldn’t afford the expensive air-conditioning units my neighbors had purchased, so I spent June, July, and August in a state of chronic sleep deprivation and mental stress. I didn’t realize how much the summer’s heat had affected me until late August, when the smoke started to roll in from British Columbia’s devastating inland fires, forcing me to keep my windows closed and my air filter running to mitigate it.

Being shut in in 30-degree weather undid me. I caved and purchased an air conditioner—on sale, to mark what would usually be the season’s end. I’m glad I did. September in Vancouver was also hot and smoky. Being able to cool down inside my home provided immeasurable relief.

This year, I’m better equipped psychically as well. As Canada emerges from the warmest winter in the country’s history, and drought fuels fires that have already forced thousands to evacuate in the West, I’m planning for the likelihood of days spent indoors, avoiding the heat and smoke. I know I’m privileged to have an escape. Like many Pacific Northwesterners, I’ve had to accept our new reality: Summer is no longer a time of freedom.

My solastalgia encompasses my grief not just for the climate I knew and how it has changed in my lifetime, but how I have changed in tandem. I mourn the Vancouver summers of my childhood but also the version of me that associated summer with pleasure and joy, instead of anxiety and danger.

I hope there will still be days when the sun sinks late over the Pacific on a cool evening and the future feels expansive, but I’ll experience them differently, knowing they’re a reminder of a fading season. The future they conjure will likely bring a different version of summer with it.

The post An Elegy for Vancouver Summer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California weather is harder to predict than it looks. Even Harris K. Telemacher came to learn that.

Telemacher was a Los Angeles TV weathercaster with an ocean of knowledge—he had a PhD in arts and humanities and quoted Shakespeare—but no real meteorological training. So, he assumed that California weather was predictable and decided to tape his televised forecasts weeks in advance, always promising sunny and warm days. This worked until an unexpected Pacific storm deluged the Southland during one of his pre-recorded forecasts.

Telemacher was a fictional character invented and inhabited by Steve Martin in the classic satire L.A. Story. But he embodied a real-life cliché that needs retiring.

California weather has never been as predictable as a Steve Martin gag—especially when it comes to the rain and snow of Golden State winters like this one.

In fact, no state in the lower 48 sees as much variability in its year-to-year precipitation as California. Such variability makes our weather at least as unpredictable as anything else in this volatile state. Last year, California was in the midst of the driest three-year run in recorded history when NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published a seasonal forecast for a drier-than-average winter. Instead, we experienced one of our wettest winters ever.

Now, another winter of weather surprises has arrived, demonstrating that California desperately needs better seasonal forecasts so we can plan and protect ourselves in this era of climate change.

Seasonal forecasts are not the predictions of tomorrow’s weather that you see delivered on your TV by Telemacher and his present-day imitators. Seasonal forecasts provide a range of possible weather and climate changes for the next season on the calendar, usually about a month or so in advance. (Federal agency forecasts for winter are usually out by Halloween.) Meteorologists will tell you that while it’s impossible to tell you the weather on a particular day months in advance, they should be able to predict, broadly, how wet or dry the next season should be.

But that’s always been hard to do in California. Lately, it’s become even harder because of the state’s “weather whiplash”—the term that the Public Policy Institute of California has used in recent years to describe the seesawing we’ve seen between flood and drought.

Our current inability to predict seasonal wet conditions makes it harder to manage water supplies (we need to store more in wet winters to prepare for drier years), prepare for disasters (including unpredictable floods, like the one that recently inundated San Diego), and do long-term economic planning for agriculture, which supplies food to the entire nation.

It’s not just winter weather that’s hard to foresee. Predicting scorching heat, as the state’s daily average maximum temperature rises by more than 4 degrees, is difficult. Impactful heat waves, called Heat Health Events, are expected to increase in frequency and duration, especially in the Central Valley and Sierra. Calling those ahead of time could be a matter of life and death.

But improving seasonal forecasts is easier said than done. Even the most advanced meteorologists have struggled with making seasonal forecasts. Indeed, recent studies, now getting attention in California policy circles, suggest that our state and its meteorologists need a better understanding of the peculiarities of the Pacific Ocean to improve their forecasts.

Making expectations about how much rain or snow is likely to fall in California depends on predicting atmospheric patterns over the northern Pacific Ocean. To do so, meteorologists have tended to look at sea surface temperatures in the South Pacific and the phenomena known as El Niño and La Ninã. Warm temperatures, or “El Niño” conditions, were believed to herald rain. Cool “La Niña” conditions were thought to signal a dry winter.

But a recent paper highlighted by PPIC, with authors from UCLA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, found that El Niño conditions don’t explain most of the variability of our weather. To cite one example, tropical sea surface temperatures and conditions were very similar in 2021–22 and 2022–23, but the first winter was dry and the second was one of the wettest in history.

“It remains elusive how predictable the year-to-year variability of CA winter precipitation is and why it is challenging to achieve skillful seasonal prediction of CA precipitation,” the paper said.

According to its authors, to arrive at more accurate seasonal forecasts, scientists need a better understanding of the ocean’s “circulation anomalies,” which are deviations in averages and expected conditions independent of El Niño. Current climate models, the paper argued, “show nearly no skill in predicting these,” which means that they have “limited predictive skill for California winter precipitation.”

The paper also argued that current climate models can’t predict patterns that stem from tropical convection (i.e. tropical clouds and thunderstorms) or the stratospheric polar vortex. This means that for better seasonal forecasts, meteorologists need a better understanding of conditions and patterns not only in the relatively nearby western Pacific but also in waters as far away as the Indian and Arctic oceans.

How do we achieve this?

One answer is to devote more time and resources to observing oceans, sea ice, and clouds—and their impacts on precipitation. Another answer is to employ better computer capacity and artificial intelligence to build better climate models. This is a planetary problem—if you want better predictions of California precipitation, you need to improve modeling and data for the climate of the whole earth.

But such improvements won’t happen fast. So, for at least a few more winters, we’re stuck with unreliable seasonal forecasts and unpredictable weather.

The post In California, It’s 72 With a Chance of “Weather Whiplash” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On December 30, 2021, residents of Curtis Bay, a neighborhood in southern Baltimore, felt a loud boom. The foundation of the row homes and two-story buildings shook as though there had been an earthquake. Instead, a fireball had exploded, engulfing the south service entrance of a tunnel at the CSX coal pier. Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) issued a cease-and-desist to CSX, a multi-billion-dollar rail corporation, due to poor air quality and the damage to the structure. But once MDE agreed that the air quality levels were acceptable, the agency deemed the incident under control, and allowed CSX to continue with business as usual.

The primary cause of the explosion in Curtis Bay was methane gas buildup and coal dust in the coal silo towers. CSX claimed it was an isolated incident. But the massive explosion illustrates the ways that existing state environmental regulatory apparatuses fail to adequately protect community residents from polluting industries, whether out of a lack of political will or of resources to regulate.

In response, Baltimoreans have taken matters into our own hands. Bringing together a coalition of residents and environmental/climate justice movements, we have built a direct action and long-term campaign that highlights the importance of solidarity across Baltimore communities and state lines, and that connects all nodes of the commodity chain. This on-the-ground work can serve as a model for other communities in the worldwide fight to breathe clean air and drink unpolluted water.

The neighborhood of Curtis Bay has long been Baltimore’s “sacrifice zone”—an area whose residents, largely communities of color and poor whites, bear the brunt of the pollution and adverse health effects that stem from industrial development. In the late 1800s, the neighborhood stored guano harvested from nearby islands to fertilize Maryland’s tobacco-farming lands. This evolved into chemical and fertilizer companies, and today we see non-renewable fossil fuel storage and export, the nation’s largest medical waste incinerator, the city’s landfill, and more than 15 other polluting industries. The open-air coal pier is just one more hazard among many. The neighborhood has the highest respiratory illnesses from toxic stationary emissions in the entire U.S.; at this year’s Earth Day celebration in Curtis Bay, one resident noted: “We have seen people spitting up black dust. We wash cars and a quarter inch of dust layers our cars … I pulled 400 pounds of coal dust out of my gutter.”

After the CSX explosion, Curtis Bay residents held two city council hearings to ask for governmental enforcement of environmental and human health regulations. At the first, the representatives from CSX failed to show up. At the second, residents were only given two minutes to speak. The representatives from CSX were given far more time to assure residents that they had increased the tunnel’s airflow, and that no more explosions would take place.

After the meetings, the city council made the decision not to require MDE to impose additional regulations on CSX. This wasn’t surprising, given that the agency was in the process of being defunded by then-governor Larry Hogan to the point where it was incapable of regulating industries and protecting residents from hazards. Beyond just CSX, Maryland residents are seeing an uptick in hazardous chemical leaks and explosions. This May, between 50 and 75 gallons of nitric acid spilled from a vacuum truck owned by W.R. Grace Chemical; despite complaints from residents about foul odors, coal dust, and other toxins, MDE has failed to investigate the incident.

Given this inaction from both MDE and city government, residents of Baltimore have had to take matters into our own hands.

First, we studied other cases. In Richmond, California, city council members held federal railways accountable and moved towards covering coal dust on trains and protecting communities. In November of 2021, the City of Richmond reached a historic agreement with the Levin-Richmond Terminal Corporation to phase out storage of coal and petcoke, a byproduct of oil refining that burns similarly to coal but with even higher carbon emissions, by the end of 2026.

Next, we held two protests at the Curtis Bay CSX Coal Pier to galvanize city-wide support for a broader campaign against the transport and storage of coal in Baltimore. At the second protest, borrowing tactics from the U.K.-headquartered movement Extinction Rebellion, we sang Christmas carols that focused on the fossil fuel industry’s role in exacerbating the climate crisis, and hung a banner on the gate to the coal facility that read “No Coal for Christmas.”

Curtis Bay residents are also filing a class action lawsuit against CSX, seeking damages and accountability following the explosion. The complaint also seeks to create a medical monitoring fund, because residents’ exposure to coal dust, lead, arsenic, silica, and particulate matter creates an increased risk of developing latent illnesses, including cancer.

Finally, the Curtis Bay Community Association and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust (SBCLT) have been working with a team of scientists to collect real-time air pollution and meteorological data from residential and industrial areas of Curtis Bay, and are using trail cameras to capture activities at the CSX Coal Terminal. Their monitors and data have been used to get MDE to do their job: Many of the scientists have been in direct contact with representatives from MDE to illustrate “unsafe” plumes in the air or elevated levels of PM 2.5 and PM 10, and have been encouraging them to declare an air quality emergency. But even with the data, action and regulation have been an uphill battle.

In an era of austerity, in which environmental protection agencies have been gutted, residents and citizen scientists are having to do the work of government agencies. But global supply chains are far bigger than the jurisdiction of a given regulatory apparatus. While these actions within Baltimore are important, it is also essential to build long-term, solidaristic connections with other impacted communities along the CSX coal line and supply chain—to make a movement that links labor exploitation of coal workers and train conductors to residents living in sacrifice zones. Those of us from affected areas must penetrate regional, state, and even international bounds in our resistance. In the upcoming months, we will follow our political commitments along the rail lines, traveling to Appalachia to better understand labor conditions within CSX and in other communities impacted by coal dust. Eventually, we hope to bring about a massive work stoppage or regional strike, and then incorporate the labor struggles of places where our coal travels, like Japan and Brazil.

By building a climate and environmental justice movement at the intersection of extraction zones, labor, and impacted communities, we hope to build worker and community power and capacity to move toward a more sustainable future.

The post The Fireball in Baltimore That Ignited a Climate Justice Movement appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hawai‘i is a spectacular place—not just visually exciting, but also located above incredible geological forces and beneath amazing atmospheric conditions. As a meteorologist who reports on earth science news, I call the Aloha State home because of the multiple scientific processes that come together here every day to create a true paradise.

The casual joke shared among locals is that we live on an island that is actively trying to kill us. Hawai‘i has a long history of epic natural disasters and will be a home for earthquakes, tsunamis, flash floods, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions for thousands of years to come. But the wildfire tragedy on August 8 on Maui has turned the joke on its head, leaving my neighbors and me to wonder whether it’s more than just nature that doesn’t have our best interests at heart. Why don’t leaders take better advantage of our vast scientific knowledge to prevent future catastrophes?

I live in Waikoloa Village on the Big Island of Hawai‘i’s west coast, which the Hawai‘i Wildfire Management Organization declared one of the communities most at-risk of fire in the state. Here, down-sloping, east-to-west trade winds tend to warm and dry the air, leading to an abundance of warm sunny days year-round. But when the atmospheric pattern is just right over the Pacific, as was the case when Hurricane Dora passed well south of Hawai‘i on August 7, 8, and 9, those winds can be fierce, potentially damaging, and extraordinarily dry. The same is true for many other leeward (downwind) communities in Hawai‘i in the shadows of old volcanic mountains that blunt most precipitation away to the windward (wind-facing) side.

Waikoloa Village, a community of about 7,400 people sitting about 900 feet above sea level, is also uniquely situated on ancient lava flows from two volcanoes. Over time, invasive grasses introduced by ranchers and landscapers have spread on what was once a completely barren landscape, coming to life in infrequent rainy periods, and going dormant or dead for most of the year.

The community is packed tightly together in a mix of one- or two-story homes of wooden frame construction, with larger parcels and condominium complexes here and there. It is essentially a giant cul-de-sac, with a single road leading in and out. During a 2021 evacuation event in which fire threatened the village, many were trapped in traffic for hours. Fire fighters successfully fought that battle, but we cannot rest peacefully knowing they may not prevail next time.

Maui’s Lahaina, like Waikoloa Village, had previous experience with wildfire threats. Yet in both places, there have been few policy changes or necessary investments in recent years: no substantial changes to building codes, evacuation programs, communication systems, or land use issues where flammable invasive vegetation runs rampant. Many utility lines, including several that run on poles through the grassy regions upwind of Waikoloa Village, remain exposed to the elements, as was the case in Lahaina, where electrical sparks ignited the recent tragedy there. On Hawai‘i Island, government officials make promises for Waikoloa Village, but have done little beyond permitting new construction and inviting in new residents. Commitments and deadlines to install emergency sirens, roadway improvements like traffic lights, and the construction of new roadways to improve evacuation routes come and go with the regularity of the trade winds.

The author’s backyard is surrounded by a tinderbox of flammable invasive grass. Photo by author.

There is a sincere sense of loss in our state after the August 8 fires. But in addition to missing hundreds of people, we’re also missing out on a sense of urgency, purpose, and intent to prevent the next disaster. This is inexcusable, in part because we have the forecasting technology and knowledge to make better broad policy decisions as well as to sound the alarm in advance of specific events, like the August 8 fire, as well as broader threats, like the current drought.

We are currently in the midst of ENSO, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a recurring climate pattern involving changes in the temperature of waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Over an ENSO period ranging from about three to seven years, the surface waters across a large swath of the tropical Pacific Ocean warm or cool by anywhere from 1°C to 3°C, compared to normal. This oscillating warming and cooling pattern directly affects rainfall distribution in the tropics and can have a strong influence on weather across the United States and other parts of the world. El Niño and La Niña are the extreme phases of the ENSO cycle; between these two phases is a third phase called ENSO-neutral.

While these phenomena impact the entire United States, Hawai‘i may find itself particularly vulnerable to bad weather this year, as a wet La Niña fades and a dry El Niño arrives. In May, Kevin Kodama, hydrologist at the Honolulu office of the National Weather Service, shared their 2022-2023 Wet Season Rainfall Summary. According to Kodama, the October–April wet season in Hawai‘i was an unusual one, starting off with severe or extreme drought in portions of all four of Hawai‘i’s counties, which gave way to the state’s ninth wettest wet season over the last 30 years. The Big Island saw the most rain, with rainfalls recorded at 130–170% of average.

Now, the National Weather Service is predicting an active 2023 hurricane season combined with severe drought by the end of dry season in October. Drought is most likely in the leeward areas, especially in Maui County and the Big Island—the two islands that saw fires break out on August 8. The bumper crop of invasive grass and scrub that blossomed earlier in the wet season is becoming a wasteland of drying fire fuels.

The forecast is crystal clear: Meteorological ingredients will conspire for ripe fire weather conditions in the months ahead. More lives could be at risk. And even as it is so obvious to forecasters and the public at large that more disasters are coming, the outlook on what the government will do, if anything, is cloudy at best.

Thus far, rather than capitalize on the loss, the media attention, and the tremendous amount of federal aid coming in, leaders here are digging their heads into the sand, doing what they did ahead of the Lahaina fire: hoping that disaster doesn’t happen. And because of that, the aloha spirit is being severely challenged, allowing a fog of anxiety and anger to rise. For this meteorologist, the overall outlook for Hawai‘i isn’t as sunny as it should be.

The post Will Hawai’i Succeed in Killing Me? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first time I met someone from Tucson, Arizona, I asked him a burning—pardon the pun—question. How did people there tolerate the summer heat? I pictured my childhood summers in Denver: hours-long games of “ghost in the graveyard” with my cousins, backyard badminton, and Frisbee at the neighborhood park. None of that would be fun in triple digits. He replied that it was easy: You just stay indoors. “It’s like winter in other places—a season where you can’t do anything,” he said.

In an unexpected twist, I now live in Tucson, which, along with much of the Sunbelt, has seen record-breaking, triple-digit days this summer. The media coverage of this extreme heat has, rightly, focused on those who are most vulnerable to high temperatures’ impacts: unhoused individuals, seniors, those with chronic illnesses, and in under-resourced neighborhoods, and the 20% of Arizonans who work outdoors. In Europe, where the temperatures are unprecedented, new research has raised concerns about how the absence of widespread air conditioning makes Europe unprepared for increasing heat.

But in the Sunbelt, most people have A/C. According to the Energy Information Administration, 94% of Arizona households use air conditioning, along with 95% of Texans and 96% of Floridians. That doesn’t mean that those of us who are healthy, housed, and work indoors are spared any need for heat-related concerns. But it does mean that the recommendation for tolerating the extreme heat is simple: Stay indoors.

The effect of this is that the experience of extreme heat isn’t dominated by danger, stress, or even grief, but something simpler and more surprising: Extreme heat is boring.

Discovering this made me think a little harder about what my Tucsonan acquaintance had said. Arizona summer wasn’t like winter—because winter wasn’t boring. Colorado not only had winters, but had built a massive economy around the season’s sports. Winter was full of activity. My brother and I took a “ski bus” to the mountains six Sundays each year. When local news announced a snow day, we went sledding and built forts. Once, when an unusually thick layer of snow had collected, my P.E. teacher led us into a forgotten basement room that held dozens of pairs of aging cross-country skis and boots, which we fitted to ourselves haphazardly. We spent class gleefully gliding around the school’s soccer field.

In contrast, one July weekend in Tucson, my partner and I collapsed into our couch after breakfast and couldn’t think of anything to do. Habituated to reading in bed in the early mornings, we missed the short, slightly cooler window of time that our neighbors used for walks. We liked to swim, but over the course of May and June, the nearby high-school pool had warmed to a temperature so hot it felt dicey to swim laps there. We considered driving somewhere, but I felt guilty about releasing more fossil fuels into the suffocating atmosphere simply so I could find marginally cooler temperatures. So we sat there, groaning, our sweaty thighs adhering themselves to the cushions.

At the time, I was reporting an article about heat in Tucson’s manufactured homes, many of which were built before federal standards for insulation were enacted. During my workdays, I was knocking on doors at run-down parks, asking people whether their home was too hot. But nearly everyone I spoke to had some form of air conditioning—even if operating it was a financial burden. Some of them mentioned that the biggest problem was blackouts, which affect manufactured homes disproportionately because entire parks are often connected to the electrical grid with a single hookup.

But while things were functioning, they, too, were bored. One woman told me that her family of three spent the summer in just one room, because they had only one window unit. Another mother and daughter invited me in for a glass of water. Their home was too temperate for an on-topic interview; they just wanted someone to chat with.

Evenings weren’t much better than weekends. The Tucsonans I had spoken to about the heat upon arriving in the city had assured me that things cooled down at night. In reality, the temperature rarely dropped below 86—the temperature at which I kept my own aging air conditioner, heeding the dictum that home units can only reliably cool 20 degrees. That meant running the air conditioner all night, which we hadn’t expected. In other places I had lived, I had always enjoyed opening the windows to let in cool air at night. As we struggled to adjust to sleeping with the stale air and loud intermittent fan, I longed for the crisp summer evenings of my childhood, for sitting outside rubbing my bare arms and thinking I should go put on a sweater.

Later, Arizona Daily Star environment reporter Tony Davis told me that there used to be a more reliable nighttime cool-down in Tucson, but it’s long since been a casualty of the urban heat island effect. Though high daytime temperatures get the most media buzz, it’s warmer nights that are accounting for the greatest warming trends across the Western U.S. Tragically, the loss of cooler nights is also killing saguaros.

I knew that hot nights made me sad. I quickly learned that they were also boring. During weekdays, my computer kept me busy, accompanied by ungodly amounts of flavored seltzer and occasional forays into the infernal backyard, just to feel something. But after work, I got cabin fever—or perhaps it should be more precisely termed “climate ennui.” I was too brain-dead to read. I ran out of shows to watch on Netflix. I scrolled and scrolled until it really felt like my brain was empty. I started going to the grocery store multiple times a week, to have a diversion that wasn’t sedentary.

Hardier desert-dwellers than I will roll their eyes at my lack of stamina and creativity, pointing to the hikes at dawn, the nighttime bike rides, the self-congratulatory pleasures of simply sweating it out. But what we’re living in now is no longer the old desert heat they know and have loved. As each successive heat dome drags on longer than the last, I suspect that even the most committed desert rats will have no choice but to spend more and more time indoors.

Ennui is famously an affliction of the privileged. But those of us who are privileged enough to suffer from climate ennui—for whom extreme heat is not life-threatening—are numerous. We are a class that could be mobilized, lashing out against our boredom. Where anger, grief, and reminders of our “grim reality” have failed to effect widespread climate activism, perhaps pushing back against boredom could do it for us.

In demanding a world where we’re not trapped indoors, twiddling our thumbs in front of vents of cool air, we would also be demanding a world with the housing and health care justice necessary to address the already-present and already-worsening effects of heat. Instead of thinking of our retreat into air-conditioned homes as a means of turning away from the reality of climate change, we should lean into the boredom it creates—in order to reject it.

The post Extreme Heat Is Boring appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The environmentalist Paul Hawken says, “The most complex, radical climate technology is the human heart and mind, not a solar panel.” What would it mean to imagine the heart and mind as the most important green technologies, and to invest in them? To broaden our idea of climate action beyond the tunnel vision of international agreements and infrastructural solutions?

These “technologies,” if you will, are not new; they apply ancient wisdom to our current moment and shift our attention toward connection, not (just) reducing emissions, as the medicine for what ails us and the planet. If a technology is merely an application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, then all kinds of approaches can be technologies.

Increasingly understood as science, too, many wisdom traditions offer a compass for such an endeavor—including traditional ecological knowledge, Theravada Buddhism, and Black spiritual traditions. These ways of understanding the world come from a variety of cultures and perspectives, but they all reframe the climate “polycrisis” (because it is not one crisis but a constellation of many) from a problem of individual suffering into one of collective strength.

Many of us feel powerless about climate change, in part because we feel small relative to the immense scale of the crisis. I often hear people ask, “Why should I deprive myself of X pleasure or Y entitlement, when it won’t really make any difference?” Such a narrow focus on individual impact reveals how much the myth of individualism constricts us. If we believe ourselves to be alone in everything we do, of course, we are too small to address a systemic, global problem. This explains why such a large number of people in America care about climate change, yet so few are doing anything about it in their lives.

We don’t just worry about the climate when disaster strikes; we worry because we feel alone in facing it. Contrary to appeals to “transform your anxiety into action,” studies have shown that it isn’t action itself that alleviates anxiety; it is the experience of participating in a collective toward a shared goal.

A “deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship,” or “species loneliness,” as Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer defines it, is arguably at the root of our polycrisis, but it may also be the reason we struggle to face it.

One solution is to first recognize, then take solace in, and then do the work of honoring that we are part of a larger system of human and non-human beings, across both space and time. We can start by cultivating an “ancestor perspective,” not unlike the Haudenosaunee notion of an ethic of “seven generations.” This means seeing ourselves as existing in a temporal frame that gathers entities together in a net of moral obligation much larger than a lone individual’s lifespan.

In his recent book, Reconsidering Reparations, the climate philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò writes that an ancestor perspective “helps ground a kind of revolutionary patience while, at the same time, rejecting complacency.”

How does this work? For someone like me, a descendent of white settlers and abolitionist Quakers, the invitation is to reckon with the legacy of harm I carry, and recognize that I can choose which of my ancestors’ calls I want to answer, which projects I want to move forward in my short time on this earth. It is also a reminder that my descendants will do the same, and that I need not finish it all in one lifetime.

Such a perspective dispels the illusion of the self-as-island. It soothes despair because we see how many good intentions and actions have come before us, are occurring alongside us, and will continue long after we are gone. This perspective is both a moral obligation and a cause for existential relief.

We can feel buoyed that we are not alone in our efforts, too, when we recognize that we are part of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called a “network of mutuality,” Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing,” and Indigenous epistemology recognizes as “all our relations.”

Consider, for example, Kimmerer’s question: “[W]hat would happen, I wonder, to the mountain of junk mail if we could see in it the trees it once had been?” If your community’s livelihood or health depended on the tree that was used to create a mountain of junk mail, you would grieve for it. You would act to protect it. This kind of recognition honors our entanglement with the material world; everything we touch and are made of came from somewhere, and will go somewhere after we experience it.

Individualism seduces us to imagine we’re free of these entanglements, but consider this science: investment in social ties, community trust, and strong relationships is more predictive of our ability to survive a natural disaster than strong physical infrastructure. Care is a more critical ingredient to climate resilience than concrete.

Further research has shown that the most important factor in a person’s survival in a disaster is how well they know their neighbors. And we are more likely to take actions to protect the natural environment if we know our more-than-human neighbors, too. Rather than seeing interdependence as a burden, we can come to see it as a practice of self-preservation.

In “The Parable of the Burning House,” from Buddhism’s Lotus Sutra, a wealthy man tries to get his children out of a burning house, but they are so distracted by all of their toys that they don’t want to leave. This parable has been used to describe people who are unwilling to let go of their attachments in order to see, much less save, the world around them. In this era of social media, simulacra, and selfies, a more apt description might be that we are playing with mirrors, not toys. Distracted by our own self-image at every turn, we cannot perceive, much less address, the problem.

What we need is a cultural container to process collective trauma. This technology won’t directly draw carbon out of the atmosphere. But it does get to the root of our polycrisis in a way that climate science does not.

All of these ideas are very humbling. But humility offers more riches than it costs. Those of us who have benefitted from individualism may struggle to let it go. Ultimately, not all climate actions are not about personal sacrifice. Ideally, they can be about what is both personally and collectively gained.

The post There Is No ‘I’ in the Climate Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How did India do it, and how might the country’s entrenched bureaucracy point the way toward cleaner energy futures around the world? Such wide-reaching advances change everything from daily commutes to the way people cook—change that seems likely to affect us all.

These were the big questions and ideas explored at a virtual Zócalo/Issues in Science and Technology event yesterday featuring sustainable development expert and SED Fund program director Kartikeya Singh, moderated by Issues editor-in-chief Lisa Margonelli. Singh, who is also the author of a recent Issues article on the subject, “Bureaucracies for the Better,” joined from his home in The Hague, and drew upon his extensive experience working with academics, policy experts, and ministries in India, his country of birth.

“In the last 15 years India has been transformed,” Singh noted. In 2006, while on a fellowship in New Delhi, Singh first saw the need for the nation to balance cleaner growth and energy poverty. “How could a country like India address climate change when 500 million people didn’t have access to electricity?” he asked. At the time, most electrification efforts focused on decentralized, community-level solutions—moving from kerosene to solar lanterns, from animal-powered to small, hydro-powered processes.

But Singh described a couple of major turning points. In 2018, India realized its goal of bringing electricity to 500 million more people, getting wires and poles to every home in the country. This “electrify everyone” campaign demonstrated the possibilities of harnessing the power of the larger government bureaucracy. “Perhaps,” Singh said, “we just need to change the mandate of that bureaucracy to become cleaner, more sustainable.”

That turning point followed a global one in 2017, when renewable energy became cheaper than coal. This, Singh explained, began a mass exodus from the coal-centered economy. Institutions, like the Ministry of Coal, locked into the coal-dependent energy sector were “left holding a bag of stranded assets and debt” he said. But rather than leaving these institutions for dead, Singh argued that their business plans need to reorient to cleaner energy. He sees an opportunity for big bureaucracies like the Indian government to use their breadth and infrastructure to deliver renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.

“How do you get a bureaucracy to do this?” Lisa Margonelli asked. It “requires political will to really mandate a pathway to transition,” Singh said. He predicted that in 50 years or so, such a pathway may take us to a point when a government agency for coal is obsolete—not just in India, but everywhere.

Ensuring that this clean energy transition is just, and that people don’t get left behind, is a challenge worldwide, from India to West Virginia. But Singh believes that India has a key advantage in this area because its energy sector is publicly owned and run. The government’s stakeholders are the people, and its responsibility is the welfare of those people. The state can also better handle pensions and absorb the costs of bankruptcy than privately owned enterprises. By contrast, CEOs do not take responsibility for what happens to their communities after bankruptcy.

Margonelli asked Singh to define and explain “intrapreneurialism”—his term for the creativity and innovation of government employees that is typically the sphere of businesspeople. Singh described a 2014 visit to the northeastern state of Assam’s Energy Development Agency. “Outside the agency building were relics of the agency’s past,” he said: rusted, cobwebbed solar panels and a demo wind turbine. But “the flurry of activity in the place was unbelievable,” he said. “There was a passionate group of committed staff working on [among other things] leveraging ponds and water bodies as a means to deploy solar energy. These people were one step ahead in mastering the changing energy transition.”

As the discussion came to a close, Margonelli prompted Singh to speak about how to reframe the mandates of big bureaucracies. Singh pointed to the pandemic, which forced the shutdown of the global economy and the subsequent unleashing of tremendous amounts of capital. “Every dollar spent matters more than ever. It should go toward building a more climate resilient society,” he said, with “less social unrest and more jobs.” The pandemic, he argued, truly did illuminate a need to “build back better.” And today, better energy sources are both cleaner and less expensive. “At the end of the day,” Singh said, “the cheapest electron should win.”

The post Can Bureaucracies Be Sustainability Innovators? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A panel of experts gathered at Artistry Honolulu to take their best shot at the urgent question “What Can Hawai‘i Teach the World About Climate Change?” The Zócalo/Daniel K. Inouye Institute “Pau Hana” event brought together Chip Fletcher, a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa geologist; Robert Lempert, a RAND Corporation scientist and contributor to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and Joshua Stanbro, chief resilience officer for the City and County of Honolulu.

Despite the recent torrent of grim United Nations reports, and terrifying TV footage of Florida beach homes being blown to smithereens, the evening’s tone was relatively upbeat. While nationalistic leaders bellow about withdrawing from international climate accords, states like Hawai‘i and California are aggressively pursuing their own environmental paths, and the panelists suggested that significant work is being done at the state and local level to keep Earth from turning into a giant Sahara.

Much of the discussion, which took place before an overflow crowd, focused on how the most remote of U.S. states (as well as one of the smallest) could become a climate-change laboratory and set an example for others to follow. Moderator Catherine Cruz, host of Hawai‘i Public Radio’s “The Conversation,” dived straight into the question of how Hawai‘i—which lately has been battered by torrential rains, volcanic eruptions, and other torments—can bring its citizens together around climate-related issues.

Stanbro, the Honolulu official, acknowledged that even experts sometimes are unsure how to size up the risks to the planet—and figure out how best to respond. “We don’t know how this is going to shake out, so we’re sort of inventing it in real time,” he said.

That’s one reason, Stanbro explained, why Honolulu city and county are holding a series of nine meetings around the island of Oahu, to get a sense of what various communities are doing to address specific local problems, set priorities, and develop action plans. Stanbro said that many cities and counties have stepped up their responses to global warming, now that bond agencies are including climate change as a risk factor in evaluating municipal credit ratings. If a municipality doesn’t have a good plan for mitigating these threats, a bond agency may give it a lower credit rating, making it more expensive for the municipality to get credit and take on debt.

Lempert, the RAND expert in climate management and adaptation, said he has studied communities around the country that are making climate-change response a critical part of their planning. Stage one of this process, Lempert said, is simply for communities to notice and acknowledge that climate change is happening. Step two is making a risk assessment. Step three is coming up with an action plan to reduce the municipality’s carbon footprint.

“We’re just starting to see people moving into it, and there’s a lot going on,” he said, citing communities that are developing new guidelines for bridges, roads, and other infrastructure that now have to take climate change impacts into account.

Fletcher, the geologist, said he recently co-authored an op-ed in a local newspaper about sea-level rise, which could reach one meter (about three feet) by the end of this century. Hawai‘i is very susceptible to this menace, particularly during the summer, and high-tide flooding could prove catastrophic before mid-century, if present carbon emission rates persist.

Rather than stick their heads in the sand, communities need to start adapting to these changes, Fletcher said, and some are doing just that. He has proposed that if a community is going to invest in long-term expensive infrastructure, like a coastal power plant, it needs to anticipate as much as a six-foot sea level rise because it’s unclear how fast the Antarctic ice shelf will melt. Fletcher also said that improved climate-change modeling also can offer better predictions on how (for example) erosion caused by rising seas will affect Oahu’s north and south shores in different ways.

Climate change is in many ways a numbers game: A rise in global temperature of 1.5 degrees centigrade could prove devastating. Such a figure may sound small, Lempert said, but on a global scale, over long periods of time, “that’s a gigantic number.”

“When we were six degrees colder, we had miles of ice on top of North America,” Lempert said. “When you gather up all the scientific evidence, half a degree makes a surprising difference.”

Such an increase could swamp parts of Hawai‘i, whose seas already have risen 3.5 inches since 1960, according to some calculations. And with world temperatures currently heading for 3.5-degree centigrade increase by the end of the century, much will hinge on what happens in places considerably bigger and more densely populated than the Aloha State. There’s a growing demand for new energy, and about half of this is coming from India and China, whose populations are eager to enter the global middle class.

What’s really needed, the panelists concurred, is “a war on carbon.” The developed world needs to be helping poorer countries buffer themselves against the worst effects of a warming atmosphere while slashing overall carbon emissions by about 50 percent per decade, if global warming is to be limited to no more than 2 degrees by mid-century. That scenario, the panelists conceded, would be a huge stretch. But Hawai‘i, which has vowed to be virtually carbon-free within three decades, already may have helped sway California Governor Jerry Brown to make the same pledge, Stanbro suggested.

Hawai‘i also can learn from other communities. Fletcher said he recently did some research on how flood-threatened Miami has invested a small fortune to build 80 pump stations which will take rain runoff and other water, spin out some its contaminants, and recycle it into Biscayne Bay. The city is studying how to sacrifice the first and second floors of buildings to allow water to move back and forth through these structures, and also how to raise many of its most vulnerable roads.

Some of those same strategies could be applied to Waikiki Beach, he said, because it’s obvious that fleeing an area is simply too costly and too difficult technically. “We’re wondering how to adapt in place” to surging seas, said Fletcher, adding: “A year ago, I was wondering when are we going to get going on this. Now I stand in amazement at the city and county of Honolulu, and also the state, at the progress we’ve made… in the last two years.”

During the audience question and answer segment, one attendee asked how renewable energy could figure in plans to grow Hawai‘i’s rail system. “By 2045, the entire grid is going to renewable,” Stanbro replied. “As the grid gets greener and greener, the train gets greener.”

Another audience member asked how to make fossil fuel corporations aware of their environmental responsibilities. “We need to stop subsidizing them,” Fletcher responded—but, he continued, we should remember that fossil fuels helped lift humanity out of the hunter-gatherer phase. The problem is that we should’ve started shifting away from fossil fuels in the 1970s. That didn’t happen, and the energy companies “are a main reason why it didn’t.”

A third audience member asked how to ensure that we don’t put the costs of environmental sustainability on the poor and on indigenous communities. Stanbro said that such groups already have borne a disproportionate share of climate-change impacts. “We’ve got to figure out how we put equity into this,” he said.

Still, the challenges before us are monumental, the panelists agreed, and they’ll require many municipalities to experiment with many different approaches. “Humans have been figuring their way out of pinches and problems for a long, long time,” Stanbro summed up. “I am optimistic about the models and the innovations that are going to come out as a response to the challenges.”

The post Can Hawai‘i’s Local Communities Lead the Global Fight Against Climate Change? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Such a statement would have been politically unthinkable 10 years ago.

Until fairly recently, the dominant idea was that current-generation wind and solar power, coupled with energy efficiency, would play the lead role in stabilizing the climate. This cornerstone of thought among liberals and greens was summed up in Al Gore’s oft-repeated dictum that “we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming … we have all the technologies we need.”

Much of the rest of the conventional wisdom on climate flowed from the insistence that no new technology would be needed: The size and scope of the challenge was defined not by realistic projections of energy demand or what could be accomplished with efficiency, but by the amounts of energy renewable technologies might be able to produce. The belief was that putting a modest price on carbon could tip the market balance between dirty fossil fuels and readily available clean renewables. Corrupt vested interests were said to stall the dawn of the new energy age.

With all of the talk of cheap solar, Tesla Roadsters, and nuclear startups, it might be easy to miss the massive shift that has taken place in the climate conversation. But make no mistake: A decade ago, climate change was seen far more as a moral and political problem than a technological one. Obama’s framing of the problem sits in stark contrast to Gore’s, and points the way to a new, more constructive era of climate politics. It may even draw conservatives back into the conversation.

Like all paradigm shifts, this one didn’t happen overnight.

In the late 1990s, Martin Hoffert of New York University led a scholarly exploration into the need for innovation and “breakthroughs” in zero-carbon energy. His initial paper in 1998 and a follow-up in 2002 established the breathtaking size of the climate challenge. Hoffert and dozens of well-credentialed co-authors drove home the point that to scale up clean energy sufficiently, the world needed to complete at least one new industrial revolution in half the time it took to complete the first one. We simply, they wrote, don’t have the technology to make that happen.

Science—physical and social—backed this message up. Scholars at Oxford and the Pacific Northwest National Lab wrote convincingly about the need to focus on technology, not regulatory caps and timetables, throughout the 1990s. Physicists and engineers at Caltech and elsewhere popularized the immensity of the “terawatt challenge”: the idea that the world needs to at least double our energy production while reducing fossil energy consumption to zero.

Political scientists argued consistently for “pragmatic” climate policies: goals that could be pursued from multiple motivations and ideologies. Cultural cognition researchers showed that environmentalists’ moralizing, apocalyptic framing of climate change was doomed to failure.

While we think of climate change as the most partisan of issues, the new innovation consensus gathered influence in support of investments in clean energy technologies through an unlikely affinity between liberal, centrist, and conservative think tanks ranging from Brookings and the Breakthrough Institute (where I am a senior writer), to the conservative Manhattan Institute, as well as Republican senators such as Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander. The cross-partisan appeal resonated with the business community, and the American Energy Innovation Council—headed by Lockheed’s Norman Augustine and Xerox’s Ursula Burns, among others—advocated a manifold increase in U.S. public and private investment in clean energy technologies, from renewables to energy storage to carbon capture to nuclear power.

All this talk had an impact. President Obama has been busy enacting the recommendations made by innovation advocates for years. Between 2009 and 2015, the federal government invested over $150 billion on clean energy. And while 2009’s Copenhagen talks failed to produce much, this year’s climate talks in Paris have adopted a much more bottom-up, technology-focused approach to emissions reduction strategies.

Still, despite laudable progress in wind, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles, Hoffert’s warnings sadly ring true: We still do not have all the technologies we need to address climate change.

Fortunately, as the world watched the climate policy happenings in Paris this week, Bill Gates announced the formation of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of individual and institutional investors determined to fund the R&D needed for next-generation energy technologies. In parallel, world leaders announced Mission Innovation, a commitment by 20 national governments around the world to double public spending on clean energy R&D. In context of the two decades of progress on energy innovation, this is tectonic.

But we must be sure to not simply throw more money at the narrow, moralistic set of solutions that has been dominant for two decades. Progress will be achieved when we admit we don’t have all the technologies we need, and embrace a broader, more pragmatic portfolio of approaches. The Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Pritzker Innovation Fund in particular have been consistent in supporting a more diverse set of solutions. That means more than just renewables and efficiency: Nuclear power, supercritical fossil power plants, fracking, and carbon capture are a few of the less popular technologies that must be on the table. It also means more than just mitigation: Adaptation to climate impacts and perhaps even geoengineering (deliberately engineering the climate to counteract human-caused global warming) must be considered.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition and Missions Innovation recognize something that climate partisans and environmentalists have often denied: We are headed towards a high-energy future. As Gates wrote this month, “in 30 years the world will consume much more energy than it does today.” In order for all the world’s inhabitants to enjoy Western lifestyles by the end of the century, global energy consumption will need to at least triple if not quadruple. Such an imperative implies that environmentalists’ laser focus on wind, solar, and energy efficiency is not enough; nuclear power, carbon capture, and other less-chic technologies will be required, and perhaps even form the backbone of this century’s energy systems.

Decades of sustained effort went into building today’s energy innovation consensus. It’s nice to see how far we’ve come.

The post The Dramatic Shift in Our Climate Thinking appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Thanks to the ample snows that usually fall, the Sierras have been California’s most efficient water storage system. In normal years, the mountain range’s snowpack provides 30 percent of the state’s water. It is the primary source for reservoirs that supply drinking water, agriculture, and hydroelectric power. But this year, the snowpack was at just 5 percent of its 50-year average. This statistic, which was announced by the California Department of Water Resources on April 1, became the poster child for the extreme drought conditions that have plagued California for the last four years. When California Gov. Jerry Brown declared the first-ever mandatory state-wide water restriction, he chose a Sierra Nevada snow-measurement station as his backdrop. For the first time in 75 years, that station was surrounded only by dirt.

For me, Brown’s announcement worked as a call for action. After my time in the Sierras, I had realized that my main research interest—the interaction between climate and forest ecosystems—could best be pursued amidst the majestic landscapes of the American West, so in 2011, I became a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where I now lead a team that uncovers the past climate of California by studying its trees. I knew my research could put this year’s 2015 snow drought in a much longer context.

While there are no written documents about the climate in California from centuries ago that anyone knows of, nature itself has been writing the story of its past in many places—caves, shells, lakes, and, of course, trees. My job as a paleoclimatologist is to decipher this story. Trees are remarkable creatures: In California’s Mediterranean climate, they form a growth ring every year, and the width of that ring depends, to a large extent, on that year’s climate. After a wet winter, the ring that forms is relatively wide; after a dry winter, the ring is narrow. By measuring the widths of these rings in trees that have lived for centuries, my team can “read” what the climate was like in each year over that time span. And we can extend this outlook even further by collecting older dead wood.

The amount of snow on the ground at the end of the snowy season in the Sierras is largely determined by two climate components: how much precipitation fell during winter, and how warm or cold the winter was. Temperature determines how much of the precipitation that fell was rain versus snow, and affects the speed of snowmelt. We put two tree-ring data sets together to represent precipitation and temperature over the last 500 years. By measuring the width of the rings of more than 1,500 blue oak trees in central California, some of the most climate-sensitive trees on the planet, we were able to reliably trace Pacific Ocean storms that have traveled east over central California and brought precipitation to the Sierra Nevada. We complemented this data with a 500-year-long winter temperature record derived from tree-ring data from a variety of trees throughout the American West, which was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

By comparing these two data sets to Sierra Nevada snowpack records dating back to the 1930s, we were able to reconstruct the history of snowpack in the region all the way back to the year 1500. The results, which we published last week, made national headlines: The mountain range’s 2015 snowpack level is the lowest it has been in the last 500 years.

To put that in perspective, this means this winter has been the worst since the first European explorer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, explored California in the 1540s—about 230 years before the first mission was established. When my team started our work, we thought this year’s snow drought would be extreme, but we did not expect it to be the absolute lowest.

Sadly, while this research sheds light on the past, it’s actually not a very good barometer for the future. It very likely will not take another 500 years to reach the next record snowpack low. California temperatures are only projected to rise over the coming century. Even if the projected strong El Niño in the Pacific dumps loads of rain on southern California this year, chances are that the Sierra Nevada snowpack will be a less reliable water source for the state going forward. This means fish and wildlife communities will suffer and, of course, California’s growing population of farmers, gardeners, skiers, and residents are only going to keep wanting more, much more.

As I write this, the summer monsoon is rolling in over Tucson, and I am reminded that it brings a chance of redemption after a dry winter in Arizona. But California doesn’t have monsoons. Instead, in the last few days, my Twitter feed has been filled with pictures and stories of the Butte and Rough fires that are raging through the region. To me, they demonstrate the well-studied link between low snowpack, earlier spring snowmelt, and the increased risk of wildfire.

Now the ancient Giant Sequoia trees that left me in awe when I first saw them are at risk of being felled by drought, and even under the immediate threat of the Rough fire. To a tree-ring scientist, these 3,000-year-old trees are the enigmatic face of the power and resilience of nature. They have doubtless survived many threats and disturbances that we are not even aware of. To walk amongst these giants for the first time was a dream come true. Little did I realize then that I’d be keeping my fingers crossed for their survival less than a decade later.

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