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.

Thank you, Chip. Normally, I do weather forecasts. But today, as we approach our first day of spring in the year 2100, I’d like to pause and do a weather look-back. I know that nobody wants to hear pining for the old days, but after this winter of heavy rains and devastating floods throughout the Los Angeles basin, I cannot resist. So let me tell the story of how our local climate has changed since the late 20^th century, when my great-grandfather Dallas Raines first launched his meteorological dynasty.

I cannot complain about the cold. We have not had freezing temperatures. Those are of the past, except in the highest elevations of the Sierra Nevada. But the summer heat last year was extreme.  Days with 95 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures were considered extremely hot in the 20th century, but of course we now take those for granted. We had 70 such days last summer. And we set a new record: several days with 120 F in the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys, where even the nights were reaching 80 F. Even Santa Monica saw some 110 F days.  It’s good they built a roof over the AEG (formerly 3rd Street) Promenade.

My great-grandfather loved the chaparral vegetation of the foothills, but that has long since thinned. Only the hardiest shrubs are left, and that’s if they haven’t burned. This year’s fires were some of the worst yet, and now fire seasons regularly last into November. Santa Ana winds are rarer than they used to be, but they’re drier and hotter, by as much as 10 F. Remember last fall’s fire? The one that covered the slopes of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains from Santa Clarita to San Bernardino? Fire suppression in the foothills had been successful for decades; arsonists were kept in check. But when the Santa Ana winds kicked up, the hills exploded. Pyrocumulus clouds towered in the evening skies for weeks. With their reddish gray glow and bright white tops, they looked beautiful from a distance, if it hadn’t been for the ash raining down on us and the smog forcing our kids to remain indoors.

So much for fire. Water’s a problem, too. The rainy season used to be a lot longer. Now it starts late in October, and the last rain falls in April, because of a poleward shift of the jet stream. From May through October, as you know, it’s scorching. Meanwhile, when it rains, it pours. The intensity of a 10-year flood has increased by 50 percent since the old days. The air bringing the precipitation carries more moisture, and little of it now falls as snow in the mountains. Almost all of it falls as rain that runs off the hills immediately, leading to landslides and flooding that have wiped away the upper reaches of those long-gone foothill communities with evocative names: La Cañada, Topanga, Sierra Madre.

As you might expect, we’ve got another water shortage on the way this summer. The City of Los Angeles has kept up its desalination efforts, but it’s not enough. The April snowpack in the Sierra Nevada has been on average only a fifth of what it was 100 years ago. Believe it or not, Angelenos used to have big green lawns that they’d water. Orange trees, too.

This winter was especially hard. Remember when we got hit by Atmospheric River Kobe a few months back? Believe it or not, a hundred years ago, no one knew about atmospheric rivers, the narrow bands of moist air that blast western coastal regions with moisture from the tropics. The Weather Channel didn’t even have names for them. Today we all know that the “pineapple express” from Hawaii brings no sweet fruits but downpours. This year, three atmospheric rivers hit the Southland within two weeks, causing flooding in Long Beach and Ventura and debris flows that destroyed thousands of homes in Malibu and Thousand Oaks. At its peak, the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, and Santa Ana rivers merged, covering an area from East Long Beach to Huntington Beach, which may eventually lose the struggle to maintain its waterfront against the gradually rising sea level. Millions of people were evacuated from hillside communities as the hillslopes, weakened by fire and saturated with water from the first rains, gave way under the torrential downpours.

At least Northern California fared a bit better. Flooding still led to hundreds of deaths and trillions of dollars in property damage, but the lack of snow that can melt quickly prevented the weather from reaching the destructive power of the storm of 1862, when a heavy snow year, combined with a series of atmospheric rivers, turned the Central Valley into a lake 300 miles long. We’re not seeing a lot of years like that, to say the least.

I know we’re proud of California’s unmatched corn and tomato farms.  But there are still some Californians old enough to remember when the Central Valley was a fruit basket, home of nut and fruit orchards. Of course, the almond, walnut, orange, peach, and tangerine orchards covering the Valley in the 20^th century depended on irrigation, but the snowpack dwindled. Clever agribusinesses first tried to cope by capturing runoff from winter rains and pumping it underground into depleted aquifers to store the water for summer irrigation. But eventually, less and less precipitation took the form of mountain snow that was released gradually as meltwater in spring; intense winter storms caused equally intense runoff that could not be fully captured. Fruit and nut trees had to be removed, and the corn and tomatoes we planted had to be genetically modified to allow them to cope with frequent droughts. Today, we’re even growing millet and sorghum, crops that used to be limited to dry regions of Africa, South Asia, and Mesoamerica, regions that are now mostly devoid of agriculture. Eastern Washington and Western Canada are where we get our fruits and nuts these days.

With the decline of agriculture, the rise of flooding and landslides, and the excessive summer heat inland, Southern California’s face has changed. The coastal areas remain attractive, the entertainment industry continues to stream to our virtual reality glasses, and the surfing is still good. The air is much better than our ancestors could have even dreamed, since California took the lead in developing a solar-powered infrastructure that virtually eliminated local emissions (and Asia eventually followed).  But I can’t get very excited about touring the abandoned towns inland. People tell me I should enjoy the new forms of landscape art that have sprung up—illustrating the majestic forces of floods and erosion through ephemeral structures erected on the hillslopes, only to be washed away in winter storms—but I’m old-fashioned.

Overall, I’m not complaining. California is faring relatively well, especially when you look at island countries and poorer countries, threatened by the slowly rising sea level. And although the world’s population has stabilized and emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that caused these changes are now lower than they were in the 20^th century, their crazy weather effects, it is now clear, will continue to be felt for centuries.  So we meteorologists have plenty of job security.

***

While the year is 2013 and this is clearly science fiction, it is plausible fiction based on the science of climate and the climate change trajectory we are on.

Resources: A great resource for interactively exploring climate change scenarios for California is http://cal-adapt.org. The Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability provides information on how climate change may affect Southern California (with focus on the mid-21^st century) at http://c-change.la.

The post An L.A. Weather Report in 2100 A.D. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Learning to Love That Furnace-Like Sensation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.