This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
In many ways, it's hard to absorb (if I can even use that word) the increasing extremity of our weather world. Just when you've taken in the latest newsflashes, something even more extreme appears on the radar screen and that news becomes history. It's already ancient news that the last eight years were the hottest on record and the oceans were never warmer than in 2022. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the recent record flooding of Auckland, New Zealand, or the "bomb cyclone" that hit Sacramento, California; it doesn't matter whether you're thinking of last summer's record heat waves in China or this winter's record cold there (reaching -63.4 in its northernmost city of Mohe); it doesn't matter whether it's the news that the temperature last year hit heights in South Asia and the Middle East where it became dangerous for a human being even to think about working, no less living outdoors; it doesn't matter that billion-dollar climate disasters are on a striking path upward in this country and elsewhere in the world; it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the seemingly unending megadrought in the American Southwest and West (despite those recent flooding rains in California) or the fact that glaciers and ice sheets are melting in an unprecedented fashion from Greenland to the Swiss Alps, the Himalayas to Antarctica.
What makes all of this so tragic is that none of the above, extreme as it may be, faintly represents an end point. Such news is only going to get worse. Remember in 2015 when so many countries signed onto the Paris climate accords, agreeing that the one thing that shouldn't happen on Planet Earth was for the global temperature to rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level? That was sadly so then. It's now expected that the return of the El Niño climate phenomenon in the Pacific later this year could push the global temperature over that line by 2024.
All of the above should be shocking news, but having just read it, you already know that it's anything but these days. And increasingly, in our own fashion, ever more of us are beginning to experience climate change up close and personal. In fact, today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon writes a little memoir of living amid the torrents (and the drought) in northern California. Read it quickly. It'll soon be ancient history. Tom
Rain and Heat, Fire and Snow
Life in a Destabilized California
It was January 1983 and raining in San Francisco.
The summer before, I'd moved here from Portland, Oregon, a city known for its perpetual gray drizzles and, on the 60-odd days a year when the sun deigns to shine, dazzling displays of greenery. My girlfriend had spent a year convincing me that San Francisco had much more to offer me than Portland did for her.
Every few months, I'd scrape the bottom of my bank account to travel to San Francisco and taste its charms. Once, I even hitched a ride on a private plane. (Those were the days!) In a week's visit, she'd take me to multiple women's music concerts " events you'd wait a year for in Portland. We'd visit feminist and leftist bookstores, eat real Mexican food, and walk through Golden Gate Park in brilliant sunshine. The sky would be clear, the city would be sparkling, and she convinced me that San Francisco would indeed be paradise. Or at least drier than Portland.
So, I moved, but I wuz robbed! I knew it that first winter when, from December through March, the rain seemed to come down in rivers " atmospheric rivers, in fact " though none of us knew the term back then. That would be my initial encounter with, as a Mexican-American friend used to call it, "el pinche niño." El Niño is the term meteorologists give to one-half of an oscillating cyclical weather phenomenon originating in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño usually brings drought to the southern parts of North America, as well as Central America, while deluging northern California and the Pacific Northwest. La Niña is the other half of that cycle, its effects roughly flipping those of El Niño geographically. (As for the meaning of "pinche," go ahead and Google it.)
San Francisco sits in the sweet spot where, at least until the end of the last century, we would get winter rains at both ends of the cycle. And boy, did it rain that winter! I soon began to wonder whether any amount of love or any number of concerts could make up for the cold and mud. Eventually, I realized that I couldn't really blame the girlfriend. The only other time I'd lived in San Francisco was during the then-unusual drought year of 1976. Of course, I came to believe then that it never rained here. So, really, if there was a bait-and-switch going on, I had pulled it on myself.
Still, looking back, as much as the rain annoyed me, I couldn't have imagined how much I'd miss it two decades into the twenty-first century.
But Is It Climate Change? And Would That Actually Be So Bad?
Along with the rest of the western United States, my city has now been in the grip of a two-decade-long megadrought that has persisted through a number of El Niño/La Niña cycles. Scientists tell us that it's the worst for the West and Southwest in at least the last 1,200 years. Since 2005, I've biked or walked the three miles from my house to the university where I teach. In all those years, there have probably been fewer than 10 days when rain forced me to drive or take the bus. Periodic droughts are not unknown in this part of the country. But climate scientists are convinced that this extended, deadly drought has been caused by climate change.
It wasn't always that way. Twenty years ago, those of us who even knew about global warming, from laypeople to experts, were wary of attributing any particular weather event to it. Climate-change deniers and believers alike made a point of distinguishing between severe weather events and the long-term effects of changes in the climate . For the deniers, however, as the years went on, it seemed that no accumulation of symptoms " floods, droughts, heat waves, fires, or tornadoes " could legitimately be added together to yield a diagnosis of climate change. Or if climate change was the reason, then human activity didn't cause it and it was probably a good thing anyway.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
