You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows…. Bob Dylan
You don’t need a weatherman to tell you that climate change is happening, although some weathermen will tell you if you ask. You can step outside. You can read about or experience the latest natural disasters. You can check a thermometer.
There are some folks (not too many) who mock the idea of the climate change on what they feel are the indisputable grounds that summer has always been hot.
This assertion is not as indisputable as they might think. There have been summers that were not so hot. See 1816 for example, often referred to as a year without a summer. In fact, up until the industrial era, the world was experiencing what has been referred to as a ‘Little Ice Age.’ A little ice age.
Climate change is always happening on this planet of ours.
It changes slowly or rapidly, and human fortunes have always been waxing and waning depending at least partly on those changes in climate.
The fact that the earth’s climate does change, regardless of whether there are humans around to goose those changes makes some feel that either a) humans can’t possibly be affecting today’s climate, and/or b) changes in climate are no big deal because the climate is always changing anyway.
As for idea a), everything affects the climate, not excluding people. Trees affect the climate, beavers affect the climate, and yeah people do too. If you don’t believe me, stand on some asphalt on a hot summer day. Take a look at the smog in Los Angeles. Read about the US Dust Bowl. Or London’s killer ‘pea-soup’ fog. Climate change is happening because people affect the climate.
But that’s not really the point. Whether people do or don’t affect the climate is not the point. And whether or not current climate changes are a big deal in terms of earth’s history aren’t really the point either.
The point is quite simply how people are going to live on the planet with the climate we’re in now. The planet has more or less accidentally coughed up a period of climate stability for the duration of human civilization. If that’s going away – then the prudent thing to do is to figure out how to live in today’s climate. Or, I guess, throw in the towel and scream ‘we’re all going to die!’
Dramatic, and perhaps even cathartic, as the screaming option might be, it’s probably not necessary.
What is necessary, though, is dealing with the current natural disasters in a changing climate.
In 2024, between January and mid-May, the United States alone has experienced more than 10 extreme weather disasters with costs of more than $1 billion each. In total, the disaster-related costs for that time period exceed $25 billion.
Meanwhile, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) thinks the North Atlantic is staring down the barrel of up to 7 major hurricanes and north of 14 named storms. The WMO is not going too far out on a limb to forecast though, since the last 8 years have had above average hurricane seasons.
If climate change was not happening, an average hurricane season has 14 named storms and 3 major hurricanes. But at this point, saying ‘well, more than that this summer!’ is almost like saying ‘the dog’ll eat the turkey if you leave it unattended like that.’ Might not happen, but experience tells you that it probably will.
You don’t need a weatherman to tell you that if the last 8 years in a row have been above average, then things are changing! And quite frankly, it’s not too hard to tell which way the wind is blowing during a hurricane – because it’s blowing pretty hard!
In fact, the winds are blowing so hard these days (and no I’m not talking about politicians pontificating) that some scientists say we need a new category of mega-hurricanes. Super-hot ocean waters are leading to super-fast hurricane winds. It’s not exactly Sharknado – but then again, it kinda is. Put bluntly, the climate change that is happening is more exciting than anyone wants it to be!
So everyone knows that humans have to stop burning fossil fuels if humanity wants to avoid this kind of ridiculous horror movie shit. Even people who burn fossil fuels know this. Even people who produce fossil fuels know this. Even people who claim that climate change is not happening know this.
Knowing that humans have to stop burning fossil fuels is not the problem.
The problem is actually stopping the combustion of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are like chocolate chip cookies. People like chocolate chip cookies. If chocolate chip cookies are in front of them, people will eat chocolate chip cookies. People know that chocolate chip cookies are not particularly good for them.
Knowing is not the problem. Not eating chocolate chip cookies when they are in front of you and you like them is the problem.
Same with deforestation. People know that deforestation is not good. Forests good. Chopping them down not good. People don’t chop down forests because chopping down forests is a good thing and they don’t know any better. People chop down forests because they’re greedy or scared or poor or criminal or flat out immoral.
Meat consumption contributes to climate change too. Meat is another thing that people like. I even like it somewhat and I don’t like it all that much. Most people most of the time don’t want to totally give up meat and become vegan. Vegans think they should – for all kinds of reasons – but, as we noted in the examples above, should and want to are not the same thing.
On the other hand, there are things that can be done to mitigate climate change that people actually do want to do. People want to transition to renewable energy sources.
There are potentially gobs of money in the transition to renewable energy sources.
Transitioning to renewable energy sources can also save consumers gobs of money. For example, if you put solar panels on your house in a climate suitable for it, you can essentially reduce your energy bills to nada. People who do this love it! They loooooove it. They love it a lot.
People also want to increase energy efficiency. People, and businesses in particular, love efficiency. Including energy efficiency. Energy efficiency means savings. People loooooove savings!
So the problem is not that people don’t want to do anything to mitigate climate change. They do. The problem is that the folks who make way too much money from the climate-change-causing-system that has made them way too powerful do everything they can (and they can do a lot) to prevent people from doing what they want if what they want cuts into the excess profits made from frying humanity in a skillet of popping oil. Oil – get it – a skillet of frying oil. That is what what we’re in!
Earth Don’t Care
The thing is, the earth doesn’t care what happens to us. About 56 million years ago, give or take, the earth experienced something like a ‘methane burp’. Methane, you may remember, is a potent contributor to global warming today, and it warmed the planet right up back then. In fact, it warmed the planet by more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit. The result was massive extinction of creatures in both the land and seas. The earth doesn’t care if everything goes extinct!
The people who should care if creatures of the land and sea go extinct – are people! And here’s the thing. People are emitting carbon at a speedier clip than the methane burp did. Who knew that humans could accidentally compete with something as bizarre and frightening as a methane burp?!
What to Do When Climate Change is Happening Where You Live
Where you live impacts what sorts of climate changes and mitigation strategies you should be most concerned about. If you live on the West Coast of the United States, for example, (and many many people do), then you need to be thinking about fire suppression strategies as well as fire prevention strategies. (You might also want to think what kinds of punishment would be appropriate for PG&E.)
The year 2020 alone (what a terrible year that was) saw almost 20 billion dollars in damages from wildfires on the Pacific Coast of the US. Around the world, there are more wildfires now. This seems to be because temperatures are higher, precipitation in fire-prone areas is lower, and more people are starting more fires. It doesn’t help that more and more people are living closer and closer to fire-prone areas.
All these changes in the fire cycle are probably the result the climate change. But that doesn’t really matter as much as the fact that YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE! Or you can’t get it insured because if it hasn’t caught fire or been blown over by hurricane, it probably will before you die, so uh uh honey no compensation for you – you should have known this was going to happen.
What matters to you is that the people who make sooooooo much money from burning fossil fuels have shifted the risk for their actions from themselves to — you!
Admittedly, it’s taken centuries to get to where we are today. It may take centuries, I suppose, for humans to dig themselves out of the hole we’ve buried ourselves in. In the meantime, what are we going to do?
Well, we’re going to have to change how we manage landscapes at the very least. We’ll have to do purposeful burning in certain fire-prone areas. We’ll have to change our building codes and our zoning laws. We’ll need to reduce the footprint of our cloud computing infrastructure and data centers. We’ll need to learn best practices from each other. We’ll need technological innovation to make our buses and trucks and other forms of transport more efficient and based on renewable energy. We’ll probably need some transformative strategies.
Things like this, common sense immediate adaptations and responses to the reality of climate change are actually not that difficult. Businesses do stuff like this all the freaking time. At least they say they do. So it’s not that difficult at all.
Or they wouldn’t be. If people would stop fucking arguing about whether or not climate change is actually happening. Nobody needs to be convinced at this point. Doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about the history of weather across the broad sweep of geological eras.
What matters is that YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE! Or the HURRICANE DESTROYED YOUR PROPERTY! Or THE DROUGHT HAS PLACED YOUR COMMUNITY UNDER SEVERE WATER RESTRICTIONS!
We know that making changes works. Smog in LA is just one example. The particular kind of smog in the LA basin is a called photochemical smog. It’s the result of emissions from vehicles as well as industrial emissions. It used to be really bad in the 1940s and 50s. So what did the people who lived there do?
They made changes! They tightened emissions standards and reduced the amount of crap going into the air in the area. Result: clearly visible vastly improved air quality.
Now – did it take a long time and overcoming a lot of resistance to make these changes?
Yeah. It took so long that a man in 1905 talked about smog with this wonderful quote:
[It takes] no science to see that there was something produced in great cities which was not found in the country, and that was smoky fog, or what was known as ‘smog’.
Henry Antoine Des Vouex 1905
Business and Industry Are Always Crybabies
Just like now, business and industry and anyone else who felt like it whined and cried and declared it impossible and it was too much trouble and too expensive and OMG how we will we ever survive even the slightest improvement in the world? Waaah waaah waaah. Business always seems to think a better world will absolutely destroy it – as though the hidden belief of every large company is that its secret mission is to make the world as bad as possible.
And yet – hold on because this is going to be a real shocker – BUSINESS SURVIVED!
Business will survive if humanity stops using coal to heat buildings or provide power. The coal industry won’t survive, it’s true. But other industries will thrive and by thrive I mean make lots and lots of money.
Business will survive if emissions from transportation are drastically reduced. How do we know this? Because business has survived this many many times. In fact, get this – business survived the transition from horse-drawn transit to steam engines like those that powered railroads. Business even survived the transition to the internal combustion engine that powered cars!
Wow! If business can survive major transitions like that – I’ll bet it can survive a smaller transition like one from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. What business needs to do is invest its money judiciously in the future – instead of whinging and moaning about the past.
Let’s talk some reality.
2023 coughed up a really brutal summer for some places. Phoenix, for example, experienced 26 days in a row of heat over 110 degrees. People have already forgotten. I know they’ve forgotten because I brought it up recently with someone (who does not live in Phoenix) and they gave me a blank look.
The reality is – in my observation – that people are really terrible at remembering weather. They’re really terrible at remembering a lot of things but one of the things they’re bad at remembering is weather.
For something like 49 years of my life, there have been hot days in February. Not always, not every day, but a few hot days in February are totally normal. Every year, people are totally surprised this happens. People store an idea in their heads of what some smoothed out idealized fall, winter, spring, summer climate would be where they live and then they remember that.
So relying on people’s memories of weather ain’t gonna cut it as far as enacting change.
And you can’t count on anyone fixing anything in the middle of a crisis like 26 days in a row of 110-degree heat. People just don’t do that. Partly because, you know, they’re really fucking hot.
What needs to happen instead is that in the middle of the 26-day visit to hell, planning for how to deal with the next 26-day visit to hell should start. It’s not hard to get a clue that certain stuff happens – when it’s actually happening.
The only thing that is required – and I admit it is a bit of a stretch for some folks – is to not tell yourself ‘this is not happening.’ It is happening; the ‘it’ in this case being 26 solid days of temperatures that would fry eggs and bake cookies – and yeah, kill people. The mayor of Phoenix knew this last year and she did something sensible – she told the federal government that extreme heatwaves are disasters and should be classified as such by FEMA. Because they are.
Miami’s another city that needs to get on board the preparing for extreme heat train. In 2023, the heat index in July reached 105 degrees for 70 hours. The previous record was 49 hours in 2020. The heat index got in even higher – 109 degrees – for 7 days in the span of a month. Miami is not prepared for conditions like that. It needs to start getting prepared.
But you already knew stuff like this. What you need to know now is that if you’ll just get pretty fed up enough with your city or county or state or local business behemoth or whoever it is – then you can start changes rolling that will benefit everyone. Including you. And that whinging business that swears this time it really will die.
Get pretty fed up!
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As a side note, fire fighting is getting more difficult and more dangerous. Biden took small steps to improve the lot of federal fire fighters. But, as people in California know, not enough can be said about the bravery of the fire fighters who battle wildfires.