Energy and Environment: Some Tough
Questions
The trademark of global warming is heat, of course. This year, around the world, we have had an abundance of that. In Seattle on June 28th, for example, the temperature hit 108. The temperature on the Olympic Trials running track in Eugene, Oregon was 140 (108 in the ambient air). The athletes were risking third-degree burns on the bottoms of their feet, so the trials were suspended until after the sun went down.
After I crack a couple of Seattle rain jokes with some eco-advice, and a pinch of meteorology, I’ll try to explain the burning question: why was it 108 in Seattle, and 115 in Portland, Oregon? Why all of that on days when Omaha had highs in the low 80s with salubrious showers? Why was the grass green in Omaha and a scalded brown in what was once called “The Emerald City”?
As a long-time Northwest resident (1965-1982, before Omaha) I am the proud owner of a SEATTLE RAIN FESTIVAL JANUARY 1 – DECEMBER 31 T-shirt, wrapped around a line of silly looking gnomes under dripping umbrellas. In the spirit of summer-less seasons: “The warmest winter I ever spent was a summer in Seattle.” Many say Mark Twain said this, but he may have said it about San Francisco. In Bellingham, Washington, which is just south of Vancouver, British Columbia, it has been said that, in Seattle, when the sun comes out, schools close for a ‘sun day’. This is probably not true, but you get the point.
That was then. Just over the border, Lytton, B.C., population 300, northeast of Vancouver, hit the heat-wave jackpot with a high of 121 June 28th. That was the highest recorded temperature in the history of weather recordkeeping in Canada. This scalding high was accompanied by a wind-whipped wildfire that razed about Hitting the Hot Spot 90 percent of the town.
Speaking of getting to the point, Dr. “What’s Hot?”, cut the rain jokes and tell us why it has been so damned hot.
Jet Stream Tales
The western half of North America has been under a ‘heat dome’ which has been the usual atmospheric pattern for much of the last two decades. The jet stream swings northeastward over the northeastern Pacific Ocean to Alaska, then arches south-southeastward to the Gulf of Mexico, then, after another severe turn to the northeast, rolls northeast up the U.S. East Coast toward the Arctic. This pattern can wiggle east/west or north/south, but the basic pattern is ‘anchored’ (instead of moving west to east, as in the old days), giving everyone a mixture of sun and showers.
The jet stream is a river of air 30,000 to 40,000 feet above the Earth’s surface (at the altitude of jet aircraft), which steers weather systems. During the last week of June 2021, the U.S. Pacific Northwest, which back in the day was accustomed to mild summers, found itself ‘under’ an arm of the jet stream with a suffocating heat dome overhead.
This anchored jet stream pattern favors warmth or heat, with generally dry weather to its south, cool or cold and stormy to its north. The area in which the jet stream makes its turn (movement southeastward to northeastward) favors climate chaos. Watch the number and intensity of tornadoes. Thus, we see enduring drought and heat from California inland to roughly the Missouri River valley. “The Southwest is getting hammered by climate change harder than almost any other part of the country,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan. “And as bad as it might seem today, this is about as good as it’s going to get if we don’t get global warming under control.”
In Eastern North America, this pattern favors storminess by dragging warm, humid air out of the Gulf of Mexico, with frequent floods during late spring to mid-fall. In winter, it favors ice and snow, sometimes in record amounts. West of the Jet Stream, this pattern favors warmth or heat, along with withering, crop-killing drought.
Some human beings’ sense of denial can be severe enough to be frightening. Bill McKibben visited Arizona in the midst of the same heat wave that gave Portland that 115 F. afternoon. With Phoenix carving out highs in the 113 to 118 range for almost a week, McKibben’s amazing sense of climatic irony found a group organizing to pursue its self supposed right to burn up water on golf courses: “AZ Central reports that some golf-course managers near Phoenix are ‘pushing back’ against a plan that would cut their water use by just three percent. Never mind that reservoirs across the West are falling to record-low levels (with insufficient snowpack to replenish them, and with that constant evaporation); representatives of the golf industry have formed the Arizona Alliance for Golf, which has met with state officials and launched a website urging residents to ‘speak up for Arizona golf’ and ‘protect our game’.”
McKibben, Bill. “The Climate Crisis.” The New Yorker [website]. July 1, 2021. Newyorker.Newsletter.com
I couldn’t help but wonder whether these golfers have air-conditioned carts. Just how hot and dry does it have to get before some people worry about more than their golf scores?
A few days after the heat wave from hell broke, hundreds were believed to have died in it—20 in Washington; 50 in Portland, 70 in Oregon; hundreds in British Columbia. What’s more, salmon (a cold-water fish) were dying en masse, and many beaches in and near Puget Sound were inundated with bacteria— not a pleasant place to spend a sizzling afternoon.
Too Hot to Grow Food?
The travails of a heating climate may be as personal and intimate as one person’s suffering heat illness during one afternoon, or as universal as tens of millions sharing misery. Witness June of 2021 (not yet even summer on the calendar) when record high temperatures reached 118 F. in Phoenix, Arizona, and 124 F. in Baghdad, Iraq. One can only guess how long ago such places lost their suitability for practicing the business of agriculture. Yet, all of us must think of certain things because survival requires food, and since all of us need food, we must engage in commercial transactions to get it. This is absurdly simple and profoundly complex at the same time. For most of the Earth’s more affluent citizens, access to a varied, tasty diet is so easy that we forget life on a planet where the basic business of acquiring enough to eat may become impossible because most of the planet is simply too hot and dry to allow the growing, commercial distribution, and preparation of food for a majority of people at any price. In the past, entire civilizations have grown and then nearly starved to death due to changes in temperature and precipitation patterns.
The Old (and New) Normal
Witness, please, the Maya, in Central America, where civilization thousands of years old was crushed by a four-centurylong drought and series of heat waves about a thousand years ago. Before these conditions set in, food was grown, people were born, received educations, matured, held occupations as diverse as farmers, priests, and sports stars, and with their surplus energy, built pyramids, then died. All of them spent their entire lives engaged in many complex commercial transactions, many of which involved the growth, sale and preparation of food, without buying, selling, or otherwise using the energy of fossil fuels—no oil, no coal, no natural gas. All of this occurred without producing a single whiff of what we take to be the commercial transactions that are at the root of today’s climate crisis.
According to the June 10, 2021 report from the U.S. Drought Monitor, 88.5 percent of the land area in the West—defined as California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington—was experiencing some level of drought, with 55 percent being classified as “extreme”. An estimated 90 percent of Utah is under extreme drought conditions, with 64 percent rated “exceptional” (the worst classification). Similar conditions were reported across Arizona (87 percent extreme), California (85 percent), and Nevada (76 percent). More than 58 million people are living with the dry conditions in the region.
These days, the evening news often looks like one very dangerous weather report. The dismal fear is that it may be just the first course.
Bruce E. Johansen, Frederick W. Kayser Professor at the University of Nebraska– Omaha, is author of Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Science, Society, and Solutions (2017).
After I crack a couple of Seattle rain jokes with some eco-advice, and a pinch of meteorology, I’ll try to explain the burning question: why was it 108 in Seattle, and 115 in Portland, Oregon? Why all of that on days when Omaha had highs in the low 80s with salubrious showers? Why was the grass green in Omaha and a scalded brown in what was once called “The Emerald City”?
As a long-time Northwest resident (1965-1982, before Omaha) I am the proud owner of a SEATTLE RAIN FESTIVAL JANUARY 1 – DECEMBER 31 T-shirt, wrapped around a line of silly looking gnomes under dripping umbrellas. In the spirit of summer-less seasons: “The warmest winter I ever spent was a summer in Seattle.” Many say Mark Twain said this, but he may have said it about San Francisco. In Bellingham, Washington, which is just south of Vancouver, British Columbia, it has been said that, in Seattle, when the sun comes out, schools close for a ‘sun day’. This is probably not true, but you get the point.
That was then. Just over the border, Lytton, B.C., population 300, northeast of Vancouver, hit the heat-wave jackpot with a high of 121 June 28th. That was the highest recorded temperature in the history of weather recordkeeping in Canada. This scalding high was accompanied by a wind-whipped wildfire that razed about Hitting the Hot Spot 90 percent of the town.
Speaking of getting to the point, Dr. “What’s Hot?”, cut the rain jokes and tell us why it has been so damned hot.
Jet Stream Tales
The western half of North America has been under a ‘heat dome’ which has been the usual atmospheric pattern for much of the last two decades. The jet stream swings northeastward over the northeastern Pacific Ocean to Alaska, then arches south-southeastward to the Gulf of Mexico, then, after another severe turn to the northeast, rolls northeast up the U.S. East Coast toward the Arctic. This pattern can wiggle east/west or north/south, but the basic pattern is ‘anchored’ (instead of moving west to east, as in the old days), giving everyone a mixture of sun and showers.
The jet stream is a river of air 30,000 to 40,000 feet above the Earth’s surface (at the altitude of jet aircraft), which steers weather systems. During the last week of June 2021, the U.S. Pacific Northwest, which back in the day was accustomed to mild summers, found itself ‘under’ an arm of the jet stream with a suffocating heat dome overhead.
This anchored jet stream pattern favors warmth or heat, with generally dry weather to its south, cool or cold and stormy to its north. The area in which the jet stream makes its turn (movement southeastward to northeastward) favors climate chaos. Watch the number and intensity of tornadoes. Thus, we see enduring drought and heat from California inland to roughly the Missouri River valley. “The Southwest is getting hammered by climate change harder than almost any other part of the country,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan. “And as bad as it might seem today, this is about as good as it’s going to get if we don’t get global warming under control.”
In Eastern North America, this pattern favors storminess by dragging warm, humid air out of the Gulf of Mexico, with frequent floods during late spring to mid-fall. In winter, it favors ice and snow, sometimes in record amounts. West of the Jet Stream, this pattern favors warmth or heat, along with withering, crop-killing drought.
Some human beings’ sense of denial can be severe enough to be frightening. Bill McKibben visited Arizona in the midst of the same heat wave that gave Portland that 115 F. afternoon. With Phoenix carving out highs in the 113 to 118 range for almost a week, McKibben’s amazing sense of climatic irony found a group organizing to pursue its self supposed right to burn up water on golf courses: “AZ Central reports that some golf-course managers near Phoenix are ‘pushing back’ against a plan that would cut their water use by just three percent. Never mind that reservoirs across the West are falling to record-low levels (with insufficient snowpack to replenish them, and with that constant evaporation); representatives of the golf industry have formed the Arizona Alliance for Golf, which has met with state officials and launched a website urging residents to ‘speak up for Arizona golf’ and ‘protect our game’.”
McKibben, Bill. “The Climate Crisis.” The New Yorker [website]. July 1, 2021. Newyorker.Newsletter.com
I couldn’t help but wonder whether these golfers have air-conditioned carts. Just how hot and dry does it have to get before some people worry about more than their golf scores?
A few days after the heat wave from hell broke, hundreds were believed to have died in it—20 in Washington; 50 in Portland, 70 in Oregon; hundreds in British Columbia. What’s more, salmon (a cold-water fish) were dying en masse, and many beaches in and near Puget Sound were inundated with bacteria— not a pleasant place to spend a sizzling afternoon.
Too Hot to Grow Food?
The travails of a heating climate may be as personal and intimate as one person’s suffering heat illness during one afternoon, or as universal as tens of millions sharing misery. Witness June of 2021 (not yet even summer on the calendar) when record high temperatures reached 118 F. in Phoenix, Arizona, and 124 F. in Baghdad, Iraq. One can only guess how long ago such places lost their suitability for practicing the business of agriculture. Yet, all of us must think of certain things because survival requires food, and since all of us need food, we must engage in commercial transactions to get it. This is absurdly simple and profoundly complex at the same time. For most of the Earth’s more affluent citizens, access to a varied, tasty diet is so easy that we forget life on a planet where the basic business of acquiring enough to eat may become impossible because most of the planet is simply too hot and dry to allow the growing, commercial distribution, and preparation of food for a majority of people at any price. In the past, entire civilizations have grown and then nearly starved to death due to changes in temperature and precipitation patterns.
The Old (and New) Normal
Witness, please, the Maya, in Central America, where civilization thousands of years old was crushed by a four-centurylong drought and series of heat waves about a thousand years ago. Before these conditions set in, food was grown, people were born, received educations, matured, held occupations as diverse as farmers, priests, and sports stars, and with their surplus energy, built pyramids, then died. All of them spent their entire lives engaged in many complex commercial transactions, many of which involved the growth, sale and preparation of food, without buying, selling, or otherwise using the energy of fossil fuels—no oil, no coal, no natural gas. All of this occurred without producing a single whiff of what we take to be the commercial transactions that are at the root of today’s climate crisis.
According to the June 10, 2021 report from the U.S. Drought Monitor, 88.5 percent of the land area in the West—defined as California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington—was experiencing some level of drought, with 55 percent being classified as “extreme”. An estimated 90 percent of Utah is under extreme drought conditions, with 64 percent rated “exceptional” (the worst classification). Similar conditions were reported across Arizona (87 percent extreme), California (85 percent), and Nevada (76 percent). More than 58 million people are living with the dry conditions in the region.
These days, the evening news often looks like one very dangerous weather report. The dismal fear is that it may be just the first course.
Bruce E. Johansen, Frederick W. Kayser Professor at the University of Nebraska– Omaha, is author of Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Science, Society, and Solutions (2017).
