Last year, during a summer that was mild but well within our normal range, someone who'd been listening to too much commercial television asked me if I'd ev-ah seen such weather. "Of course," I said, reminding the person of years. Person obviously thought I was no fun.
But this year's weather has been weird.
First we hardly had any winter weather at all. No hard freezes, only one sprinkling of snow. New York State seemed to have grabbed all the cold weather and sat on it. I didn't even need to dig out the serious blanket-and-quiltage this winter. I ran a 300-watt room heater, and frequently turned it off, while sleeping under one sheet, one cotton blanket, and sometimes my knitted shawl. I took some more blankets out for airing but did not actually put them on the bed. From November to March the weather was chilly, but not what even Virginians can call cold with a straight face.
Then the mildly chilly weather just stayed and stayed through the coolest spring anyone can remember. Day after day the outdoor temperatures have been perfect for me, no real need for heating or cooling, days in the 55-to-80-degrees-Fahrenheit range and overnight lows in the 45-to-65-degrees range. Anyone who's mildly hyperthyroid will agree that if the weather were going to be the same every day for the rest of our lives, this is the way it should be. People taking blood pressure medication are actually complaining about the lack of sweaty, steamy afternoons in between the mildly warm, sunny ones and the windy, rainy, chilly ones. Our June weather report contains several record lows for the time of year.
It's been sort of unreal to read or hear the news from the rest of the world...Hot and dry enough for serious wildfires, in Nova Scotia, in spring? Who knew that was possible? Now e-friends on the West Coast are having normal weather, New York is basking in flowers and sunshine, I'm revelling in the sort of cool June we don't get nearly often enough to suit me, and Texas is scorching in day after day of afternoon highs well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Life is not fair. Weather is not fair. I didn't even want to post about this until the Weather Service assured us that it's due to change. Texas is supposed to see some sort of break, with no mention of tornados or hurricanes yet, this afternoon. Virginia is supposed to get the ninety-degree afternoons our cardiovascular patients have been pining for, too.
We have had years of weird weather before. Not exactly this pattern of weird weather, but others. They did not add up to anybody's predictions of "global climate change," for hotter or for colder. They were anomalies, after which regression toward the mean was observed. One or sometimes two years of really unusual weather are normally followed by several years of really normal, ordinary weather.
Early in the literature of almost every culture on Earth, as written language developed, there appears a legend of an epic weather disaster that seemed to destroy the whole Earth while only Our Ancestors, the Chosen People, escaped. In cultures that existed longer as cohesive cultures before written language developed, the legends tell of more than one disaster. In cultures that have had written language longer, multiple disasters are described in more precise, meaning narrower, terms: In Grandpa's time there were great and terrible droughts, and in his grandfather's time there were great and terrible floods, that destroyed whole towns but not the whole Earth.
Virginia's epic hurricane, which occurred after the Weather Service started giving hurricanes cutesy-wutesy human names and was called Camille, became a legend people told their grandchildren. By several measures of awfulness, Camille wasn't even much of a hurricane; it just happened further north and further inland than a normal hurricane, where people had never seen a hurricane before and weren't prepared. Camille did a lot of damage but not nearly so much as Katrina, which hit a place where hurricanes were not a complete novelty, but where denser population and more expensive buildings made Katrina, at the very least, ten times as expensive as Camille. But for those who want to compare the awfulness of recent weather disasters, someone Out There calculated that the Johnstown Flood, which destroyed towns in New York and Pennsylvania and was still remembered and talked about a hundred years later, did more damage to more people's property than Katrina did. Hurricane Camille deserves to be remembered as a story about what happens when people don't prepare for the unusual. Hurricane Katrina deserves to be remembered as a story about what happens when everyone expects someone else--especially government!--to take care of things. The Johnstown Flood, which occurred after one storm broke a few large dams, approaches the scale of the weather legends preserved by people who had no means of precise calculation and long-distance communication, when fires, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc., appeared to be destroying the whole Earth--at least as much of it as anyone knew anything about, anyway.
Most of the people I know are what our ancestors would have called old, as in grandparents, and have seen a lot of unusual weather, a few disasters. We learned that the word tsunami was more accurate than the older word, "tidal wave," but during the winter before Hurricane Katrina people were still talking about The Tsunami that washed away whole towns in a few South Pacific countries. There were a few other hurricanes with human names that did a lot of damage; Agnes, Hugo, Ivan. During the short lifespan of this web site we saw North Carolina, where one foot of snow can be considered a disaster, buried in six feet of snow. Not too long ago we saw old Grandmother Pele, the fire spirit, redesigning Hawaii again. Alaskan baby-boomers and their elders remember "The" earthquake of 1964. Some African baby-boomers remember temperatures officially recorded as peaking at 131 degrees Fahrenheit, measured properly in the shade, but they weren't in the shade and they saw thermometers reading 140 degrees or more. In the Blue Ridge Mountains the summer of 1980 was pleasant, but continent-wide the 1980 heat wave has been blamed for more fatalities than any recent hurricane or tornado. So we've seen fire, and we've seen rain; we've seen things that don't happen in every decade, or century.
We have, of course, seen different ones than our grandparents did. Nobody I know has personal memories of the snow on the fourth of July in 1920, but our grandparents had. The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1901 rates in between the Johnstown Flood and Hurricane Katrina on the scale of property damage done by a single storm. The 1930s recorded some of the worst heat waves in US history, and one of the coldest, snowiest winters. Then there was 1816, remembered as the Year Without a Summer, and 1780, the year of the Dark Day--weather phenomena so memorable that major churches still point to them as the fulfillments of prophecies of the end of the world. (By now, how closely events of 1780 foretold the end of the world is a good question.)
On the scale of weather events, a mild summer, followed by an abnormally mild winter, followed by a positively chilly spring, is pretty tidgy.
It is not proof of "global warming" or the impending loss of most of the continent due to rising sea level.
It is not proof of "global cooling" or the impending ice age in which all but the tropical countries are doomed to become uninhabitable.
It is not proof that global climate change may not take place, however much it counters the claim that global climate change is taking place fast enough to be seen now.
It is proof that, once again, we're living through memorable weather. In thinking about global climate change, yearly weather quirks are irrelevant.
So is the local climate change that really is "warming" our cities and costing us a few lives, mostly of older people with cardiovascular disease, every summer. Actual weather patterns, movements of hotter and colder air driven by wind, aggravate the local warming or "greenhouse" effect in some places, some summers, and mitigate it in others. That's why, if you ask Google how many heat-related deaths the United States has seen within our lifetime, Google will direct you straight to epa.gov, where you'll see a spiky chart with its all-time high point in 1980.
Apart from the 1980 heat wave--and seriously, I was keeping a diary in 1980, there were lots of days when my brother and I took extra cold showers, just to cool off, and lolled in front of the window fan until ordered to get up and do something useful, but in the Blue Ridge Mountains there were no Code Red days in 1980--the chart of heat-related fatalities jitters up and down like an EKG, but the general trend is upward. To some extent that's because interest in the "global warming" narrative has driven some hospitals to count more cases as "heat-related" since 2000 than they did before 2000. In fact a new line has been added to the chart to show the looser criteria for counting deaths as "heat-influenced" since 2000; the summer of 2000 was brutal in many places, the heat-related death count for 2000 was higher than for any other year since 1980, and increased fear of Code Red heat has actually contributed to the local warming effect as more people have cranked up the air conditioning. But the bottom line is that extreme temperatures kill people, and local warming is increasing the frequency of heat-related fatalities.
What to do? Turn off the air conditioners, for pity's sake, and park the cars. Get out. But stay near water and shade. Maintain green space and healthy interpersonal distance. Consider replacing heat-trapping paved roads with shell or gravel surfaces. Recognize that living more than fifteen feet above or below ground level is like prostitution--there's no way to stop some people indulging in it, but it should be a crime for anyone else to make a profit by exploiting those people--and that, while it might arguably be possible to pack more people into a few "ghost towns" out West, the population of the Eastern States is unsustainably dense already and needs everything we can ethically do to thin it down.
Mild though the summer's been, on a sunny afternoon a town ten miles from mine is starting to show downtown temperatures fifteen degrees hotter than my home. The difference will be twenty degrees or more when the sun really starts beating down on us in July. The official temperature, measured in the shade at the weather station, used to run three degrees warmer than the temperature here, and still runs less than ten degrees warmer. The temperature on the streets, where the new stock of drug addicts imported from Knoxville lie on the pavement waiting to die, and the desperate working mothers try not to sweat through their clothes so they can keep their jobs, and the factory laborers, oh mercy, at least they're all young...So far it's only been in the nineties, in this record-"cold" June.
I don't think of myself as making sacrifices to minimize my contribution to the local warming of Kingsport, Tennessee. I don't live there; I have never, least of all when I did live there, wanted to live there. I don't drive; I wanted to learn how to drive, in case of emergencies, and in the learning process I soon realized that emergencies are the only situations in which I want to drive. I work close to home, and do what commuting I do on foot; I've wanted to do that all my life. I take extra cold baths and use a window fan, not an air conditioner. There's never been a television set in my home. I cut up food with a knife and stir them together with a spoon, not an electrical device. I minimize cooking in summer (baked goods, slow-grilled meat, and slow-simmered soup are winter treats), and do most of it outdoors. My taste always has been to listen to and participate in live, acoustic music, unamplified. My parents chose to set up the water heater and toilet so that they work efficiently enough for one person on solar power alone. Running all electrical devices entirely on solar power is still something I'm working on; all-solar lighting is within sight. When you get accustomed to living lightly on the land, Gentle Readers, it feels natural and pleasant, and you wouldn't want to live in an overcrowded, overheated city and waste energy heating up the "greenhouse." I certainly don't.
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