The Climes they are a Changin’

“If you don’t have anything nice or good to say, don’t say anything.” With this parental advice in mind I am inclined to put my keyboard aside and go dark this week. The Afghanistan exodus, a pandemic that won’t go away, and the daily reminders that our country is as divided and rancorous as I’ve ever seen it in my lifetime, all leave me scrambling for some glimmer of good news about which I can write. Social etiquette dictates I should stay away from politics and religion unless I’m aching for a fight. I’m discovering, however, that even the simplest and most innocent conversations can touch a nerve or open a wound. School, masks, the media, inflation, immigration, guns, crime, urban chaos, mothers and their unborn children—“if you don’t have anything nice or good to say…”

So what may we safely talk about? How about the weather? Whomever we are, wherever we live, no matter our age, gender, or political affiliations—we have to deal with it. Sometimes we love it, sometimes we’re bothered by what it brings, but in any case, it remains the common denominator of our shared life on planet earth. No matter if we are good or bad, weather happens to us. Jesus probably said it best: “God makes His rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” No one is spared the blessings and the terrors brought on by the weather.

I hope my sarcasm didn’t get lost in all the verbiage. Unless out-of-control forest fires, damaging winds and rain, extreme drought and triple digit temperatures in the Pacific northwest are your cup of tea, the weather can be as touchy a subject as any these days. And that is a little surprising, since weather is nothing more than a here today, gone tomorrow reality. It often varies from morning to night, from one day to the next, season to season and year to year. Who can’t remember at least one brutal summer of unrelenting heat, or one frigid and snowy winter from our own rather short longevity? So if 2021 has been too hot, or too dry, or too windy, or too rainy, or too cold for some of us somewhere, that is just the way it is. I never thought of it much more deeply than that. That is until recently.

Our recent experience with weather over the past three decades or so does make you wonder, however.

Is this part of the normal ebb and flow of meteorological events? Or is it an aberration, suggesting trends that have wrung alarm bells across the globe. Climatologists look at such things through the lens of a longer view than do most of us.  The glacial scars that cut lakes and dropped boulders on northern landscapes, and the petroleum gushing from beneath Alaskan tundras and Arabian deserts bear witness to the shifting climates of this old and resilient world in which we live.My own attempts to understand what is happening with our climate bring me back to three axioms that undergird life as we know it on planet earth:·      The one constant in the universe is change.  While we have no trouble believing this about people, it is harder to fathom in cosmic and geological time frames. Yet over billions of years continents have migrated, oceans have relocated, poles have shifted, glaciers have spread out and retreated, and life on this planet has evolved, died out, and come back in new forms. We may now be the lead characters in this epic saga of life, but our time on stage has been oh so brief—so far.·      What affects you affects me.  There is no revelation in this statement when applied to how we relate to each other.  But we only begrudgingly admit it when thinking of the vastness of our world. Yet if COVID has taught us anything, it is that we are interconnected.  The viral outbreak in China quickly became our nightmare and the world’s pandemic, just as the smoke from burning California forests has blurred our eyes and stifled our breathing half a continent away. Nearly everything that happens to some of us somewhere on this planet touches the lives of all of us everywhere—sooner or later.·      Life’s biggest problems can’t be simply understood or solved.  Yes or no, either/or, all or nothing answers may satisfy children and the uneducated, but they do little to advance our understanding of our most important challenges. Answering important questions with clipped text messages or 30-second sound bytes says more about our attention spans than it does about the complexity of life’s most important issues. Climate change has never been about just one thing.  Both its causes and explanations defy simplistic and reductionistic diagnoses and remedies. I’ll be the first to admit that, until recently, I have been ambivalent about climate change. The scientist in me can no longer ignore the indicators of global warming, no matter how troubling and inconvenient they might be. Yet science also cautions me to be careful and deliberate before coming to conclusions about something so laden with political and profit-making implications. Not wanting to be a chicken little or a climate hoaxer, I have tried to keep an open mind about what I am experiencing and what I am being told by the news media. This summer NOAA released data showing that, between 2013 and 2019 we have endured eight of the ten hottest years in recorded history. Adding to this picture is the fact that 2020 ranks as one of the top five, and July 2021 set temperature records making it the single hottest month since we began detailed measurements 142 years ago. Data like this leads me to two conclusions: either we are at the crest of a heat wave that will soon break into troughs of cooler weather and more normal storm patterns; or our climate is recalibrating in such a way that higher temps and more extreme weather events will become the norm.  As a person who lives for autumnal days with temperatures between 50 and 75, my heart and my hopes are riding on the former of these climate scenarios. — Is this part of the normal ebb and flow of meteorological events? Or is it an aberration, suggesting trends that have wrung alarm bells across the globe. Climatologists look at such things through the lens of a longer view than do most of us. The glacial scars that cut lakes and dropped boulders on northern landscapes, and the petroleum gushing from beneath Alaskan tundras and Arabian deserts bear witness to the shifting climates of this old and resilient world in which we live.
My own attempts to understand what is happening with our climate bring me back to three axioms that undergird life as we know it on planet earth:
·      **The one constant in the universe is change.** While we have no trouble believing this about people, it is harder to fathom in cosmic and geological time frames. Yet over billions of years continents have migrated, oceans have relocated, poles have shifted, glaciers have spread out and retreated, and life on this planet has evolved, died out, and come back in new forms. We may now be the lead characters in this epic saga of life, but our time on stage has been oh so brief—so far.
·      **What affects you affects me.** There is no revelation in this statement when applied to how we relate to each other. But we only begrudgingly admit it when thinking of the vastness of our world. Yet if COVID has taught us anything, it is that we are interconnected. The viral outbreak in China quickly became our nightmare and the world’s pandemic, just as the smoke from burning California forests has blurred our eyes and stifled our breathing half a continent away. Nearly everything that happens to some of us somewhere on this planet touches the lives of all of us everywhere—sooner or later.
·      **Life’s biggest problems can’t be simply understood or solved.** Yes or no, either/or, all or nothing answers may satisfy children and the uneducated, but they do little to advance our understanding of our most important challenges. Answering important questions with clipped text messages or 30-second sound bytes says more about our attention spans than it does about the complexity of life’s most important issues. Climate change has never been about just one thing. Both its causes and explanations defy simplistic and reductionistic diagnoses and remedies.
I’ll be the first to admit that, until recently, I have been ambivalent about climate change. The scientist in me can no longer ignore the indicators of global warming, no matter how troubling and inconvenient they might be. Yet science also cautions me to be careful and deliberate before coming to conclusions about something so laden with political and profit-making implications. Not wanting to be a chicken little or a climate hoaxer, I have tried to keep an open mind about what I am experiencing and what I am being told by the news media.
This summer NOAA released data showing that, between 2013 and 2019 we have endured eight of the ten hottest years in recorded history. Adding to this picture is the fact that 2020 ranks as one of the top five, and July 2021 set temperature records making it the single hottest month since we began detailed measurements 142 years ago. Data like this leads me to two conclusions: either we are at the crest of a heat wave that will soon break into troughs of cooler weather and more normal storm patterns; or our climate is recalibrating in such a way that higher temps and more extreme weather events will become the norm. As a person who lives for autumnal days with temperatures between 50 and 75, my heart and my hopes are riding on the former of these climate scenarios.

Trends like this certainly get my attention, making me wonder to what extent the human element may be influencing these changes in climate. During my lifetime alone the human population on our planet has grown from 2.5 billion to 7.7 billion people—a 208% explosion. More sobering is the 1183% increase in the number of people our earth has had to support since pilgrim feet disembarked from the Mayflower.  Unlike most of the other living creatures with whom we share this planet, humans rarely leave it as they found it. We harvest, produce and consume energy, burning wood, coal, oil and natural gas to heat our homes and propel our vehicles. We also drink a lot of water and use pipelines more to irrigate our fields and water our lawns and gardens. In the name of progress and growth we have turned 46% of the world’s forests and jungles into fields and pastures to support our insatiable appetites for corn, wheat, rib eye and quarter-pounders.  It stands to reason, then, why so many believe that we are the primary drivers of climate change. Climate scientists, however, have long recognized that, in earth’s contained ecosystem, many variables factor into our weather patterns over time. Among them are the strength and activity of the sun, the periodic alterations in our orbit and tilt of our axis, the percentage of gases in our atmosphere that trap radiation, changes in ocean temperatures and currents, seismic activity and tectonic plate shifts, and the amount and distribution of land cover from trees and ice sheets. No one of these by itself ensures climate stability or drives climate change. Yet each influences the whole in a complex interaction with all of the others. To the degree that we make an impact on what we add to the atmosphere and what we remove from it in oxygen enriching foliage, we become another of the variables at work in changing the climate. And to the extent that we represent the only variable in the equation for which some degree of control can be exercised, we and we alone bear the responsibility for acting wisely, prudently, and with a global, and not provincial, outlook.  If it is true that the climes they are a changin’, then we will be changed along with them, either by helping steer what is happening or by having to deal with whatever is coming down the road. — Trends like this certainly get my attention, making me wonder to what extent the human element may be influencing these changes in climate. During my lifetime alone the human population on our planet has grown from 2.5 billion to 7.7 billion people—a 208% explosion. More sobering is the 1183% increase in the number of people our earth has had to support since pilgrim feet disembarked from the Mayflower. Unlike most of the other living creatures with whom we share this planet, humans rarely leave it as they found it. We harvest, produce and consume energy, burning wood, coal, oil and natural gas to heat our homes and propel our vehicles. We also drink a lot of water and use pipelines more to irrigate our fields and water our lawns and gardens. In the name of progress and growth we have turned 46% of the world’s forests and jungles into fields and pastures to support our insatiable appetites for corn, wheat, rib eye and quarter-pounders.
It stands to reason, then, why so many believe that we are the primary drivers of climate change. Climate scientists, however, have long recognized that, in earth’s contained ecosystem, many variables factor into our weather patterns over time. Among them are the strength and activity of the sun, the periodic alterations in our orbit and tilt of our axis, the percentage of gases in our atmosphere that trap radiation, changes in ocean temperatures and currents, seismic activity and tectonic plate shifts, and the amount and distribution of land cover from trees and ice sheets. No one of these by itself ensures climate stability or drives climate change. Yet each influences the whole in a complex interaction with all of the others. To the degree that we make an impact on what we add to the atmosphere and what we remove from it in oxygen enriching foliage, we become another of the variables at work in changing the climate. And to the extent that we represent the only variable in the equation for which some degree of control can be exercised, we and we alone bear the responsibility for acting wisely, prudently, and with a global, and not provincial, outlook.
If it is true that *the climes they are a changin’*, then we will be changed along with them, either by helping steer what is happening or by having to deal with whatever is coming down the road.

Homeland Insecurity

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