The Climate Crisis Is Happening Right Now. Just Look at California’s Weekend.

Elizabeth Weil (ProPublica) 10 September 2020

Public Interest

Record high temperatures. Record fires. Record smoke. ProPublica reporter Elizabeth Weil spoke to former California Gov. Jerry Brown about the state’s converging apocalypses.

Two weeks ago, after freak lightning strikes torched Northern California but before the inferno of Labor Day weekend had begun, a friend called to talk, like you do when the world is turning to crap and nothing is stable or makes sense. In the past six months she’d fled New York for rural West Marin (due to the pandemic), and West Marin for San Francisco (due to smoke). Now she was planning to leave San Francisco for Los Angeles, as the gross air had descended here. We joked, as I’d joked with every friend this summer, that we should all just drop out and start a commune on a lake in Maine. “Every commune needs lesbians!” she said. “I’ll be our lesbian! California is going to become unlivable!”

Two weeks ago, this was a funny conversation. By Sunday, it was not.

This was the weekend that climate change, in California, stopped being about the future. The weekend that the idea that COVID-19 was worse than climate change, or fascism was worse than climate change, disappeared. The experts, of course, had known this for some time. But by the point August turned into September, the drumbeat of California’s environmental anomalies had grown so horrid and relentless that not even the professionals could stay detached.

Way back, a lifetime ago, on Sept. 3, Daniel Swain, UCLA’s extreme-weather climate scientist who’s made a name from himself by tweeting, in plain language, just what the hell is going on, wrote, “This *gesturing wildly and in every direction* is utterly exhausting.”

Still, through Friday the 4th and into Saturday the 5th, Swain tried his professional best to keep his readers up to date on the all-time record high temperatures in a staggering number of California cities and the unheard-of airlift rescue of 200 people from the Creek Fire surrounding Mammoth Lake.

But by Saturday evening, his emotional and lexicographical reserves were growing thin. “Yeah, it is almost literally unbelievable, but I’ve been saying that a lot lately,” he wrote while commenting how the Creek Fire had exploded to more than 100,000 acres even before it reached the part of the Sierra where, due to climate change, bark beetles killed millions of trees.

For a moment early Sunday morning, he appeared to get his vocabulary and mojo back: “Active pyrocumulonimbus ("fire thunderstorm") activity occurred through night — resembling volcanic eruption …”

But by 8 a.m. he’d exhausted his vocabulary and himself: “These are getting harder and harder to write.”

The stakes had shifted; the essential subject-object dynamic changed. The earth — at least the part of it that is California — was no longer a backdrop for our actions, the set of our play. It had become the diva, the star of our horrible drama, the villain demolishing cascades of plans for all of us little specks hubristic enough to believe we could still make them.

Midmorning Sunday, hoping to escape the heat and smoke, I walked across San Francisco’s Great Highway, on the far western edge of the city, to Ocean Beach. Last year, the city closed part of the Great Highway due to blowing sand (and it plans to move a whole stretch in the future due to sea level rise).

This spring, the city closed the road again, so residents could exercise, socially distanced. Then on Sunday, Mayor London Breed shut down not just the Great Highway but the parking lots along Ocean Beach. Labor Day weekend is Burning Man weekend in the traditional Bay Area calendar.

Given that Burning Man 2020 was canceled, 1,000 people gathered Saturday night on the beach instead.

The next day the mayor called the partiers “absolutely reckless and selfish,” and she closed the beach parking to make an example of them. Continue Reading…

Courtesy: ProPublica.org

Comments