The past 2 mornings, we’ve awakened to 3 inches of snow on the ground and more coming down. For the moment it’s stopped, but the forecast is for another inch or so tonight and tomorrow morning. Nightly lows are 20° F. Tomorrow afternoon’s high is 48° F. By Saturday, we’re told to expect clear skies and 66° F.
We try not to believe everything we’re told, but it seems reasonable to expect a change in the weather.
Snow is not unusual this time of year in Sawtooth Valley, but an article in The Guardian this morning is titled, “Inside an oven: sweltering heat ravages crops and takes lives in southeast Asia.” The article details heat-stroke deaths, military ammunition cook-offs, closed schools, destroyed farms, slaughtered poultry, and workers who cannot pick up their tools after a break because they’ve been left out in the sun. The area from India to the islands off southern Vietnam has seen high-temperature records broken every day for the past 11 months. Globally, the Paris Agreement’s target of a 1.5° C temperature increase has been indisputably breached.
Such a contrast in temperatures indicates that Sawtooth Valley is, for the moment, doing its part to keep the global average temperature down. But every snowy morning we have here, somewhere else is experiencing conditions that threaten life. The atmosphere between hot and cold areas is chaotic.
How chaotic? Hailstones 5 and 6 inches in diameter have been falling in Texas and parts of China recently. Such hailstones are formed by sequential updrafts in thunderclouds. They fall and are lifted again, getting larger and larger each time. Finally, the wind can no longer lift them, no matter how big the storm. It takes a mighty wind to lift a couple of pounds of ice up to 20,000 feet before dropping it onto your windshield.
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Tornadoes require less explanation. So do hurricanes. Droughts and fires tend to explain themselves in the forms of dead livestock and destroyed homes. Sea level rise is still subject to dispute by climate deniers, although it won’t be long until climate scientists on the payrolls of fossil-fuel companies will change the subject when anyone brings up Miami or New Orleans.
Lots of people are waiting for this summer’s storms and fires before they concede that heavily populated parts of our planet are close to uninhabitable. But I think the south Asian heatwave is evidence enough to say we’ve passed the tipping point to an Earth with no icecaps.
If lack of ice were the only problem, humanity could probably construct a recognizable future for itself, but humans and a lot of other organisms tend to die if exposed to wet-bulb temperatures above 35° C for long periods of time.
In Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, wet-bulb temps have exceeded 50° C this year. Fatality statistics have not been as high as expected, due to acclimation, scientific bias toward heat-vulnerable northern European genetics, education (stay out of the sun, don’t move, get to an air-conditioned area if you can), and probable underreporting by governments. Even so, lots of people will die of heatstroke before the Northern Hemisphere summer is over. Some of them may even die in Sawtooth Valley.
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It seems absurd that I can write such things while snowmelt is dripping off the roof and ducks are floating in the semi-frozen pond that is occupying our backyard. But next Sunday, Julie and I are heading to Eastern Oregon to help plant her parents’ garden. The high temperature at their house is supposed to be 87° F.
It will be a shock to two people who have been wandering around in sweaters and long underwear for six months.
If we survive working outside in a hot zone, we’ll come back home to cool off. The weather has preserved the snowpack here, which will act like an old-fashioned icebox until mid-July or so.
Our most immediate climate crisis will be high water. The snowpack in the Sawtooths is above normal, but not extremely so, so we’ll survive unless a rain-on-snow event causes the river to carve a new channel through our living room.
A more likely crisis is an influx of climate refugees disguised as tourists. Once the temperature passes 100° F in the valleys of the American West, we will have near-constant traffic on the highway outside our windows, and Redfish Lake will begin to resemble a walrus sanctuary. If the heat keeps up, the number of visitors will exceed the valley’s capacity to absorb additional people. Fights will start over a few square feet of beach.
I’m not sure how the authorities will handle people who defend their bit of sand with violence, but the local campgrounds have become violent in less crowded circumstances. I suspect that if people start moving inward from hurricane-wrecked American coastlines and residents of the Midwest and South start experiencing megadeath heatwaves, we will see some high-altitude Idaho public lands become refugee camps. Of course, once the snow melts in the high mountains, those camps will be just as warm as everywhere else, and it’s hard to air condition a tent. They’ll head for the lakes.
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All this sounds disastrous, and it is, but as my title indicates, pessimism has nothing to do with it. There are hard limits to resources, hard limits to the amount of heat humans can take, hard limits to the amount of CO2 the atmosphere and oceans can absorb before our habitat goes away. Any preferences we have for bad news (or for good news, for that matter) have little effect on outcome.
So, for the record, I am not a pessimist. I am not a doomer. I am one of those optimists who hope that economies, infrastructures, and climate will endure long enough for me to live a normal, privileged, Western Civilized life until I die. When I’m feeling hopelessly optimistic, I hope that Julie will get to do that too.
But I don’t for a minute think that what I hope will make a difference. What will be will be, whether I’m around to witness it or not, comment on it or not, pray for it or not.
I’m in the position of a philosopher in the late Roman Empire who could see that his zeitgeist would kill him if his emperor didn’t kill him first. Stoic philosophers who prospered under the supremely realistic Marcus Aurelius didn’t do so well under his successors, leading to the famous Latin lines, “It is not good / to piss off a man / who has been declared a god / by pointing out he’s gonna die” (translation mine).
Another Roman philosopher’s poem, one reconstructed from a charred scroll found at Herculaneum: “It’s hard to embrace optimism and realism / without betraying / one or the other.”
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There was a time, in the 1960s, when hope could have been a factor for me and a lot of other people. If we had realized we had to abandon extractive capitalism, consumer culture, infinite growth on a finite planet, and technology as salvation, we might have had a chance to avoid war, economic collapse, and extinction.
If we had not elected Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump we might have had a longer future. But we didn’t. We didn’t have to give religious leaders and patriarchs control of our population numbers. But we did.
Fabulously wealthy humans invested in private jets and yachts instead of housing for working people. Bright young people chased wealth and power instead of conscious, ethical lives. People vaguely attracted to public service chose narcissism over community. Morally defective voters elected leaders who were moral defectives. College students chose distraction and easy choices over the honest facing of facts and critical thinking. Debt serfs believed conmen and demagogues who promised to save them from imaginary enemies, and sure enough, those enemies went away.
But everybody is finally facing real enemies, ones that really are trying to kill us. One is the release of CO2 from the burning of hydrocarbons. Another is war over increasingly limited real estate, which will keep us from doing anything about the first enemy. Yet another is a general lowering of consciousness and critical thinking, achieved by our inability to admit how badly we’ve screwed up. This last enemy will prevent us from doing anything to help ourselves at all.
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In times like these, when the unconscious ebbs up through the floorboards to engulf our daily lives, it’s easier to see that people don’t often think rationally. We’re facing a climate and civilizational crisis that requires the most careful use of frontal lobes, yet our solutions are all from the amygdala: kill them all, elect a savior, don’t let them in, become an envied influencer on Instagram, escape to Mars, have a dozen children, use billions of dollars to buy a private island and stock it with a lifetime’s worth of weapons, ammunition, freeze-dried food, and adolescent females. Also “la-la-la I can’t hear you,” a phrase which is in more frequent use than you would think. These are the practiced strategies of spoiled children who want to stay spoiled and stay children. They’ve resulted in people who have given up on reality and fled instead to secret gardens of their own deadly psychoses. They would rather die than live anywhere else. Optimists, in a word.
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I should say that Julie and I are among the spoiled children in this world. We haven’t had to grow up in a way that’s familiar to 6-year-old Palestinians, among other 6-year-olds. We’ve kept our inner children, the ones who delight in the world rather than being afraid of it, intact.
It doesn’t mean we’re psychotic, it just means we’re not starving or maimed and know we’re lucky not to be.
But this morning we once again awoke to a dark and quiet house. After 3 weeks of power, no power. I admit that I hadn’t been so pessimistic as to think it would happen again this soon. I hadn’t been so optimistic that I thought we could call the power company and they would be here in an hour or that in another hour they would replace our old transformer with a new one, and the lights would come on. But that is what happened.
We now have electricity that promises to last longer than 3 weeks. Although we are once again reminded how quickly life would become unbearable without it, it’s easy to take it for granted once it’s been restored.
It becomes all too human to think that civilization and its helpful competent power company employees and new transformers and functional light switches are normal phenomena, even when you consider the odds against any one of them ever happening once, much less twice, in our universe of ever forking paths.