As someone raised in Northern California, I’ll never get fully used to the Washington, D.C. summers. The heat and humidity ebbs and flows, but at its worst, the combination can be brutally oppressive, like trying to breathe — and work, and walk around, and generally live — through a thick, hot, wet blanket. I’m always thrilled when the first snap of cool, dry air breaks through sometime generally in late September or early October, signaling that I’ve survived another summer.
Early this summer, on a less oppressive day, I was on a bike ride through Rock Creek Park. Winding my way up Beach Drive, between the old growth trees towering above, I sniffed the familiar smell of the fire pits that dot the meadows on both sides of the road, popular gathering places for families, and friends, and summer camps, and parties in the summertime. There are grills at each of these spots, and their smoke will drift across the road, from one direction or another, depending on the tilt of the wind. It’s as sure a sign of summer’s arrival as any smell.
There was just one problem. I wasn’t on an afternoon or weekend ride. It was 7 a.m. on a weekday morning. Passing the campsites, it was clear that they were all empty. Even as I continued past them, the smell persisted. It wasn’t until I got home that I discovered the breadth of the Canadian wildfires, stronger and earlier than ever on record this year, which were sending up unimaginably large plumes of smoke. Our mild, early summer, fueled by cool, dry winds coming down from the north, was suddenly importing not just unseasonably nice weather, but dangerously particle-filled air.
Moving east, I knew I was inheriting some new natural disasters, mostly in the form of strong, potentially hurricane-force storms. Though I thought I’d left the fire seasons of my California youth behind. If this summer has taught us anything, it’s that none of us can count on being spared any of the climate catastrophes we’ve helped amplify through our collective pollution of the planet. But the other lesson I’m hoping more of us take to heart is one that few people ever like to admit: We are absolutely not ready for what’s coming.
In 2016, those same Canadian wildfires, which burn every summer as a natural part of the forest’s natural growth cycles, suddenly did something nobody had ever seen before. Unusually dry, hot air — nearly 30 degrees above normal — caused a fire burning on the outskirts of Fort McMurray to come raging toward the gas boomtown. The entire city of 88,000 had to be evacuated. Even more frighteningly, standard firefighting techniques proved to be not just ineffective, but inflammatory, causing fire tornados to spiral up into the sky.
The more you learn about the Fort McMurray disaster, the more you realize how incredible it is that hundreds, or thousands, didn’t die. I started writing this post, and about this particular unprecedented disaster, a couple months ago. And then Maui happened.
Fire tore down the volcanic hills toward the water at a speed unlike anything that anyone had ever seen or imagined, fueled by a combination of unusually dry vegetation and strong winds, just like had happened in Fort McMurray. This time, people weren’t as lucky. The fire is already the deadliest in a century in America, but it’s far worse than just that.
The sleepy resort town of Lahaina, where I spent one of the best weeks of my life back in college, was basically entirely destroyed. Those lucky enough to make it to the ocean spent hours in the water waiting out the flames. If all you’ve seen is the already staggering death tolls from the island, you likely don’t have a sense of how bad things really are (something this disaster shares with the pandemic). As of this writing, more than 800 people are still missing, nearly two weeks later.
As Hawaiians still struggle to come to terms with the unprecedented disaster on Maui, Southern California was hit with a tropical storm this weekend, the first to make landfall there since the 1930s. Though it weakened from its category 4 hurricane status and veered inland earlier than projected, sparing San Diego and LA the worst of the winds, the storm still caused flash flooding across a huge swath of land unaccustomed to dealing with such things. One of the main arteries into Palm Springs appeared to have been washed away entirely.
You can be forgiven for missing the fact that a large swath of Washington State and British Columbia are currently on fire, given that coverage is running a distant third on national news, behind the disasters in Hawaii and California.
And while the disasters grab the headlines, the creeping, year-by-year warming could have much more dramatic impacts on the way we live, or don’t.
If you’re not already familiar with it, I’d like you to learn about a term that will become increasingly important in the years to come. Understanding it, and its severity, might help keep you or someone you love safe. I just wish it had a more ominous name than “wet bulb.”
It is a calculation of the combined heat and humidity at which human beings can no longer self-regulate their body temperature by evaporating sweat off the skin, leading to overheating and, eventually, death. While the wet bulb thresholds were initially put forth by a 2010 study, more recent research suggests humans are even more vulnerable than previously believed.
According to a study from Penn State on young, healthy men and women, the critical environmental limit — the point at which body temperature begins to rise continuously — is just 87 degrees Fahrenheit with 100% humidity, or 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 60% humidity.
These are not outrageous temperatures, by today’s standards. We just endured the hottest July, and quite possibly the hottest month, on record. Austin, Texas has had a 45-day streak of days topping 100 degrees and, perhaps more concerning, two separate 11-day streaks topping 105. These are, definitionally, by wet bulb standards, unlivable conditions.
Air conditioning has improved and become more widespread, protecting us temporarily from some of these impacts. But so have blackouts, especially in Texas, which often occur as systems are stretched to their limits amid extreme conditions.
And that’s only for those lucky enough to have shelter. Because as our technology has gotten more advanced, our homelessness epidemic continues to worsen.
Just like every other risk vector, natural disasters impact our most vulnerable populations at higher rates. I mentioned before the somewhat spectacularly low death toll in Fort McMurray. That was only because people drove away from (and through) the fire to safety. The only fatalities occurred in a car crash fleeing the flames. But with older, or disabled, or especially unhoused populations, simply hopping in your car and fleeing at the last possible moment — from fires, floods, hurricanes, etc. — may well not be an option.
We’ve evolved — sociologically, but not physically — to be able to survive in, what may well seem like, nearly any condition. But we seemed to have learned the wrong lessons from this progress. The point should not be to lean into making environments even less hospitable and hoping we survive. This may seem more obvious in cases like the Titan submersible, but it’s a far bigger problem when it comes to masses flocking to the sun belt.
If there’s a positive to hurricanes in the west and wildfire smoke in the east, perhaps it’s the more widespread understanding that there is no safe haven from what’s coming. We’re all going to have to live through it, and deal with what we’ve wrought.
Unfortunately, we’re still governed by far too many politicians either small-minded or cynical enough to declare climate change a hoax because it still gets cold in winter. When we most need sweeping, systemic changes to mitigate this crisis, some elected officials are being more stubborn than ever. Their power and money may protect them to a degree. But the events of this summer have made clear that nobody should make the mistake of thinking that a disaster — any disaster — can’t happen where they live just because it hasn’t happened there yet.
It doesn’t do any good to panic at our collective lack of inaction. But we need to be prepared.
Lean on your friends and family who have lived in places that have experienced the disasters. Listen to warnings from lessons learned the hard way. And for the love of god, don’t move to one of the places becoming rapidly inhospitable to human life. Because if the heat or a weather event doesn’t kill you, disaster capitalism is ready to finish the job.
Not only did water rights fights lead to many of the aspects that fueled the Maui fires — they are ongoing, amid the disaster. As the west deals with growing fights over the shrinking bounty of the Colorado River, a Saudi company is pumping groundwater out of Arizona…to grow alfalfa…back in Saudi Arabia…because they’d rather spend the cash to do that then use their own water to do so. If we keep pushing these systems to failure, they will continue to fail more and more spectacularly.
In spite of it all, some people still roll their eyes at the idea that we’re killing the planet. The climate denialists will point out that the Earth has been through big climate swings throughout its history. If you find yourself in conversations with those who would downplay or outright reject the creeping reality around them, I’d like to offer this reframing. The planet is going to be just fine. It will do whatever it needs to do in order to cycle through this phase. It’s built to handle whatever we can throw at it. We’re the ones who won’t survive.