AND THEY CALL THE WIND MARIA
Trees burning in Kirkwood, photo credit New York Times.
Chalk it up to depression…or my reluctance to bring you bad news you already know. That and a week’s vacation my family took explains my absence from my blog the past two weeks. About that vacation…it was meant to be a week of camping in our beloved Sierra Nevada, but had to be canceled at the last moment: wind-driven forest fires and much wind-driven smoke. (I can’t even remember the name of the fire…there have been so many this summer.)
So we gave up on the high country and drove west where we rented a house on Dillon Beach facing Tomales Bay, not a long swim from where the North American Plate grinds against the Pacific Plate along the submerged San Andreas Fault. The Pacific was its usual rolling blue majestic self, but even here ash from the forest fires stained the normally azure sky.
Back home yesterday, I read that the 204,000-acre Caldor Fire has crested the Sierra Nevada and is threatening Lake Tahoe, that cobalt jewel long celebrated for the purity of its waters; and three days ago the Forest Service temporarily closed all 18 of the state’s national forests due to fire danger. Yes, our California—indeed the entire American West—is getting hotter and drier and windier. Too few of us too late recognized the interconnectedness of all things on this planet, living and not. Now, all it takes is a spark to drive the lesson home. Year to date stats (thru Sept. 2): 7,003 fires consuming 1,926,123 acres of the Golden State.
Kathleen Johnson, a paleo-climatologist at the University of California Irvine, is very concerned. “This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years. And the reason is linked directly to human-caused climate change.”
Scientists have been warning us of this awful truth of climate change for decades. And most of us have put it off for future consideration. How many times have you heard a politician answer when asked if he believed in global warming or climate change, “I don’t know, I’m not a scientist!” Our follow-up question should have been “Then why the hell do you hold your office? Can’t you ask a scientist?” If he did, he would discover that 97% of those in that field of science will say “yes, it’s an existential threat;” the other three percent are in the employ of fossil fuel industry.
Our political failures aside, climate change, assisted mightily by we featherless bipeds, has arrived, and is not to denied. Time to pay the tab, and we are going to pay dearly. Our paradise, this miracle of nature, our California, will never be the same in our lifetimes.
I am not a climate scientist nor a meteorologist. But I’m familiar with the basics of the science. Back in 1951, as a new volunteer in the United States Air Force, I was sent to weather school at Chanute Air Force Base in southern Illinois, where I attended an eight-hour-a-day, six-month course in meteorology. Even back then we were taught about global warming that was rising along with atmospheric pollution triggered by the Industrial Revolution. Thereafter I worked the next four years in six Air Force weather stations sending balloons aloft—from Japan to Greece—before being discharged.
But that was not the end of my involvement with weather and climate. Remember Los Angeles smog in the 1950s and 1960s? When a choking mix of chemicals and particulate matter trapped under a temperature inversion burnt your eyes and assaulted your lungs? LA became infamous for its “smog,” and locals demanded an end to it.
A journalist by then, I received an assignment from Westways magazine to do a series of articles on the subject, which was prompted by a Cal Tech Professor of bio-organic chemistry, Dr. A. J. Haagen-Smit, who was doing some ground-breaking research on the cause of our smog. Professor Haagen-Smit called it “photochemical smog.” As he explained it, the emission of unburnt hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen emitted by autos rose into the atmosphere, only to be trapped near ground level by the temperature inversion, and in the presence of sunlight changed into ozone and formaldehyde and other eye-stinging pollutants. Ironically, the same stratified stable air that had drawn the infant aircraft industry to the Los Angeles Basin back in the early 1900s was an accessory to the crime of polluting the air we breathe. And the chief culprit? The automobile.
Eureka! Always resourceful and forward-thinking Californians, bucking Detroit’s foot-dragging, required catalytic converters on automobiles sold in the state and rubber grommets around gasoline pump nozzles, and our air returned to breathable.
That win was minor league. With climate change/global warming now the opponent, we’re late to the game and decidedly overmatched. And only we are to blame. Why are we so dismissive of science? Is it that difficult to understand how nature works? We certainly welcome every incidental gadget and luxury science brings with new discoveries, but we are deaf to warnings of its misuse.
As a species we seem to be remarkably creative, but ignorant of how to cope with our own creations. Does this signal the arrival of “End Times?” No, try the Sixth Mass Extinction.