I live in Oregon. It snowed in Colorado just a few days after 100-degree temperatures. For those unwilling to see that global climate change is real, the snow was proof positive there’s no global warming. Snow in early September, everything is just fine.
Except it’s not. Our climate reality is not fine. It’s not for the victims of Iowa’s inland hurricane dubbed “Derecho” (every year there’s a new name of some terrible storm we’ve never heard of before). Or for Louisiana, which was recently walloped by a catastrophic hurricane. And our climate reality is not okay for my friends and relatives living in California and Oregon. We here on the West Coast are surrounded by hundreds of fires right now.
Fires raging, not sure what to do
I was up most of the night watching the emergency reports as places within walking distance from our house were being evacuated. The impacts of our climate reality kept me awake and wondering: should I pack our bags? Load the car? Hose down our property? Or at least just let the water run all night? We don’t water in the summer. Which means our grass is ready to ignite. But so is most of the West Coast after staggeringly hot day and gusting winds followed by explosive fires burning everywhere.
The Glendower Fire raged all night and it’s still burning. Phoenix, Oregon has many businesses and homes that have burned to the ground. Parts of Medford and Central Point received Level 3 “Go!” mandatory evacuation alerts. People are worried and scrambling. All this just a few miles away from our home.
Last night my 10-year-old went to bed and feel asleep easily only to wake up from a nightmare. I read the news on my iPhone next to her to help her get back to sleep. Watching our cities burn is devastating. All this piled into an unprecedented year of pandemic concerns, suicides, and trauma.
It was Shakespeare who said: Sweet are the uses of adversity.
But I’ve had my fill of adversity in 2020. I’m sure you have, too.
But that won’t stop the politicians in this country from continuing to deny the climate reality that is, as I write this, burning our state to the ground.
Mother Nature always comes back. Fires can be regenerative for the earth. But not for us humans.
Climate reality in terror: fires like these are just starting
Up and down the West Coast suffocating smoke, searing heat, and the threat of racing fire is our climate reality this week. People are fleeing. Social media is full of people checking in safe, people traumatized, people unsure what to do.
A family in Chico, California that lost everything they owned two years is ago is now packing emergency bags. They, too, have a daughter having night terrors (and crippling day-time anxiety as she looks out her window at a blood-red smoke-filled sky).
Twitter is full of similar stories, all bearing witness this climate reality. At the same time, there are still those who want to continue to exploit the Earth for their own greed, making it so much worse.
But here’s the thing: this isn’t a feature film that ends in two hours. It won’t be over for days, maybe weeks, or even years. For families who have already lost their homes, businesses, and lives, it may never really be over.
Climate destruction happening at warp speed
The problems of this climate reality have become monumental. In 2006 Al Gore predicted this in his documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” But it’s happening at warp speed. What we were told would happen to our grandkids is happening to us. Right now. The fires aren’t going away tomorrow. The impacts of global warming aren’t going away any time soon, or ever. At least not without a seismic shift in our willingness to find a peaceful resolution with Planet Earth.
I found my moment of peace today. Our homeschooling collective is at our house today. We spent the morning checking in, sharing special things we love, baking together, and learning math and measurements. The sound of children giggling is a balm to me. Our home amid the trees and hills of southern Oregon is a safe place today. But I am all too aware that if the winds shift it could be gone tomorrow.
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Fascinating that you’d be intelligent enough to see through vaccines and the virus false narrative, yet still worship at the altar of the ones who push the shots and demand we cower from a flu.
You need to take a look deeper into the climate change story. You’ll find not just badly manipulated science, as with corona, but also a complicit media, as with corona and vaccines. As with the virus, predictions of utter doom have proven to be fearmongering.
Your strange preschool-teacher-like worldview makes us all into little people under your matriarchy and not equals. And you seem to have that chicken little mindset where fear comes all too easily and you’ll scurry to gather your little chicks over a loud noise.
Real, existential threats are afoot and none of them were “accidentally” made by bad humans being bad to Ma Nature– no, it’s all been a conscious choice by all of us, in the name of “progress” or money or power or comfort. I adore Mother Nature on a deep level rarely found in people I meet. It hurts to hear her scream so loudly under the pain we inflict.
But the pain is caused by the very things you yourself are doing. You insist on a modern, unsustainable lifestyle complete with all the plastics, metals, glass, wood, water, electricity, garbage, internet, tech, toys, gadgets, comforts, specialty foods, and personal indulgences that cost so much for nature to give to us and then take back in the form of waste. Your lifestyle contributes in every way, as much as anyone else, to the problem. Thus you are a hypocrite.
The very website and blog and data infrastructure you enjoy blogging on costs nature dearly. Your lovely phone was toxic to make, is toxic to use, and will be toxic to dispose of when you upgrade, First World Problem-style.
I too in Oregon have been looking at the flames less than a mile away, teetering on the knife edge of full bugout. More than once. West Coasters have been through earthquakes that flattened buildings and started fires and took out power and bridges. We’ve been buried under feet of snow with the roof caving in, or had the roof ripped off by Pacific Storms gusting to hurricane force. We’ve endured cataclysmic floods where whole towns washed away and our streets were rivers and rivers were spilling their banks.
This is just another of Ma Nature’s faces, and to be so terrified of her natural state reveals a great deal about someone who claims to be a mature person who loves nature.
To further repudiate any research or self-education into information about the climate change scam, would reveal a great deal about someone who claims to be informed and educated.
I cannot but urge you, and everyone around you, to do these two things before you enter into the world, before you go out among the rest of us:
1. Grow the eff up.
2. Get the eff over yourself.
Good day.
Climate change is real and is driven in large part by human activity. I think Jennifer has done a fantastic job of putting a human face in some of the devastation people are facing as a result of our collective failures to address climate change. Natural disasters have always happened, but our changing climate is driving these wildfires and many of the damaging hurricanes that have resulted in loss of life in recent years. Thank you for this important piece Jennifer.
“Climate change” is a concept built on top of another concept called “climate”, which is usually defined as the average weather at a given place or location.
Weather is changeable. Climate is ascertained based on observations of weather, and so climate must also be changeable.
Weather consists of physical phenomena, while climate is an abstract idea and climate change is merely an abstraction of an abstraction. Consequently, neither climate nor climate change have any physical existence, nor can they cause anything. All the problems that are generally blamed on climate change should actually be blamed on weather.
For what it’s worth, climate does change, because weather changes. Over the past 200 years, the West Coast of the US has for the most part experienced unusually wet weather, which has given it an unusually wet climate, compared to the preceeding millennium. California experienced a mega-drought lasting over 50 years about 800 years ago. As far as we know, another mega-drought could occur there at any time—which shows how little we really know about what factors determine or influence the weather.
The West Coast is one of those parts of the world where weather patterns including rainfall are far from stable.
MJ was unnecessarily rude in the above comment, but the first two paragraphs of the comment make a lot of sense, at least they do to me. The people promoting the vaccines-are-good-for-you meme are the same ones pushing the climate-change-is-all-our-fault meme, and they are not pushing these memes for the benefit of the mass of people. Also, the people I talk to who are convinced that vaccines are good for us tend to be the same people who are convinced that climate change is all our fault, and they get quite uptight or irate when I politely suggest otherwise.