Around the world, summer heat, drought, floods, and fire pose grave and intertwined threats to life and property. Are we approaching the end of another summer, or the end of summer as we know it?
The end of summer arrives, as every child knows, when the first bell rings on the first day of the school year. But where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, the season shows few signs of departing. The triple-digit temperatures that descended for a week in late July and intermittently in August returned to the West last week, breaking records from Southern California to Montana.
The version of summer that most North Americans grew up with is a relatively recent invention, and it can be traced to a human-caused change in the climate. In the eighteen-forties, New York City public schools took only a three-week summer break. But, as urban centers grew larger, denser, and more industrialized, they also grew hotter, thanks to urban warming known as the heat-island effect.
Over a decade ago, Vivek Shandas, an urban ecologist at Portland State University, began giving presentations about the dangers of escalating summer heat to local officials in Oregon and Washington, states that were historically known for their cool and cloudy weather, and where air-conditioning was considered a needless indulgence. More often than not, he was “laughed out of the room,” he told me recently. “The attitude was, ‘Well, this is cute; great, thanks.
Although news reports focussed on the high temperatures, which exceeded a hundred and twenty degrees and shattered all-time records, what my body noticed were the nightly lows that never came. Long after midnight, there was no respite from the heat—only plenty of time to lie awake, imagining the summers to come. “It was a moment of reckoning more severe than anybody expected,” Shandas told me. “I spent the hottest days up to my eyeballs in the Sandy River.
Thanks in part to new awareness of and readiness for the heat, this summer has been less deadly for the Pacific Northwest—even though temperatures, at times, have been as high or higher than during the heat dome. But cooling costs money and emits greenhouse gases that make the warming even worse—debts that will be carried less by the chief perpetrators of climate change than by those suffering its effects. We cannot wait until the next disaster to further protect ourselves, Shandas told me.
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