This commentary is by Walt Amses, a resident of Calais.
Last summer in Montana opened my eyes, which I presumed already open; enlightened my perspective, which I thought adequately enlightened; and offered a crystal-clear glimpse of the future: humanity slow-roasted in a well-aged, bubbling marinade of greed-infused climate change denial.
It’s startling how a couple of days over 100 degrees can put an exclamation point on your worldview.
Another trip out west in August 2017 lands us in a Missoula motel, eating takeout, again dodging triple-digit temperatures and dense smoke from the more than 100 wildfires charring hillsides and threatening the lungs of anyone daring to venture outside.
We binge on pizza as an entirely different yet equally otherworldly scenario unfolds on TV, as Category 4 Hurricane Harvey makes landfall on the Texas coast, kicking off Houston’s third 500-year flood in three years, eventually dropping up to 60 inches of rain in places, inundating vast expanses of the city’s outlying subdivisions at a cost upward of $125 billion.
After vowing never again to risk summers any hotter than the ones at home, I find myself in waterlogged central Vermont, struggling with what has been described as “biblical” or “thousand-year” rainfall, flooding fields, washing out roads and dredging up awful recollections of Tropical Storm Irene, whose 2011 deluge ravaged the state’s infrastructure, destroying homes, businesses and bridges and isolating entire communities, several for weeks.
Even in the midst of what was already shaping up to be a relentlessly tropical summer in Vermont, weekend storms unloading as they did on already saturated ground quickly lifted rivers and streams above flood stage, prompting evacuation of low-lying communities and had weary first responders out in force 24/7.
It feels distinctly as though recent trends and an ever more volatile present portend an increasingly dangerous future, well beyond the mythical “tipping point” we may have already left in the dust — or mud, depending on location.
It’s notable my own experience with brutal heat, as profound as I thought it was, occurred in what is essentially a high desert, with extremely low humidity, where moderate exercise is viable even with temperatures in the upper 80s. When the thermometer ticks up past 100, though, things change drastically, especially combined with humidity levels raising heat indexes to a life-threatening 120 in areas of the Deep South.
The heat, humidity and smoke of early summer have altered our own routines pretty dramatically, relegating even moderate activities like walking to the early morning hours.
A United Nations study released last October suggests — not without controversy — that certain areas of the United States, including Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama and parts of California, would become uninhabitable for humans by 2070. Touted last weekend by an NBC meteorologist as “probably closer than you might think,” the report states that without mitigation, including a reduction of greenhouse gases, the global surge of rising temperatures will create levels of heat stress intolerable for the human body.
Further emphasizing the need to reassess the world’s climate policies, research suggests that, without action, up to one-third of the global population will begin experiencing life-threatening conditions similar to the Sahara Desert. Which effectively translates to the most vulnerable populations — those living in the hottest regions — fleeing to avoid heat and drought, pressuring the cities and towns to which they move, creating a massive number of climate refugees that will ripple across the globe.
Early Tuesday morning, July 11, we bounce over deep washboards, between water-gouged canyons with signage warning of temporary closures and roads that no longer exist. Small, usually crystal-clear brooks have crested their banks, muddy and threatening. Startling drone footage depicts Montpelier’s business district eerily still and completely under water. Barre too is submerged with warnings to stay away.
We return home still not quite sure if we can safely leave Calais, which doesn’t matter much. There’s no place else to go.
The impact of this storm in central Vermont will be devastating. Businesses are likely to lose a chunk of the summer tourist season. Lives throughout the area will be dramatically changed: homes unlivable or even destroyed; infrastructure compromised; roads under repair for months; rivers and streams tainted with copious, toxic runoff; and agriculture — barely recovering from a late spring freeze — again suffering the wrath of nature’s fury.
What happened in Vermont this month was shocking, but it shouldn’t have been surprising. It’s precisely what climate scientists have predicted forever and what the fossil fuel industry and its congressional minions have consistently denied, even while knowing the truth for decades.
Conditions over the past month, sultry heat and high humidity interspersed with a series of heavy thunderstorms, provided a near ideal setup for the July deluge. As the planet warms, the air is capable of retaining more and more moisture, a near “perfect storm” of conditions, according to one climate scientist, who believes the jet stream may also be a contributing factor.
Michael Mann, a distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania, points out on CNN that while “weather is weather … it’s going to happen; rainfall, flooding events are going to happen, but climate change is supercharging them,” which means when a weather system is producing large amounts of rainfall, it’s probable it will produce even more.
Mann, considered on the cutting edge of climate research, explains that the Arctic is warming much faster than the lower 48, reducing the temperature difference between the equator and the pole and causing the jet stream to stall, keeping weather systems stationary for longer periods of time, exactly what happened here in Vermont.
The sobering fact is that storms of this magnitude are certain to continue unless we undertake a huge mitigation process, and even then it is unlikely we’ll be around to see major changes. It’s “irreversible on the timescale of humans” (currently alive), according to NASA: “If we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would flatten in a few years … but remain elevated for many centuries.”
I’m afraid the bill for years of complacency has come due.
