Very Slowly And Then All At Once

Reckoning with our new climate normal.

Photo by Steven Weeks on Unsplash

It’s been a terrible summer, hasn’t it? Everyone I talk to seems to agree: It’s been a terrible summer, or at least a very weird summer, a things-aren’t-feeling-like-they’re-supposed-to summer. In many places, it’s very, very hot — breaking records kind of hot, cooking creatures in the ocean kind of hot. In others, it’s very, very wet — flooding that displaces millions kind of wet. And in others, it’s very, very stormy — level towns and kill people kind of stormy.

It’s not that climate change itself has accelerated in the last few months. It’s that the earth has been steadily warming for years, and it feels like we’ve finally hit a tipping point. Until this summer, to the casual observer, climate disasters likely seemed to be more or less sequential: there were hurricanes and floods and fires that probably wouldn’t have been as bad if not for these man-made changes, but there was generally one major disaster on the front page at a time. Those of us who care about the future of the planet took note of each one, and those invested in not caring about it either ignored or denied what was in front of them, and the cycle replayed itself over the next wildfire, the next flood, the next tropical storm.

This summer, though, disasters were unabating, and overlapping, and seemingly everywhere all at once. I wonder if we’ll look back at this summer as the moment when the ravages of climate change went from feeling like a sinister if ambient threat to feeling like a horror show of every-day reality.