Before the Deluge
Tornados in the Midwest, heat wave hits the East Coast, a named hurricane (Andrea) formed before the official season begins. This is our new normal: weather extremes.
Baseball and Climate Change
We can’t look at any one event and say: that’s global warming, that’s climate change. I read an interesting baseball analogy, used by a sixth grade teacher in Oklahoma in a lesson about climate change. She said it’s a lot like baseball in the “steroid” era. During that time, more home runs were hit than in any time before. The reason: some baseball players were using muscle building steroid drugs, enabling them to hit the ball farther.
The teacher made the point that just because a player hit one home run, didn’t mean that player was using steroids. The only way to really know was to look at the player over time, over seasons. When a pretty good ball player hit fifteen home runs one season, then comes back twenty pounds heavier and hits forty the next year, it might be reasonable to guess he was on steroids.
It’s the same with climate conditions. No one hurricane or tornado is evidence of global warming, even the category four or five storms we have seen in the past few years. It’s the number of major storms we now see, seemingly a guarantee to have two catastrophic hurricanes or more in any season. Just like the ballplayers, there were always home runs, but now there are so many more of them.
Live at Eleven
Tornados, blizzards; it’s not just the intensity, it’s the number of storms at that intensity. That’s the evidence to show we have changed our environment.
Yesterday we had our annual “street flood” on my block; it rained a couple of inches in less than an hour. Our city has done a great job improving the drainage but no one, including “we the flooded,” is willing to pay to prevent the “annual” inundation. As long as it’s only once a year, we live with it.
So we went out and played in the water, yelled at the trucks speeding through the flooded street and pushing waves into the garages, and hoped that there wasn’t another “pop-up thunderstorm” coming soon. Another two inches and the fun would be over, the floods would be in the house.
It was a joke on Facebook, come and see the new “waterfront” property. On an obviously slow news day, the WCMH Channel 4 television station sent a crew out to shoot the scene. There was a “live at eleven” broadcast right from our driveway (really.) When I asked why this was important tonight, the crew said it was better than last night’s murder. I guess that makes sense.
It’s Our Choice
The city has made our flooding problem once a year, instead of once a month. That’s a financial choice made by our community. But should the climate make the once a year flood a monthly event, then we will be faced with a financial choice. Either we spend a lot more to enlarge the storm sewers, or we spend a lot more to repair the constant flood damage to our property.
That’s the same choice we are making about all of the climate change issue. We can spend the money and change our priorities now to reduce the damage we are doing, or we can spend the money and change our lives to fit the new environment we are creating. We can get steroids out of baseball, or everyone can take steroids. Either way, we are making the choice, and we will pay the price. We are still, as Jackson Browne once sang, “Before the Deluge.”
