Big, medium and small personal climate concerns

I thought when things got bad enough – as they did this fall with three powerful hurricanes and wildfires that were the most destructive on record to lives and homes in California – I thought when it seemed like the U.S. was exploding with climate-fueled disasters, that people would recognize what was happening and force our so-called leaders to take meaningful action to rein in global warming.
But I would be wrong. The same week Santa Rosa went up in flames, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced the long-awaited dismantling of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which was designed to reduce CO2 emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. I’m not really a fan of the CPP, mostly because it relied on the ramping up of fracked gas to replace coal. And even though gas produces half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned, and no incredibly dangerous mercury pollution as coal does, gas is not the answer, because gas is methane, which leaks at every stage of the production process and which warms the planet 86 times more than CO2 in the first 20 years after release, which is the time frame we need to worry about if we have any hope of stopping runaway climate chaos.
But things in TrumpWorld are so much worse, and climate change deniers everywhere continue to insist that these disasters are just part of “normal fluctuations” in the weather.
This became very personal to me this week in ways big, medium and small.
Big – besides all the fires in northern California, there was a big fire in southern California, Orange County to be specific, and TV was full of images of a smoky Disneyland. My daughter, her husband and my five-year-old granddaughter live in Orange County, and they could smell the smoke from their house in Irvine. They’re certainly not immune from another wildfire that could come much closer to home.
Medium – I’ve been part of a community garden for the past 23 years, and in that time I’ve seen the season extend on both sides but especially in the fall to the point where we now regularly do two plantings a year, which we never could successfully do until a couple of years ago. We’ve got beans, broccoli rabe, broccoli, tomatoes and kale still growing, and that’s just in our plot. We all expected to harvest into mid-November to deliver organic veggies to local soup kitchens and pantries, as well as for ourselves. Heck, it’s the one positive development I can attribute to climate change. But the providers of water turned it off on October 15, because that’s what they’ve always done, and the remaining crops are in danger of dying before harvest. We must educate them about the new climate change-fueled growing season.
And small – the first pumpkin of the season I bought rotted a few days after I brought it home, long before it was time to carve it into a jack-o-lantern. We’ve been having a summer-like fall, with temps regularly in the mid- to high 70s and nighttime temperatures way above normal. So I bought another pumpkin, but I was afraid to leave it on the front steps where the sun would beat down on it, so it’s on the back deck where there’s more shade. I’m waiting ‘til the last minute to carve it, since that will accelerate the rotting process. But I magic markered what I plan to carve into it. The 350 stands for the parts per million of CO2 climate scientists say above which we risk profound changes to life on earth as we’ve known it. And here’s the kicker – we passed the 400 ppm mark for the first time in May of 2013 and it’s been above 400 ppm pretty steadily since September of 2016. Ralph Keeling, the scientist who runs the Scripps Institute for Oceanography’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, wrote in a blog post in October 2016, “Brief excursions toward lower values are still possible, but it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year – or ever again for the indefinite future.” Happy Halloween.