Last week in Portland, Oregon, we had a heat wave. August 14 brought 104 degrees F. to the airport. August 15, 102. And August 16 came in at an even 100. Amongst a steady stream of climate change stories--Maui, Rhodes, Canada--we had some hot weather, and it was understandably easy to conflate that to “this is due to climate change.”
I didn’t want to get into that mindset. That leads to a learned sense of helplessness. Yes, Portland had a freakish 116 degrees on June 28, 2021--but it was a one-off heat dome, a 10,000-year event, that might or might not happen again. I thought it essential to step back and look for some perspective on the weather that only lasted a few days.
I decided to go back in time, to when I was a mere lad of eighteen, getting ready to start college, and living in a town where summers meant hot weather and people would have sweaty, red faces, but accepted it as normal. Full stop. They kept on with their lives.
This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I remember that summer trying scuba diving for the first time. I went with some friends to abandoned, flooded strip mines east of town. I lived in an apartment with no air conditioning, some fans, windows that opened, and plenty of trees nearby. Not surprisingly, our family car had no air conditioning.
I was curious what the weather was like back then, when I and everyone else was so accepting of weather. Nobody talked about climate change; it was not a staple of the “news.”
Thanks to the Internet, I found the temperature records for that year in Tulsa. Sure, Tulsa is not Portland, but the temperatures for that summer, which we thought were very normal, had four days at 104, four days at 103, 1 day at 102, and four days at 101. Some hot weather, but amazingly, I don’t recall anyone calling it cause for alarm.
I have an affinity for those temperature records because that summer I worked at the Weather Bureau Airport Station in Tulsa. The odds are high, being low man on the totem pole, I went out and recorded most of those triple-digit temperatures. At least those for Monday through Friday.
My point is that I intimately knew hot weather that summer in Tulsa, and I remember nobody whined about it. I think there’s great value in that perspective as we go forward with the future’s challenges. Although we’re in for freakish weather events and rising average temperatures, we and others have faced ordinary heat waves before with resilience. It might be time to let go of climate change as the reason for all weather we don't like.
Image credit: creativemarket.com
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