Grace Ross: What The Heat Wave Taught Me
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Putting money into sustainable agriculture is key for both the environment and creating jobs, says Grace Ross.
What had struck me the most about the heat is that it reminded me of the heat as a child growing up in New York. We knew them as “heat inversions” where the humidity was so high on top of the heat that it was quite unbearable.
I have been pretty good at keeping my house cool without air conditioning, but last week was impossible. The heat was remarkable with the heat index (combining the actual temperature with the humidity) over 100 degrees more than once in that four or five day period.
It turns out that this weather anomaly was not local.
There was strange weather in many places; Alaska had historically unique high temperatures and some places in Texas had historically unique low temperatures–one of them was 58 degrees in the morning.
We have a weather pattern experts say occurred once before in the mid-1980s: the jet stream had pushed down so far from Canada (and pushed down is the right description because the edges of the low were unusually ridged and unmoving) and then the weather patterns essentially stalled out. The jet stream stalled out; it brought cold weather to the center of the United States–far colder than normal and heat to the coast. This time, they believe they were more extreme because of increased ice melt. Any way–stalled out extreme heat systems–lucky us.
That heat was worrisome to me based on the projections from 2006 that our weather would start being more like New York or a little farther south.
Of course, the story with climate change is that it’s not about a consistent noticeable uniform change. On the one hand, it is about overall warming. The earth experienced its warmest temperature in over 100 years in Death Valley at 129°. It’s not completely about some predictable shift of us in New England having a climate of the mid Atlantic states.
On the other hand, more importantly it is really about huge fluctuations in our weather pattern as the overall world climates fluctuates under relatively quick large scale changes. Normally, a planet like ours would not see climate changes this large except over many hundreds or thousands of years.
A school of thought among climate experts (yes, these are folks with bona fide credentials) is that this recent unusual weather pattern is an expression of the relationship between the jet stream weather changes at the Poles. We are all used to watching the jet stream in weather reports across the U.S. The weather changes at the poles are not just the melting of ice, but relatively hot weather patterns and continuous cyclones and storms in the ocean that forced the jet streams to do something unique in the last week.
Over the weekend, at a friend’s party, I met a man who does part time computer work because that is his marketable skill set. However, he said to me, “You know, what I really want to do is work in sustainable agriculture." I thought to myself: of the $14 billion that the Governor is not spending of authorized bond money could provide jobs. Six billion of that which he signed into law is for green jobs.
Those jobs could be used for many important projects for our well-being as a state.
Boy, do we need not just this young man, but many additional minds looking at what we’re going to do to sustain our farms. Our agriculture is in trouble not just in the face of relative droughts and the using up and wearing out of the soil for so many of our farms, but we are going to need many committed workers to figure out how to sustain agriculture when weather patterns like last week’s become more and more frequent and our weather becomes more and more unpredictable.
Grace Ross is a former Gubernatorial candidate and author of Main St. Smarts.
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