A hurricane prepared for; a flood that can't be avoided

A week after we completed our hurricane prep, the sky is blue, the yard is raked and the fallen limbs are picked up. City sanitation crews have collected our debris and appear to be back on a normal schedule.

Getting the deck furniture, the bird feeders, the wind chimes, the whirligigs and all the rest put away or lashed down was easier this time, the first hurricane since we both were retired. Two can do more than one. I made a quick (but crowded) run to the supermarket for non-perishable food, and we ate well last week as we finished off food from the freezer. We froze water bottles, repurposed juice jars, and food storage bags filled with water. They were never needed.

In 1996 (Fran) and 1999 (Floyd), we had lost hundreds of dollars worth of food when we were without power for more than a week each time. From Fran's devastation and the difficulty of cooking our own food and taking showers, we decided to switch to a natural gas hot water heater and a gas stove. Floyd was more tolerable three years later because we could cook and take showers, even though we had to do it all by battery-powered lights.

Nothing frustrated us more during those '90s hurricanes than being unable to read once the sun went down. A friend offered us a battery-powered lantern that gave off enough light for two people to sit close together and read from the same light source. This year, we invested in book lights — LED lights powered by a watch battery that clip onto a book. I was looking forward to using the book lights, but we never had a need.

The electricity NEVER FAILED. We waited, we worried, we fretted, but the worst never happened. We never lost power, no trees fell on our home. We could see flooded streets a block or more away, but floodwaters never reached our property. We feel incredibly blessed to get through this first major storm this year with so little damage or inconvenience.

Over the weekend, we unhitched the deck furniture and put the pieces in their places; we rehung the bird feeders, and we removed the collection of flashlights and battery-powered lanterns from the kitchen counter.

We're back to normal, but we're mindful of the thousands of others, not so far away, who are dealing with felled trees, loss of power, and flooded homes. We hope and pray that they will recover soon and that government agencies, nonprofits and individual donors will be sufficient to allow them to recover and be happy again.

Each time a hurricane strikes, some will warn that the weather is getting worse because of climate change resulting from human activities, such as burning fossil fuels. I don't know enough about it to blame fossil fuels for these hurricanes, but I can confidently see that man-made activities are causing increased flooding. Just look at the acres and acres of paved blacktop that we have added to our world in the past decade. While older shopping centers sit empty, newer, bigger shopping centers with even more blacktop parking areas are built.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust, the Bible says, but all of the rain that falls has to go somewhere, and all of the rain that falls on blacktop parking areas and on multi-lane highways runs off the blacktop, ultimately reaching small streams that feed mighty rivers. Waterways that could handle the runoff 20 years ago cannot handle the vastly increased runoff of today. The stream beds and creek banks that used to channel the water away can't handle the increased volume.

You don't need a degree in environmental science to see this happening, and to see that we need to find new strategies for reducing runoff before it ends up in somebody's home.

 

Hot enough for you?

This week, the temperature is expected to be in the mid-90s or hotter. On Saturday, I worked on painting the interior of a house in the morning and worked in my own yard in the afternoon. My sweat soaked through my clothes twice and dripped like raindrops as I walked along. Standing in the shade was tolerable, but barely, while direct sun made me feel like a piece of meat in an oven set to "broil."

Heat like this saps your energy. It hurts. It exhausts you.

Finding an air-conditioned space — and an excuse to be inside it — filled my consciousness. At the end of the day, after taking a shower and putting on fresh, dry clothes, I still felt exhausted. The heat would not let me go.

Every day has been hot for a couple of weeks now, and there is no relief promised in the 10-day forecast. I know there were spells like this when I was growing up, when no one I knew had air conditioning at home, when a single electric fan provided the only hint of relief, pushing the hot, humid air around the house. The grown-ups would grab a ladder-back chair and take it out in the yard underneath the big shade tree to escape the heat inside the house. My Vacation Bible School work was ruined in that upstairs classroom at the church. Perspiration from my face dripped on the drawing paper, leaving big, round splotches that multiplied and grew until the entire paper went limp with moisture. When we came in from recess at my elementary school, the boys would ask the teacher for permission to go to the bathroom to retrieve a few of those rough, brown paper towels to wipe our faces.

How did we tolerate it? How did we manage to work and to sleep through such strength-sapping heat and humidity? And what will it mean in future summers if global temperatures continue to rise, if two-week heat waves turn into two-month heat waves?

The "Sunbelt" (also known as The South) was transformed by the invention of air conditioning, but more intense heat could make the region less attractive (because of higher cooling costs) and the debilitating effects of unremitting heat. This current heat wave might be more than just unbearable heat; it may be a glimpse of what is to come.

Climate change or just another hot spell?

North Carolina is toasting under a heat wave that is forecast to remain blistering for another couple of weeks. Inevitably, we find ourselves wondering whether this is climate change or just another major heat wave. We've seen heat waves before, and eventually they come to an end, usually several days or weeks after our patience has given out.

But suppose this is something more than a run-of-the-mill heat wave. What if future Junes will always feature temperatures at or near triple digits? What if the unrelenting solar radiation cooks our lawns and our shrubs to a crisp? What if the lush regions of the East Coast grow increasing arid until the region is no longer able to support the dogwoods, azaleas, oaks and magnolias native to the region? What if our rivers and lakes dry up? What if our green lawns and hills turn dry, brown and windblown, a creeping desertification of our world?

That's a scary scenario, and I know of no one (not even Al Gore) who is predicting such devastation in the near future. But climates have changed before. Species have disappeared in great die-offs in past millennia. An ice age that subsided only about 10,000 years ago had kept North America and northern Europe frozen solid for thousands of years, but then the planet warmed, and northern regions could grow crops, and humans could tolerate the winters. Some other species did not survive the warming climate.

Putting aside the controversial argument over whether the climate change we are witnessing in the 21st century is man-made or caused by some other source, if humanity is facing such an abrupt shift in our world, we should prepare for it and strive to limit its impact. Assuming that we cannot halt or reverse climate change, how can we adapt to it? Unlike songbirds and butterflies, we can't simply alter our migration patterns. Humans tend to build permanent housing, not temporary nests. Property rights, which are central to western democracies, would be lost in a migratory world. Once nearly uninhabitable regions, such as northern Canada, Siberia, and Greenland, might become the great developments of the future. The Sunbelt cities of Miami, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Los Angeles might become unbearably hot and underpopulated.

This hot spell, even if it's not proof of climate change, reminds us of what the human race might be facing as it tries to survive the future.

Blame warming for the cold? Huh?

Blame the cold weather on global warming? That's the contention of a new meteorological society report as explained in a New York Times opinion piece. If that's not creative science, I don't know what is.

I'm willing to concede that the Earth's climate is changing (and give credit to the scientists who have abandoned the phrase "global warming" for "climate change"), but contending that warming causes cold is more than my liberal-arts mind can grasp. This warming-causes-cold theory seems as shallow as the anti-climate-change crowd's pointing to a one-day low temperature as proof that the Earth isn't warming. There's a difference between weather and climate, the scientists say, and I understand that. A cold snap does not constitute a new ice age, nor does a heat wave (like the ones those same scientists blamed on global warming) constitute proof that Earth is turning into Venus.

Maybe this week's snowstorms and the early snowfalls in several parts of the United States and Europe are nothing more than anomalies. Maybe we'll return to "normal" (whatever that is) next year. For all the publicity their forecasts have received, the climate scientists have not had a particularly good track record in providing "results" of global warming. For the last two years, scientists predicted more and larger hurricanes as a result of global warming, but those forecasts fell flat (thank goodness!). This year, not a single hurricane made landfall in the United States. The predicted rise in sea level has not risen to expectations.

Instead of reading catastrophe into every wrinkle in temperatures or rainfall, we should concentrate on what we all should recognize as true: Industrial development has sharply increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We humans breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. More carbon dioxide in the air is not good for us, so we should do all that we can to limit carbon dioxide emissions. We don't have to prove the verity of global warming or climate change to agree that lowering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good policy.

That's a lot easier to sell than the theory that warming causes cold.