The New Normal

The Solstice aside, this weekend is the official beginning of summer, and guess what--it's likely to be a long, hot one. But by now, we should be getting used to it. It's the New Normal.

“The New Normal” became a catch phrase in the months after 9/11, suggesting that international terrorism had changed the nature of daily life. But as we continue to shed our shoes in airport lines, we dance around the recognition of the true New Normal settling over our lives: the slow terror of the climate crisis.

We feel it now most persistently in summer. July 2005 to June 2006 were the hottest twelve months in U.S. history—and that was before the July and August heat waves responsible for some 225 deaths. California saw all-time records broken for high temperatures and lengths of heat waves last summer. But we weren’t alone: summer temperatures were above normal in all fifty states.

Though largely ignored in the U.S., the summer heat wave that hit western Europe in 2003 killed more than ten times the number of people who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In fact, after severral years of accumulating data, the Earth Policy Institute believes that it caused more than 50,000 deaths.

Yet in many European countries, last summer was even hotter. Though heat related deaths were higher than normal among vulnerable populations, this time communities were more prepared: responding to the New Normal.

Besides the direct threats to health (dehydration, strokes, heat-intensified pollution worsening allergies and other ailments), there are the burdens on the psyche—the anxieties, frayed nerves and tempers, the weariness of mind and body that heat waves engender. In their intensity and relentlessness, they can be terrifying.

As can other effects of extreme heat: rainfall patterns alter, leading to droughts in some areas and floods in others (as in the mid-Atlantic states last summer, which killed 16 and caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage.) Thunderstorms are more violent, wildfires are larger and more frequent, roadways buckle, water lines rupture and heavy demand for electricity leads to blackouts. Warmer air feeds tornadoes, and warmer ocean waters are likely to increase the ferocity of hurricanes. Apart from danger to life and limb, all of these stress services, government and the economy in general, as well as individuals, families and communities.

In an interconnected economy, disruptions caused by extreme weather extend far beyond their origins, as frequent flyers can attest.

We can hope this summer will be cooler, but these days that would qualify as unusual. Forecasters predict that in both the U.S. and Europe, this will be another hot summer (with a high number of Atlantic hurricanes.) The pattern of the past several decades seems well-established: hotter summers are becoming more frequent, with fewer years of less extreme temperatures between them. All seasons appear on average to be getting hotter, but the New Normal is most noticeable, and most threatening, in summer. A NASA study suggests that the eastern U.S. will see a 10 degree F rise in average summer temperature in the next 80 years.

If the consensus of climate scientists is correct, and global heating caused by greenhouse gas pollution is a major cause, it’s just the beginning of this New Normal. Our summers now are the product of fossil fuel emissions from years ago. Those emissions have accumulated and grown over time, and they appear to be growing ever faster: last week a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that annual carbon dioxide emissions have tripled in this decade. One hot summer after another should soon bring home this reality: the climate crisis is here and now, and it will be part of the rest of our lives.

Local municipalities especially are forced to prepare for the increasingly and persistently hotter summers, but while more people in general seem alarmed by the climate crisis, it’s not clear that they yet accept that it’s here: that this is the New Normal.

And what will the terror of overheated summers lead to? Perhaps to a new heated argument over what to do about the climate crisis. Until now, the efforts to address climate change have mostly been discussed in terms of a future crisis. Will there be pressure to shift attention from efforts to prevent worse heating in the future by cutting emissions, in favor of devoting resources solely to coping with heating effects in the present? Will the aborning committment to lowering carbon emissions fall to the urgent desire for air conditioning, by any means necessary?

Dr. Susan Solomon, one of the leaders of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, made a little-noted observation during that organization’s convention in San Francisco earlier this year: “Changes already underway will require adaptation in the short term… while efforts to reduce or reverse change will only occur on a long term.”

These are the twin necessities of the climate crisis: anticipating and responding proactively to its effects in the present, while forestalling even worse consequences in the future—which experts tell us could include the end of human civilization, and life on earth as we know it. We need to face the urgency of the New Normal, but we also need to keep faith with the future. If we don’t, these long hot summers will look like paradise compared to the New Normal in coming decades, perhaps even in the lifetimes of today’s children.