News Reporter: Climate Coach: The East Coast's climate moment

PUBLISHED BY

READ ONLINE | SIGN UP


Down-to-earth advice for life on our changing planet.

By Michael J. Coren

Welcome! This week, beach art and vulture surveillance. But first, the East Coast gets its climate moment.

When I ask people about the moment climate change became real for them, the answer, often, is a natural disaster.

For me, it was Sept. 9, 2020, when I woke up to a day without dawn. The sun never seemed to rise above choking smoke from hundreds of fires burning from Seattle to Mexico.

It's one thing to live for decades with the scientific understanding of climate change. It's another to look up at the sky at noon, as I did, and only see black smoke stretching across the horizon.

That's when I really felt a knot of visceral fear.

This week, that moment came for millions of people living on the East Coast. Yesterday, I began to get calls and texts from friends and family experiencing the same fear and worry I did that day.

"It's a cloudless day here in New York," my father-in-law said on the phone as he walked under a blanket of wildfire smoke blotting out the sky, "and I can't see the sun."

No one can predict exactly when extreme weather and natural disasters will strike. But in many ways, this will become the new normal.

We know many places on Earth will burn hotter and more ferociously than they have during any living person's lifetime. Growing up, our children will have to be reminded their world is different from the one we knew. The snow once fell each winter, we'll say, and stuck around. The floods weren't so frequent. It never burned like this.

On the West Coast, we've been living this reality for years. The West remains trapped in a 23-year "megadrought," the region's most extreme in nearly two millennia. Nearly half of the forest area burned between 1986 and 2021 in the western United States and southwestern Canada is attributable to emissions from major fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, according to researchers in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Even after this year's miraculous wet winter, climate models predict brutal fire seasons for decades to come.

Like many of us in the West, you may soon find you need to keep air filters, masks and contingency plans around for when the smoke returns. You'll know ER visits will spike. You'll see thousands of people die as fine particles from wildfire smoke work their way from their lungs into their bloodstream, causing heart attacks, strokes and asthma.

It has been a scene repeated in Australia, Europe and China. And now, D.C.

There is a hotly debated link between extreme weather and climate action. Does personal experience with climate disasters alter people's attitudes? We're about to find out.

What's your moment? Write me at climatecoach@washpost.com.

Field Sample

Since 1999, Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang have strolled along a remote beach picking up plastic and other debris washed up along the Pacific Ocean at the Point Reyes National Seashore. Over the years, they've carefully curated the bits of plastic into works of art.

"This colorful stuff is the thermoplastic junk of our throwaway culture," they wrote by email.

"As we have deepened our practice we've found, like archaeologists, that each bit of what we find opens into a pinpoint look at the whole of human culture. Each bit has a story to tell." You can see their art at One Beach Plastic here.

Luckily, a previous column prompted them to reach out. "Your difficulty in finding a used wet suit glove to buy caught my eye," Judith wrote.

"We are hoping that one from our collection of gloves that have washed ashore … might just fit. … We've never found two the same, never a matched set."

I'll see what I can find.

(Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang/One Beach Plastic)

Tracking Biden

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland withdrew lands within a 10-mile radius of Chaco Culture National Historical Park from any new oil, gas or mineral leasing for 20 years, after Trump administration officials had proposed leasing more than 2,300 oil and gas wells in the greater Chaco area.

The Second Degree

You are passionate about stuff, dear readers. First, many of you noted I overlooked the original online group to give away (and receive) used free things en masse: Freecycle! Find the chapter in your town.

Anne proposed federal, state and local Departments of Reuse, while Chris recommends the book Secondhand, which explores the emergence of a global garage sale. But we first need to realize how to let stuff go. "We want someone to want [our stuff] as much as we did when we acquired it," writes Chris.

So how do you decide what to give away or buy used? Maria flips the hangers in her closet each winter. If the hangers don't get turned back, out the items go. "I have never regretted what I've let go," she writes.

My favorite may be Marie's Christmas tradition. "For the past 30 years, my family has celebrated the Christmas holiday with our slogan, 'Nothing New Under the Tree,' " she writes. "Each year we gift only used or handmade items to our family and friends. We told the kids, 'Santa knows our policy, so if he can find it used, he will bring what you asked for,' and it worked great."

Now that those kids are adults, they've stuck to this gifting approach, making holidays a fun scavenger hunt: "An antique necklace, used book or old family treasure is always welcome and remembered," Marie writes.

On the Climate Front

From The Washington Post:

State Farm, following Allstate, will not take on new insurance policies in California because of fire risk. Here's why insurance is getting so expensive and hard to obtain in the United States.

Countries laid the groundwork for the world's first plastics treaty last week, but finding substitutes won't be easy.

Cities across the United States are sinking. Here's how some of them are trying to stay above water.

For those on the East Coast, a how-to on protecting yourself from the smoke from Canada's wildfires.

From elsewhere:

Last year, the world spent more on solar than oil production, reports MIT Tech Review.

Vultures with satellite trackers are alerting Zambian park rangers to poachers, reports Reuters.

The Indian government issued a five-year pause on any proposals to build coal plants to focus on renewables, reports AP, but coal still accounts for about 75 percent of India's electricity.

Many of you raved about the wildlife identification apps I wrote about in April. For Haydee in Southern California, Merlin identifies more than a dozen different birds each time, including Steller's jays that love to bathe in a water bowl.

"Every morning I go out to my patio and I listen to the bird orchestra," she writes. She has other visitors as well: rabbits, foxes, hawks — and this captivating bobcat she photographed as it paused for a drink of water.