Climate change: The feel-good catastrophe
Last week my newly adopted home of Washington, D.C. had two back-to-back days of summer in the middle of winter. The first day the temperature reached 78 degrees (when the high is normally 48 degrees). That was a new record. The next day the high was 82 degrees (normally 49 degrees). Not surprisingly, that was a record, too.
People were walking the streets in T-shirts and shorts. Last week’s balmy interlude felt like those late spring days which provide a preview of the summer ahead. Everyone was telling me I had to get outside so I could to take advantage of such great weather—which I did.
But the long walk I took on day one was not a particularly happy one. As most of the rest of the Washingtonians I encountered were experiencing the feel-good part of the feel-good catastrophe called climate change, I was experiencing the catastrophe part.
That’s the problem with the initial phase of climate change in many areas: It feels good. In my longtime home of Michigan, people often commented positively about the increasingly mild winters there (except for the winter sports enthusiasts). How do you explain to people that that good feeling is the harbinger of something really, really bad?
Yes, people say, they know such warm days in winter are not good. But, why not enjoy the weather anyway? They have a point. Still, if the climate is giving so many people feedback that makes them feel better, how will anyone ever take climate change seriously enough?
Now, climate change did little to comfort the people of Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico during the hurricane season last year. But it’s too easy to dismiss those incidents if you don’t actually live where the hurricanes hit. For most of us, climate-change enhanced hurricanes are something that happen to other people.
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