 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS, AFP/GETTY IMAGES | |
By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE Executive Editor
This spring, early in the pandemic’s reign, I saw a lot of chatter about how people racing to understand COVID-19 might learn a few lessons from people on the climate beat. The problems are very different, but the challenges they present—and our best hopes for recovery—are shockingly similar. Listen to the science; take individual action; fight for larger systemic change. It’s an apt comparison, though some people have expressed concern that solving the pandemic has now come to overshadow efforts to address the climate crisis.
Earth, it seems, plans to make sure we can’t ignore it.
Not one but two tropical storms bore down on the Gulf of Mexico this week. While Tropical Storm Marco lashed Louisiana with heavy rain on Monday, Hurricane Laura brought damaging floods to the Caribbean and is expected to make landfall early Thursday in Louisiana or Texas as a category three tempest. (Pictured above, people being evacuated from Lake Charles, Louisiana.) Having two named storms in the Gulf so close together is very unusual, but perhaps it’s not that surprising to climate scientists, who forecast that 2020 would be an especially active year in the Atlantic, in part due to climate change making storm-forming weather conditions more extreme.
Meanwhile, California was set ablaze in part due to a “historic lightning siege,” Cynthia Gorney writes for Nat Geo. The unusual electrical storms struck during a heat wave, stoking fires that have so far burned more than 1,900 square miles and filled the sky with choking smoke. Gorney describes going outside her home in Oakland to pick up the morning papers, as ash flutters onto her arms. “The headlines and front-page stories contain phrases that read like catastrophic haiku,” she says.
Before the fires, the heat wave had triggered blackouts in California, leaving several hundred thousand homes without air conditioning or powered medical devices. Some critics suggested the blackouts were due to the state’s reliance on renewable energy, primarily solar and wind power, which can be variable. But other experts noted that the variability is predictable enough to be managed with careful planning. The bigger issue is that climate change has exacerbated the overall strain on the state’s power system—in this instance, the heat wave specifically made things worse, Alejandra Borunda reports.
Dealing with all these disasters on top of the pandemic is admittedly overwhelming. People are even taking an apologetic tone when explaining that an asteroid passing close to Earth near election day is not going to hit us, and is too small to wipe us all out if it did. But that would be the easy way out of this mess. Although she wrote these words long before anyone had uttered the phrase “doomscrolling,” I opt to take a lesson from Emma Marris and her approach to tackling our climate future, as outlined in the April issue of National Geographic: “In the midst of a swirling sea of sorrow, anxiety, fury, and love for the beautiful weirdness of life on Earth, I find an iron determination to never, ever, give up.” | | | |
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