![]() ![]() In the Seattle area, it is on the payroll at Day & Nite Plumbing & Heating, where the staff worked 16-hour shifts for nearly a week during the recent heat wave. “Humans have become as great an influence on the planet as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.” The larger wake-up call is the dominance of humans, a fact so significant some scientists have argued it constitutes a new “Anthropocene” geological epoch. “You see gradual change for a while and then you reach this threshold of pressures that cause all hell to break loose - that’s what we’re seeing this summer,” said Anthony Barnosky, a Stanford University biologist who manages the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he studies the impact of humans on the environment and other species. The World Meteorological Organization reported last month that average temperatures on the planet already were consistently at least 1 degree Celsius warmer than in the late 1800s. At the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles last week, a packed outdoor audience clinked wine glasses and danced at their seats, shedding their masks as the hills around them went dark.īut unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, scientists say, the massive floods, severe droughts and catastrophic ocean warming the world is experiencing now will only worsen, generating bigger fires, more violent storms, more severe flooding and more extinction. And togetherness has, in fact, been joyful. adults have had at least one vaccine shot, allowing them to gather. National parks are setting visitor records. For some, this summer has offered a respite, worry-free and as close to normalcy as the pandemic will allow. We experience summer regionally, personally, universally. “But it’s not unexpected, and we have a pretty good idea what the long run looks like: It will be a painful transition, and in a couple of generations, the world will be different - different than the world that was, and different than the world that is now.” “Climate science couldn’t predict it would be in 2021, as opposed to 2017 or 2023,” said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska. Scientists say the disheartening pileup is the outcome of population- and climate-related pressures that they have been warning about for decades. “But they didn’t all come on the same summer day.” Waldie, a cultural historian and author in Southern California. “Here in Los Angeles, we have had periods of extreme drought, and periods of extraordinary flooding, and political turmoil, and ecological degradation and a pandemic in 1918, and of course heat waves and wildfires,” said D.J. ![]() What is different this time is the sheer volume of catastrophe, natural and man-made - and a sense that there is no turning back from it. The summer of 2019, when there were 26 mass shootings in 18 states, including one of the worst hate-driven massacres in modern American history at a Walmart in El Paso. The summer of the Manson family murders in Los Angeles in 1969. “The smell was just gross,” said Mia Huffman, 18, a tourist from Maryland who had come down to Florida’s Pass-a-Grille Beach in Pinellas County recently, just in time to witness a young boy reach into the water and pluck a foot-long dead fish.Īmerica has known dreadful summers before. Scientists wondered for months how that might affect red tide this year. ![]()
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