The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Why our summers may never be the same
Record heat is tough to ignore, but it’s little things, too.
It felt like the opening minutes of a disaster movie.
This summer, Trevor O’Donnell, 64, had been reading the cascade of news about extreme weather: wildfire smoke covering the country, deadly flooding in unexpected places, record-breaking heat. To O’Donnell, a tourism executive who splits his time between Palm Springs, California, and Douglas, Michigan, American life now resembled a scene straight of out a Hollywood film, when the hero’s family is making breakfast as alarming television news bulletins play in the background.
“There’s an ominous feeling,” he said. “You notice that something’s fundamentally off. It just struck me that what we’re experiencing right now is so similar to that prelude.”
Globally, average temperatures broke a string of monthly records this summer, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: June was the warmest June, July the warmest July and August the warmest August. September was also, by a record margin, the warmest September, the European Union climate monitor said this week. As humans continue adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, record-breaking heat will become even more common, as will extreme weather events such as droughts, wildfires and floods.
This summer alone, floods ravaged Vermont and upstate New York; the seawater in South Florida was so hot it felt like a Jacuzzi; choking smoke from vast Canadian wildfires enveloped the skies over the Northeast and Midwest. Even the mosquito population in Texas suffered. In cities like New York and Chicago, a wave of summerlike temperatures flowed into September and October.
To many Americans, the season felt like a climate inflection point: a peek at what the country is facing in the future, and a new definition of summer.
This was the summer that Marianne Gingher, 76, welcomed her son, his wife and their two small boys to live with her in Greensboro, North Carolina, while they got settled in the state for his new job.
“I kept saying, ‘You’re North Carolina boys now. Children play outside — we’re going to the park,’” she said. “And I’d walk out the door, and the heat would slam me.”
The state was setting records for high temperatures. The boys, age 5 and 2, seemed to wilt in the sun and soupy humidity.
“They were like little water lilies without water,” Gingher said.
No one, it seemed, was enjoying the kind of summer that Gingher remembered from growing up in Greensboro, where she has lived since she was a toddler. Back then, there was less development, more trees, fewer asphalt parking lots making her feel like she was broiling in a skillet.
Now she has been thinking about how extreme weather is upending the definition of childhood.
In cities across the country, the institutions that define the lives of children — park districts,
schools, summer camps — have struggled to adapt.
The Boston Public Schools, seeing the heat of summer creeping into the school year, scrambled to add air-conditioning units to the windows of classrooms. Summer camps in Chicago faced with days on end of wildfire smoke asked children to wear masks for their own safety. In Austin, Texas, this summer, park officials scaled back the hours that splash pads for children were open, trying to conserve water in the dangerously parched city.
In St. Louis, 8-year-old Riley Vasser achieved a childhood rite of passage, learning to ride her bike for the first time. But it was a shortlived triumph.
“She was very proud of herself,” said her mother, Jessica Vasser, 42. “We had a few nice days and she rode, but then it was too hot outside after that for her to use it. She couldn’t ride her bike for a month and a half.”
Riley has sensitive skin and suffered from a heat rash in the broiling temperatures in St. Louis, which regularly hovered in the 90s in July and August. Her allergies were far worse this summer, her mother said, and smoke from Canadian wildfires polluted the air for several days in St. Louis.
At Vasser’s sister’s home, the heat spurred the growth of algae in her pool, and the filter couldn’t keep up, she said. Allowing the children to swim and get some relief from the hot weather was out of the question.
Climate change is making childhood summers more difficult, less carefree, Vasser said, giving her a creeping feeling of worry.
“It’s the small things that are different,” she said.
For Larry Chamblin, 85, even the humidity of summers in the Florida Panhandle never kept him from enjoying the outdoors. That all slipped away this summer.
Chamblin used to love going on walks or gardening near his home on a bayou in Pensacola. He would paddle around in a kayak, explore a nearby wildlife preserve on foot or chat with neighbors.
“I used to enjoy that,” he said. “This summer, it’s just been impossible. This is the first year that I feel that climate change has actually changed my life, in pretty important ways.”
Even as early as 7 a.m., during Pensacola’s hottest July ever, the heat was just too much for him to take a comfortable stroll outdoors. Without the experience of nature, Chamblin said, he has felt disconnected, even depressed. When he planned to make his annual journey to New Jersey to visit family, he had to cancel that trip because of wildfire smoke making the air in the Northeast unhealthy.
“It has really had an effect on me,” he said. “I just don’t think we’re meant to stay inside all the time. I think we’re part of nature. We’re not meant to be inside in the air-conditioned house
all the time.”
Americans who savored the beauty of summer have found themselves pushed back indoors. In Pennsylvania, the tick population soared to its highest level yet, scaring away hikers from the woods.
This summer, the night emerged as a preferred time to work and play.
Construction crews and air-conditioning repairmen learned to continue their work in the late evenings, hoping for a tiny respite from the searing heat of the daytime. In New Mexico, farmworkers harvested onions by night, after the sun had dipped down into the horizon. Any earlier and the onions would bruise too easily in the hot temperatures, and the labor of picking them in the heat would become too intense.
Rachael Hall, a photographer who lives outside Austin, went to visit family in Chattanooga, Tennessee, this summer. When she came back home, “I felt like I was driving on the surface of the sun,” she recalled.
“We don’t have shade,” Hall said. “Everywhere you look, they’re building more roads. Trees are being cut down. There’s less green
space. It’s just hard to see your neighbors watering their lawns to keep them looking nice when you know you’ve got a limited supply of drinking water.”
So she and her husband are asking themselves: Is this where home should be?
“It’s a Catch-22,” she said. “You want to go, but you’re stuck.”
The increased cost of living, in part because of hurricanes and difficulty affording insurance, has caused a population drop in cities like Miami. While some places are less vulnerable than others, escaping climate disruption entirely is probably impossible, experts say, and owning multiple homes and taking frequent, long-distance commutes between them might actually contribute to climate change.