The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Susan Young is the Bangor Daily News opinion editor.
The weather has been a hot topic of conversation in Maine this summer. When will it stop raining? And, when will we see the sun again, have been frequent questions.
June was one of the wettest on record in Maine, with flood warnings flowing into July.
Yet, while many Mainers felt like they were living in a cloud bank, much of the rest of the country and world has been sweltering. The temperature in Death Valley reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday. Earlier this week, for the first time ever, Miami was under excessive heat warnings because of the combination of extremely high temperatures and high humidity. Earlier this week, Fort Myers, on the state’s west coast, had reached at least 90 degrees a record 89 times this year. Ocean breezes, which often bring relief from the heat in Florida, actually raised the temperature as water temperatures in places off the Florida coast exceeded 90 degrees.
Record high temperatures were also reported in parts of Europe and in China, where a temperature of nearly 126 degrees Fahrenheit was provisionally set on Sunday in a township in the northwestern part of the country.
These record heat waves aren’t just about numbers. The heat, unbearable in places, is wrecking people’s health and lives.
“[The heat] drains your everything, your hope. It wrecked me emotionally. I just cried all the time,” Florida resident Kimberly Goulet told the Washington Post. “I feel like I experienced a second disaster right alongside [Hurricane] Ian.”
Last year’s hurricane destroyed the home on San Carlos Island where Goulet had lived for more than 30 years. The 64-year-old spent months living in a storage container before recently finding an inexpensive trailer to rent.
“I am just trying to pretend that everything is normal,” Goulet said. “Because right now, it’s all I can do.”
Here’s the problem: This is likely a new normal. Without significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (and maybe even with them), our planet will continue to heat up.
Already, some of the temperatures recorded this week are extremely dangerous to humans.
Researchers at Penn State explained the dangers of high heat in an article published by The Conversation last year:
“When the body overheats, the heart has to work harder to pump blood flow to the skin to dissipate the heat, and when you’re also sweating, that decreases body fluids,” they wrote. “In the direst case, prolonged exposure can result in heat stroke, a life-threatening problem that requires immediate and rapid cooling and medical treatment.”
The researchers ran tests of healthy men and women to find out when this “critical environmental limit” is reached. It was lower than they expected: About 88 degrees Fahrenheit at 100% humidity and 100 F at 60% humidity.
Recent heat waves around the world have exceeded these limits.
And, as other recent reporting has shown, there are many perils to high temperatures. In Phoenix, which marked a record 19 consecutive days over 110 degrees, emergency rooms are treating patients with burns, often from hot pavement. On a recent day, two toddlers burned their feet when stepping onto patios. Elderly and homeless patients have been burned by falling on pavement. People have been burned by touching their seatbelts and mailboxes. Others have been burned by the scalding water coming out of their garden hose.
If these heat horrors seem far away, consider that many people will be forced to flee inhospitable conditions. The Pentagon has long warned that instability caused by climate-induced migration will be a major global security threat. Increasingly, people who are displaced by famine, starvation and conflicts over arable land may end up in the U.S.
Well-heeled climate migrants – those seeking a more comfortable place to live – are already moving northward. As Bloomberg columnist Connor Sen recently wrote, Maine and other northern states are increasingly popular destinations for people looking to escape the heat, for vacation and, sometimes, permanently. This is likely to exacerbate housing shortages in parts of the state.
It’s not just people who are on the move. Some governments are already buying up land in distant countries to grow crops that can no longer be grown in their countries. Companies backed by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have purchased land in Arizona and California to grow forage crops that are shipped to the Middle East. These deals have drawn scrutiny because of the farms’ water use in the drought-plagued states.
All of this highlights the fact that our planning for climate change, and its consequences, feels very inadequate. Yes, we need to electrify our cars and homes so we burn less fossil fuel. We need more renewable energy. We need to stop building in flood-prone areas.
But, all of these feel inadequate to the reality of our rapidly warming planet. As do current considerations of how climate change will impact migration, land use, water supplies and things we haven’t even thought of yet.
So, yes, keep complaining about the weather, but realize that in Maine, we’ve got it better than billions of other people on the planet. For now.
