Last week, the planet got yet another wake-up call on the immediacy of the climate crisis. It might be hard to realize with the chilly weather we’ve had in the Bay Area recently, but the planet just broke the record for the hottest average daily temperature last week. In fact, global temperature records were shattered on not just one but several days, leading to the possibility that 2023 could be the hottest year on record.
In this blog, I try to keep a local focus, but it seems wrong not to note something so monumental, even if it’s not local news. And every time something like this hits the news, we environmentalists ask ourselves whether this will be the thing that finally makes climate-deniers wake up. But so far, we have yet to witness any kind of widespread realization that the climate crisis is real and that things need to change right away.
It’s not just the heat, although that is a serious, life-threatening hazard, as Texas and the Southeastern U.S. learned yet again when temperatures soared over 110 degrees in late June. Climate change means more than just rising temperatures; it means more extreme and unpredictable weather events of all types, from heat waves to hurricanes to atmospheric rivers (like the storms the Bay Area experienced over the winter). It means rising sea levels, which is very much a local issue since San Mateo County is the most vulnerable county in California in terms of economic risk from sea level rise. And it also means severe disruption to ecosystems, reducing biodiversity and leading to increased levels of species extinction.
You might think that climate change is unlikely to affect your life significantly. After all, the Bay Area enjoys a mild climate, and a few degrees of warming might not sound uncomfortable. Flooding and wildfires are terrible disasters, but if you don’t live in a floodplain or a wildfire hazard area, you might feel relatively safe (at least, as long as you still have homeowners insurance now that State Farm and Allstate have announced that they won’t issue any new policies in California). But this attitude is both short-sighted and ignores the reality that climate-related impacts, whether sudden catastrophes like wildfires or slow-moving disasters like drought or famine due to loss of agricultural land, will affect everyone. As just one example, the Bay Area’s wastewater treatment plants are all located right on the Bay and thus are vulnerable to sea level rise. If you would like to continue to be able to flush your toilet, you should care about addressing climate change.
In March of this year, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement that “our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.” Maybe we, as individuals, can’t do much, but we can all do something. Whether it’s saving energy, reducing water usage, driving less, changing our diet, recycling more, or something else (a quick internet search will provide plenty of suggestions), we can all make a difference. Many of us already do a lot of those things – but we can always do a little more.
What’s something you do in your daily life to address climate change? Tell me in the comments!
