How Is the Climate Energy Hitting You? Philadelphia
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
I thought it might be a fun experiment to see how the extreme weather fueled by climate change is impacting you—and me.
I’ll start with “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.”
Within 15 feet of my backdoor, we’ve experienced more violent storms than ever. Events that used to happen once every thirty years seem to be happening right now.
The violent storms at my house have produced only about three inches of rain in total. But a couple of times, when the rain became truly extreme, it was giant p = mv pain rain. Thank the god of physics for friction and wind resistance—or we all might have been dead.
But the rain was the least of it.
The winds and lightning have been even more extreme. Winds have taken down branches and sections of trees on an almost daily basis, creating an unusual amount of chainsaw work for me. Lightning has been nearly daily as well.
We’ve had more power outages in these three months than we normally experience in a dozen years. Fortunately, the local infrastructure was upgraded recently, so most outages have been brief. New technology allows the utility to install breakers along the lines, helping isolate problems and restore power more quickly.
But that has presented a new problem: power surges.
Lights flicker, breakers trip, and electronic equipment gets hit with sudden changes in voltage. I hadn’t really considered surge protection for something as mundane as my room lighting. Now I do.
Another new extreme has been the flash drought.
Even with all these thunderstorms, the new climate atmosphere seems capable of sucking water out of everything—the soil, the plants, even the pool—within days, sometimes within a day, and occasionally within hours.
Overall, it has been one of the worst years for my home garden.
Oh, I almost forgot.
There were six heatwaves.
And then there were the days when the wildfire smoke made the air practically unbreathable. The smoke wasn’t coming from a fire in my backyard, but the atmosphere doesn’t care much about property lines. Wildfires hundreds or thousands of miles away can turn the local air quality into a serious problem.
And this is just what has happened within 15 feet of my backdoor.
For the next installment of this show-and-tell, I’ll expand the circle to the more exciting energy events that have occurred within 15 miles of my house: microbursts and straight-line winds powerful enough to collapse buildings, furious flash floods in town after town, and, of course, tornadoes.
The point isn’t that every storm, heatwave, drought, or wildfire is caused by climate change.
It isn’t.
The point is that the climate system is changing the amount of energy and moisture available to extreme events—and we are increasingly experiencing what that extra energy can do.
So here’s my question:
How is the climate energy hitting you?
Taking the Temperature of Climate Change: How Is Climate Energy Hitting You?
Easy-to-Read Resources
