Being away from the healthy amount of sun that we all need has taken a toll on my mental health as well. I feel like I’m a canary in the climate mine.
In the late 1970s, I was a graduate student working toward my master’s of education and I took a full load of courses during the summer quarter. I would study in our backyard while my two young children played on their swing set or in their sandbox. Our windows were open to a cooling breeze. We didn’t need air conditioning until late August, if then. Now our AC goes on in May and stays on the rest of the year. We’ve installed a roof over our patio with several ceiling fans, otherwise we would never be out in our backyard during summer.
I remember well the first Earth Day. We should have listened more carefully to the cautionary predictions.
Alison Strickland, Seminole, Fla.
My car’s AC is down, and though I am saving for the expensive repair, I now plan my life around avoiding the heat. If I know that I have to go out for groceries, I park my car under a shade tree hours before I leave. I buy enough food and other necessities so I can go days without having to drive. Thankfully, I work from home. Going from air-conditioned stores or offices back into the heat leaves me physically ill.
When I do go outside, the sun is not the sun I pranced around in 40 years ago. That sun warmed me; today it scorches me. I miss the cooling rain!
Carol Kallas, Indianapolis
I grew up in Arizona, moved away and then returned in 1996. During my childhood summers, monsoons arrived every day around 4 p.m., bringing thunder, lightning and heavy rain for maybe an hour. The desert would cool off from 100 degree weather. You could plan your life around the rain.
Over the past few years, rain has been sparse, and temperatures often are in the 110 degree range. We have added dual-pane windows, screens and raised our air conditioning to a livable range. We drive less, combine errands and take the bus to work. Where we used to take a summer trip to the mountains, the higher temperatures there are not enough of a respite.
Climate change hasn’t changed my feelings about summer very much so far, partly because even though I grew up in relatively cool Pennsylvania, I lived in very hot Kansas and Nebraska for 20 years, where I trained huge mileage and did outdoor research in extreme heat. The main difference seems to be that there is much more concern about extreme rainfall, flooding and drought conditions even here in New England where I now reside. From my perspective, all the changes so far are just making me feel more like I am back in Nebraska and Kansas, with more very warm, dry days and more floods and dry periods. I am a believer in human-contributed climate change, by the way.
Carl Hastings, Narragansett, R.I.
The late-summer fire season in the West has become a year-round phenomenon, fueled by drought, a warming climate and the human suppression of smaller fires that naturally clear out forest overgrowth. A planet made hotter and in some regions drier by carbon emissions has turned the trees that produced our oxygen and sequestered our carbon into firetraps.
From Santa Fe, we watched the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, which destroyed 200 homes, damaged Los Alamos National Laboratory and resulted in an estimated $1 billion in damage. At night we could see the flames of the out-of-control “controlled burn” encroach on the historic Pajarito Plateau, and an eerie darkness as — quite possibly for the first time since 1943 — the lights of “Atomic City” were extinguished. A friend who grew up in Ruidoso, N.M., where two fires recently converged, remembers a childhood spent in fear of the surrounding forest of Ponderosas going up in flames. This deadly new conflagration, which has devastated nearby Mescalero Apache communities, has been followed by flooding, which strips topsoil from burned areas and contaminates groundwater and the aquifer. My daughter, her husband and my grandson live in a canyon above Boulder and are prepared to leave with their dogs at a moment’s notice.
During fire seasons here, the evening skies develop an apocalyptic orange hue, and the accompanying smoke makes the air toxic. On the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, I walked for a day through dense smoke, not knowing whether the fire would encroach upon our group. If you live among the sublime beauty of mountain forests, you live in fear of arson, a downed power line or a lightning strike.
According to climate science, this summer is forecast to be the coolest of the rest of our lives.
We stay home at an elevation of 7,000 feet, and thousands of people from the lowlands come here to escape the heat. We’ve planted fruit trees on an old beat-up cow pasture and built a passive solar house using Trombe walls and collectors. It’s hard to imagine what else to do. I’m old enough that I won’t live long enough to see how it all plays out.
Elizabeth Winter, Taos County, N.M.
Growing roses while ye may
I used to be enamored with the “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.” The romance went away with our rising temperatures. The torrid summers in the South have become even more torrid. I have rearranged my activities: Summer picnics now take place in fall, cookouts begin in early evening as opposed to midafternoon, and Christmas is now so warm it doesn’t feel like Christmas at all.
Vegetables in the garden almost cook themselves and members of the nightshade family shut down when temperatures reach the low 90s, which now happens earlier in the year compared with a decade ago. The intolerable heat forced me to retire from gardening. Favorite plants can no longer survive the heat stress, and disease and bugs quickly set in on stressed plants. Rain doesn’t seem to be as plentiful, so watering has become burdensome, wasteful and expensive.
Barbara Dunn, Savannah, Ga.
What is the opposite of a snowbird? That’s what my husband and I have become ever since his retirement and in the face of hotter and hotter summers. We leave. We try to spend as much of the humid, sticky, unbearably hot string of 90-plus degree days somewhere else. We can’t afford to stay away the entire summer, but we get away as often as we can. We are avid gardeners and love our flower beds, but we have realized that the flowers we plant need to be hardy, requiring little of us from mid-June onward. If we are home, we might water before 10 a.m., but we are not about to weed in the summer heat.
Lisa Libowitz, Granite, Md.
As we grew older and found ourselves with less tolerance for hot weather, and given that we faced more 90-plus degree days, we bought a place at the beach to summer at. Even though it is costing us retirement money we can’t afford, it’s much more comfortable there. But even at the place that is supposed to be our escape, there are more days in the 80s, or even up to the 90s. That never happened when I was growing up there. Sixty years ago, a day in the 70s was unusual, and I don’t remember it ever hitting 80 degrees. So we judge climate change to be very real, and have had to adjust our lives to accommodate.
Kerry Haas, Oregon City, Ore.
I moved back to my native Michigan from North Carolina, where I treated summer there like I treated winter up here. I stayed in as much as possible. It was just not comfortable to go out.
I’m now relatively close to Lake Huron, so I thought my summers would be better. But last summer there was almost as much heat and humidity, plus we got the smoke from fires in Northern Ontario, hours away, and I was sick all summer.
I have a degree in history and I’m a Great Lakes specialist, so I follow the ships on the Upper Lakes, mostly Superior. Recently, a swim race of sorts was held in the Duluth area. The water temperature was between 60 and 65 degrees. That’s outrageous. Water temperatures in Superior, especially that far north, averaged 42-45 degrees in the summer when I used to spend time around the lake. This is just unreal.
Marian Latimer, Brown City, Mich.
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