What Climate Change May Look Like in Long Beach (for Now)

I’ve been sunning myself on my balcony. At the end of October. I’m not into tanning, but I like the heat, and lately every afternoon around 1PM the sun arcs overhead just right so as to shine between my building and the one next door. And it’s been warm enough to make it worthwhile to sit there for 10 minutes—in shorts, shirtless—and soak it up.

But what’s been nice for me may be a symptom of something very wrong with the planet. According to the National Climatic Data Center, the period between September 2011 and August 2012 “was the warmest such 12-month period on record for the contiguous U.S., with an average temperature of 56.0°F, 3.2°F above average.”

Is this—along with melting glaciers, receding ice packs and rising sea levels—a sign of human-caused global warming, or merely natural climatologic fluctuation? While no one can say for certain,[1] the vast majority of the world’s leading scientists strongly feel that it’s us,[2] from the gases we release into the atmosphere to the amount of rainforest we level. We have transformed the planet, and our transformative powers become greater all the time.

The concept is not complicated. Ninety-nine percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is composed of a relatvely large—but completely finite—number of nitrogen and oxygen atoms. For billions of years volcanoes would erupt (releasing sulfur), a lighting strike would cause a forest fire (releasing carbon), etc. Once upon a time, a meteor slammed into what we now call the Yucatan Peninsula and threw up debris that partially blocked out the sun, which killed off some plants, which killed off some dinosaurs, etc. Connections. Do X, get Y. You can argue all day about the details, but no one’s walking around claiming that cause and effect is a myth.

We have water because hydrogen and oxygen atoms bond together in a specific formation (H₂O). And since the number of hydrogen and oxygen atoms on Earth is finite, so is the amount of water. Everybody gets this.

But bring other atoms into the atmospheric picture, and a lot of people have trouble seeing that they can make a difference. A lot of people don’t process, for example, that pumping more carbon atoms into the atmosphere—such as through the burning of oil—results in an increased number of carbon dioxide molecules (CO₂). And that these CO₂ molecules trap heat down here where we live.

What we don’t know is whether we’ve produced enough CO₂ (and methane, etc.) to affect the climate. It’s a big job, altering the molecular composition of a planet’s atmosphere significantly enough to do that. It could never be the product of a single act. But keep at it on a sufficiently large scale, and it’s going to happen. Maybe we’re not capable of producing enough “greenhouse gases” (the CO₂ and so forth) to make this kind of difference. Maybe we are. Maybe we already have.

We’ve got experience with altering our planet through pumping of chemicals into the atmosphere. In the 1970s we started to become aware that our production of certain molecules, CFCs, was depleting Earth’s ozone layer, a component of the atmosphere responsible for absorbing ultraviolet radiation. Reduced ozone meant increased radiation exposure. Not good. So not good, in fact, that most of world’s countries banned CFCs. The apparent risk of not doing so was simply too great not to alter our behavior.

The scientific consensus is that currently we’re running another such risk. If we alter our environmental practices and policies in deference to that risk, at the very least we get cleaner air, which everyone agrees is a good thing. At most, we stem our contribution to the unnatural heating of our planet, a move that could spare us from devastating consequences.

We heard a lot of talk this week about those consequences, as many people weighed in with their belief that Sandy, the superstorm that caused almost incalculable damage to the Eastern seaboard, is symptomatic, a sign of the change our decades of industry have wrought. The truth is, no one knows whether the weather this past week—severe and horrific back east, lovely for sunning right here at home—was different than it would have been were there no cars and refineries, no power plants and ports.

We’re not going back. We’re never going to rid ourselves of these modern conveniences. The possibility open to us is to alter our employment of these technological trappings in deference to the scientific community’s belief that not doing so is likely to make our life on Earth increasingly problematic.

Earth’s climate is changing. If it’s our doing, it’s not like it would happen with a big sign written across the sky: THIS CLIMATE CHANGE BROUGHT TO YOU COURTESY OF YOUR PRODUCTION OF GREENHOUSE GASES. And the damage doesn’t happen all at once, but cumulatively. In Long Beach, it may manifest—in the short run, at least—simply as a longer, hotter summer, something that feels anything but alarming while we bathe in the late October sun.

But an alarm is exactly what it may be. And if there’s any area of life in which we should err on the side of caution, it’s the environment. It’s a caveat we can take with us into the voting booth, and carry with us throughout daily life. If we don’t, there’s no telling what will happen.