During the hot summer of 1988, as Yellowstone National Park burned, we vacationed on the Oregon Coast. I took our poodle for a cool morning stroll on an ocean beach. The wet, sandy, happy hound was lucky. On the Today Show, jolly weather forecaster Willard Scott showed sobering heat-wave maps, and we were in only one of two places in America — far north Maine and the Northwest Coast — below 90 degrees. The 1988 presidential campaign was meanwhile heating up across the country.
The heat from global warming was widely predicted to be a major fall campaign issue. White House hopeful Gov. Michael Dukakis made a photo-op stop at Yellowstone. But the urgency never took hold. Instead, an escaped Massachusetts rapist, Willie Horton, took center stage.
Thirty-seven years have passed. The climate issue should be clearer than ever. After all, we are hot and choking in fire smoke. But no again. Our summers are such that I could drive 600-plus miles from Seattle to Canmore, Alberta, with smoke every mile of the way. Come fall as temperatures drop, climate retreats as an issue.
The years 2023 and 2024 were the warmest in recorded history, and the current year is warmer. A friend in Phoenix swelters in 117-degree heat. “Heat domes” have hovered over parts of Europe, the eastern United States, and lately the Southwest
The LA disc jockey Magnificent Montague’s “Burn Baby Burn” sums up our summers. Between 2010 and 2020, 78 million acres of forests burned around the globe. The destruction of canopy was particularly acute in the great carbon absorbing basins of the Amazon and Congo Rivers.
“Climate change has loaded the dice for extreme fire seasons,” John Abat Zillow, a University of California researcher, told The New York Times. Boreal forests of Canada are burning, as are the islands of Greece. We have had a 5,200-acre fire at Bear Gulch burning for two months in our Olympic Mountains, while neighborhoods in Los Angeles are under evacuation notice.
“If this trend continues, it will permanently transform critical natural areas and unleash large amounts of carbon, intensifying climate change and fueling more extreme fires,” warns Peter PetaPov, director of Global Land Analysis at the University of Maryland.
The earth’s warming has extended the fire season. It has become virtually year-round in California, where we saw much of Pacific Palisades and Altadena destroyed by January blazes. Early spring Boreal fires in Quebec and Alberta have sent smoke south over the United States.
Seattle has at times had the world’s worst air quality, a distinction once primarily the domain of Philadelphia and Cleveland. I flew north from a clear Atlanta to see only summits of our volcanoes sticking up through thick smoke. Days later, I covered a goofy Gov. Jay Inslee bearing a serious message: We should be staying inside — it was mid-summer — since that thick smoke is not healthy for small children and other living things.
The far right is responding to nature’s man-caused wrath with a two-pronged strategy: Belittle climate data, and blame Canada. The devil figure is always a must. Fox News has taken to reporting on “Canadian smoke” as if it was an export product. A bevy of Republican federal and state lawmakers have called on the U.S. International Joint Commission to probe Canada’s “menacing” conflagrations.
“If Canada can’t get these conflagrations under control, they need to face real consequences: We won’t sit back while our air becomes a health hazard,” the GOPers wrote — and this from a party that has worked to prevent limits on carbon emissions.
The Trump Administration has set out to torch the progress which has been made in holding down emissions that cause global warming. Unbelievably, 37 years after the Summer of ‘88, the administration is extending tax breaks on fossil-fuel production, easing restrictions on oil and gas drilling and fast tracking coal leaseing on federal land.
They’ve gone further: The “Big Beautiful” budget bill rescinded tax credits for solar and wind. It is holding up renewable energy projects, finding “legal deficiencies” in the big Lava Ridge wind project in Southern Idaho. Donald Trump is a windbag who hates wind energy, having described windmills as “ugly monsters” and bird killers.
A Bellingham High School friend, Barry Sarchett, spends much time across the Pond and reports, “Greece, like most of Europe, is miles ahead of the U.S. in generating alternative sources of power. Many wind farms in Greece, both on the mainland and on islands. And huge arrays of solar panels: the Greek sun is famously strong.”
Wind and solar have climbed to account for 16 percent of the nation’s energy generation, double that in Nevada. The trend will continue, but the growth rate for wind energy is projected to halve under Trump, with solar growth projected down 23 percent.
The danger signs are both fire and ice. Beneath smoke-choked skies lie rapidly retreating glaciers. The Portage Glacier is no longer visible from the Portage Glacier Viewpoint in Alaska. The Anderson and Lillian Glaciers in the Olympics, and the Hinman Glacier in the Cascades, have completely melted away. The snows of Kilimanjaro are half what they were when I climbed it 42 years ago.
The cities of eastern China depend on rivers flowing from distant Himalayan glaciers. Our dependence is close behind. The great Boston Glacier in North Cascades National Park feeds Thunder Creek, which flows into Diablo Lake.
Diablo Dam generates power for Seattle City Light. The “Magic Skagit” River, fed through the summer by snow and glacial melt (and other rivers) sustains wild salmon runs and agriculture. The Columbia River, fed by shrinking icefields in the Canadian Rockies, sustains our region.
Even television news has discovered glaciers. Al Roker, on Today, reported on accelerated melting from Greenland. KING-TV is following a team measuring how fast the Lower Curtis Glacier on Mt. Shuksan is melting. NBC News has reported on glacial retreat from high in the Swiss Alps.
As glaciers get smaller, fires get larger. The 2014 Carlton Complex Fire in Okanogan County burned 256,208 acres. A 2014 fire in northeast British Columbia consumed an area larger than the province of Prince Edward Island. Around the world, we lose 18 soccer fields of forested land to fires every minute of the day.
The earth is telling us something. The Trump Administration isn’t listening.
This article also appears in Cascadia Advocate.
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