Here in Wisconsin, National Dairy Month is underway, an annual celebration where small towns elect Dairy Queens and hold parades on Main Streets. Farmers roll into town on their biggest tractors to compete in high-horsepower tugs of war. Those who still farm with draft horses bring them in for one-horsepower pulling contests.
Corn is only shin-high this time of year. The air is tainted by the smell of dairy cows and their effluent as farmers spread it on their fields. This summer, however, smoke is part of the olfactory experience, thanks to hundreds of unprecedented early wildfires in Canada.
A classic Gershwin song promises, “it’s summertime, and the living is easy.” But haze in the air, watery eyes and new mask warnings tell us that probably won’t be the case this year or in the future. Nature used to control summer. Now, we have created our own weather of extreme floods, fires, drought and rising seas with fossil fuel pollution.
Wildfires: In California, the fire season began in April when the first large blaze scorched the foothills east of Los Angeles. PBS reports, “As California and other parts of the West continue to experience record-breaking heat and wildfires, decades-old houses are burning away in climate-linked disasters, fueling the number of Americans who are becoming ‘climate migrants’ – a term researchers use for people who are displaced by such events.” However, climate migrants are finding housing shortages when they try to move.
As of June 1, there had already been 18,300 fires in the U.S. this year, most of them human-caused. Fossil fuels are fouling the air, too. The American Lung Association reports more than one in three Americans breathe unhealthy air because of pollution from vehicles and power plants.
Bad air is a new norm. PBS reported last fall that wildfire risks across the country will threaten roughly 79.8 million homes by 2050.
Killer heat waves: We can anticipate another dangerously hot summer. Heat kills more Americans every year than floods, hurricanes or tornadoes. Heat waves are off to an early start. Record-breaking temperatures swept through the Pacific Northwest in May. Earlier this month, heat and high humidity created life-threatening conditions in parts of the South. Triple-digit heat broke 75 records in Texas last week, pushing its grid to the brink. Meteorologists expect record-breaking temperatures across most states through August.
Pervasive floods: We will see floods, too. Pew Charitable Trusts points out they are a “pervasive year-round threat affecting Americans nationwide.” In recent years, they have occurred almost daily in the U.S. due to snow melt, torrential rains, coastal storm surges, and sea-level rise. In 2021, flood-related disasters caused damages and economic losses of $85 billion.
NOAA says about 44 percent of the country, nearly 150 million people, were at risk of flooding as spring began. In April, about 26 inches of rain fell over 12 hours, triggering flash floods in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The deluge was statistically likely to occur only once every 1,000-2,000 years. After three years of drought, California has experienced 11 atmospheric rivers since 2023 began; now it’s threatened by floods as epic snows melt in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Sinking land and rising seas: Because of climate change and natural forces, the U.S. mainland is literally sinking and shrinking. By the end of the century, sea-level rise could force 13 million Americans to relocate from coastlines submerged by rising seas. On the East Coast, the land is subsiding mainly because of groundwater withdrawals. Researchers say this will double the rate of land inundated if sea-level rise were occurring alone.
According to NASA, excessive water withdrawals have caused parts of California’s agriculture-intensive San Joaquin Valley to sink 28 feet since the 1920s. Last year, drought caused entire towns to sink nearly a foot in one year. The Atlantic Coast, where more than a third of the U.S. population lives, is dropping several millimeters each year. In some parts of Delaware, subsidence is twice that amount.
“Climate scientists already know that the East Coast of the United States could see around a foot of sea-level rise by 2050, which will be catastrophic on its own,” reports WIRED, a technology news service. “But they are just beginning to thoroughly measure […] subsidence, and it’s poised to make the rising ocean all the more dangerous, both for people and coastal ecosystems.”
Limited insurance: The economic impacts of climate-related disasters go beyond the damages to buildings and infrastructure — big insurers are limiting coverage for hundreds of disaster-prone areas. The American Insurance Group (AIG) plans to reduce home insurance sales in about 200 ZIP codes because of flood and wildfire risks. Homes in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Montana, New York and Wyoming will be affected.
Yet, big insurers reportedly contribute to risks by investing $582 billion in the fossil fuels responsible for climate change.
Americans are paying even more — $662 billion in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund — to subsidize fossil fuels with taxes and damages to their health and the environment. In other words, we are investing heavily in our own misery. Yet, the National League of Cities reported two years ago that more Americans were moving into rather than out of places with high risks of climate-driven weather disasters.
Adaptation: Some of us are trying to adapt. A few communities on both coasts are trying to inject excess rain and floodwaters into aquifers to prevent further subsidence and “bank” water for periods of drought.
Sociologists at Rice University say about 50,000 families have moved out of flood zones since the 1980s with the help of federal buyouts. Most are moving to higher ground within a 20-minute drive of their original locations. With the nation’s flood losses averaging about $8 billion a year, federal and state governments should encourage more relocations, and local governments should prohibit further development in disaster-prone places.
However, although adaptation is necessary, there is no substitute for retiring fossil fuels from the U.S. and global economies. We have entered an age of painful superlatives — highest, hottest, coldest, costliest, deadliest, and so on. There are limits to how much we and other species can adapt to such profound changes in so short a time. And while adaptation helps us survive, mere survival is not enough for a decent quality of life.
So, living will be challenging this summer. There will be good days, and we should enjoy them while they last, because summers to come will be worse. More climate change is already in the pipeline because of past pollution. We created these conditions, so we can’t blame the weather. And unless we stop using fossil fuels very soon, deadly weather will become catastrophic and unstoppable.
Thirty-five years ago, America’s top climate scientist told Congress that climate change had begun. The question is the same today as it was then: How much are we willing to sacrifice before we end our addiction to fossil fuels?
William S. Becker is a former regional director at the U.S. Department of Energy and author of the book “The Creeks Will Rise: People Co-Existing with Floods.”