Shoot the Breeze

Our Opinion/This Isn’t Kansas weather anymore, Toto.

By Cindy Gomez-Schempp
Editor

If you don’t know what to talk about, a safe topic is always the weather, right? Your mom always told you to stick to talking about the weather because no one could become offended if you asked about that.

Total strangers in the most awkward situations could strike up lively debate over almost any topic related to the weather. Did you get much rain? How did the winter treat you this year? Did the flooding affect the crops in your area?

That’s because when catastrophic weather events occurred, they were few and far between. If someone in our family lived through a tornado, a hurricane, an earthquake, or flood, it was usually someone pretty old. For those of us who grew up in the Midwest, there was a sense of safety. The most we could expect to deal with were an occasional flood or tornado. And for most of my life, that’s exactly how it was. But lately, the once-in-a-lifetime weather catastrophe is happening to everyone.

The frequency of catastrophic weather is really starting to kick our butts. It has gotten to the point where it’s no longer polite to ask about the weather. ‘How’s the flooding in your area?’ or ‘Did you have any tornado damage?’ are questions that set people off on crying jags.

The toughest part to deal with, perhaps, is that everyone is feeling the effects of weather. Chances are, if you were in a major flooding area this year, you were also in an area that had several dangerous blizzards. Many that were lucky to escape the snow and water ended up victims of tornadoes, straight line winds, or hail damage.

Just in the past week, there was devastating damage to the Fargo Downtown Street fair. Detroit Lakes residents surveyed damage from hail and straight line winds that will cost thousands for Otter Tail county. And that doesn’t even take into account the cost of lost crops due to damage from the 90 mile plus an hour winds and hail. And that’s just what’s happened in the last week!

What were we thinking, where weather was concerned? Have we just been living through an inordinately long time of relatively mild weather? From the way we are getting hammered lately by devastating weather patterns and systems, it would seem so. It happened to me on a smaller scale when I first moved to Fargo. For the first five years or so, whenever I complained about snow in the springtime, I was informed of how “mild” a year were having. In fact, I was repeatedly warned that I was not really experiencing Fargo weather. The warning proved true over the past years with their constant blinding blizzards and 40 below wind chill factors. There’s no going back, now that I know what can really happen during Fargo winters.

But, why stop at weather epiphanies when it comes to Fargo? We can apply the weather karma lessons from the microcosm of Fargo, N.D. to the rest of the country and the world. And we should. Ignoring the obvious signs of continued weather havoc will be futile, and very expensive.

Take for instance the peach orchard farmers in Southeast. Sustained droughts in the area brought strong farming operations to their knees. In the meanwhile, the farmers have tried to survive. But survival has not been cheap. Irrigating their orchards is costing a fortune and yielding less and less. The farmers are resting their hopes on a change in the weather. They cling to the idea that this bad spell of weather will pass. Unfortunately, weather everywhere is becoming more severe. The peach farmers of the Southeast are in for a nasty surprise.

La niña is already expected to work the same weather magic on us next year that it has hit us with this one. She will make the northwestern corner of the U.S. unusually cold and snowy, causing more overland flooding and crop damage. These weather patterns will also keep the droughts plaguing the Southeast corner of our country and destroying prospects for farmers to recoup their crop losses from this year.

While we are yet unaware whether it will be safe to do so or not, people are already beginning the clean-up and rebuilding efforts in areas devastated by flood, hail, tornadoes, and winds.

Scientists and politicians are all arguing about policy and planning. But no one can agree on what we should do. In Mexico we have a saying “Vez el temblor y no te incas”, that literally means: “You see the earthquake but you refuse to kneel”. The proverb is used as a reality check to tell people to ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’ or something similar. In the case of our weather worries, it’s the most fitting advice I can think of.

Our moment to kneel is here.

Landslides in China killing hundreds, tornadoes in the US have done the same this summer. Summer isn’t over yet. Russia, like many other regions of the world, is experiencing 100 degree-plus summers that are sparking out-of-control forest fires. Flooding here at home is just the tip of the flooding iceberg nationally and globally. Monsoons in Pakistan have left 14 million homeless there. Nationwide North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and other Midwestern states are seeing record flooding. In Brazil 500 people died in mudslides. Tsunami’s this year have smashed Japan and Australia.

NASA has reported this is the hottest meteorological year. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now, at long last, finally come out with this Captain Obvious statement: “The IPCC’s most recent assessment report says, ‘It is now more likely than not that human activity has contributed to observed increases in heat waves, intense precipitation events and the intensity of tropical cyclones.’”

Duh! We know this already. We don’t need NASA or the UN to tell us the weather is totally bat-$hit crazy right now. Do we really have to hear some meteorologist or scientist tell us that the world’s weather is becoming unstable? Or is the proverbial earthquake happening right now, enough to make us kneel?

The longer we fail to recognize our weather failures, the longer we keep bleeding money and paying the price for our bad weather predictions. All countries have to make changes immediately. But especially those nations like the U.S. who are among the greatest producers of waste, emitters of green house gasses, and consumers of energy. Being a country that’s most likely driving the hellbent hand-basket of the worlds climate destruction, the U.S. needs to take a commanding lead in changing climate back. Letting countries which massively outnumber us in population and poverty like India, China, Brazil and Mexico rank in the top five most environmentally friendly countries in the world while the U.S., one of the worst environmental offenders ranks 17th, is embarrassing and self-destructive.

Failing to acknowledge this moment could be the end of us as a species. We in the U.S. really need to figure out what the weather is telling us and kneel at her requests before it’s too late.

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