It’s all the little climate things, too

Climate change is shaping our daily lives more and more. It’s a dull ache you’re learning to ignore

ICE and the police continue to kidnap and brutalize immigrants, protestors, and random citizens. ICE is hiring 10,000 new brown shirts. The fascist regime continues to spread lies and is increasingly open with their racism and authoritarianism. MAGA folks are grappling with whether or not it’s OK for their boss to be a known Epstein pedophile. Fascism has been normalized to the point that fascist Nazis are increasingly comfortable admitting publicly that they are fascist Nazis. Meanwhile, Earth heats.

In January, Los Angeles burned. I lost the house and the neighborhood where I’d lived. Earlier this month, Texas flooded. Every year there are several headline-grabbing climate impacts in the US, and many more worldwide. Over the years, the big ones have both gotten bigger and more common. This is not normal. When I was a kid this didn’t happen.

(As an aside, the stories under the headlines consistently fail to mention that (1) These impacts are caused by fossil fuels; (2) People in the fossil fuel industry continue to spread disinformation and to block action to preserve profits, as they have for decades; (3) These impacts will get far worse and continue to do so as long as the fossil fuel industry still exists. These three basic facts are fundamental to any story about climate impacts; and it would be pretty easy, now, to stop planetary damage from further increasing if these three basic facts were known in a deep way by the public. This is therefore the greatest failure of journalism of all time.)

But I’ve noticed something else the last few summers. Something that’s getting stronger but also normalized, like all things climate. In addition to the big headline-grabbing climate impacts, my life is increasingly being shaped by smaller impacts. These smaller impacts tend to fly just below the radar of my climate grief.

For example, on July 6 there was a deluge over my house and neighborhood in Chapel Hill, NC, from Tropical Storm Chantal. It was the most intense rainfall since I’ve lived here, twice as intense as Hurricane Helene that devastated Asheville and western NC on September 27, 2024. This is the rain gage data from a creek close to my house:

I put the cursor at the point where rain from Hurricane Helene stopped; the biggest vertical jump near the right of the plot (over seven inches in a few hours!) was from Tropical Storm Chantal on July 6. (Another aside: thank you, workers at the USGS and other scientific agencies for working hard, serving the public good, and providing critical data like this. These rain and river gauges are yet another valuable resource that this idiotic fascist regime is foolishly dismantling.)

Those seven inches were enough to kill six people in the region, including a woman in my county who was driving to work to the next town over from mine. They were enough to destroy homes and displace families about a mile away from me. I’m fortunate that I live on higher ground, and that I don’t work a night shift job that has a river crossing to get to it.

My own experience of the deluge started with a tornado warning in the evening followed by eerie winds that whipped the tall trees around. Then the rain started and the power went out. Soon I found myself frantically digging water diversion trenches up on the street in nothing but my underwear with lightning flashing around me, barely managing to avert flooding in our home. (This is not normal.) My son and I both got some weird bites, we think from spiders, despite the pouring rain and rushing rivulets.

The next day, with power still out, a book randomly came in the mail, sent from the publisher. It was soaked inside its plastic mailer. I get books in the mail like this on a weekly basis, and I will probably read parts of this one, so I took some pains to squeeze out the water and then carefully placed it vertically with fanned out pages to dry. The book was The Great Auk by Tim Birkhead, and the publisher blurb ends, “The great auk remains a symbol of human folly and the necessity of conservation. This book tells its story.” It struck me as a metasymbol of human folly for a book on extinction to arrive soaked from a climate flood, and this makes me question my own propensity for writing books. Writing a book as the planet dies is, honestly, a weird, weird thing, at least for me.

It turned out that many local businesses had flooded, including our beloved Trader Joe’s, the local bakery and the local Greek restaurant, Sharon’s favorite yarn store, our Planet Fitness, and many other places that are part of the daily life of my family and our friends. The last time the Trader Joe’s flooded was in September 2018, due to Hurricane Florence. A friend said it took two years to reopen after that. It doesn’t help that the shopping complex was built literally on top of Bolin Creek in 1969, just downstream from where the rain gauge data above was collected. This was irresponsible development, but also development from an era before climate flooding. The reason it took two years to reopen was the installation of an extensive and expensive watershed drainage system, which clearly didn’t have the capacity for Chantal’s deluge. There is no adapting our way out of this, people.

Sharon and I speculated that the great auk book was wet because the post office had flooded, since it’s located in the same flood plain, not far from the Trader Joe’s. We drove around town to see the damage. Dozens of cars in the parking lot outside the local movie theater were flooded and jammed with sticks and debris (top photo); people had been inside, watching a movie and enjoying the air conditioning with no idea that rain with such intensity had started pouring outside. When the movie ended, they discovered their flooded cars. We drove past a huge dumpster being filled with food outside the Trader Joe’s. The post office seemed OK. We saw dozens of flooded and closed businesses. We went for beers at a local bar, and it was open, but the parking lot and sidewalk were partly covered in mud and silt.

A few days later, I went to a friend’s to clear a fallen tree that was blocking the path to her front door. After just a few minutes of chainsawing I was dripping - no, pouring - with sweat; it was just too hot and humid for even that kind of light work. I came back early the next morning to finish the job. For weeks now, it has been so hot that even slowly walking my old dog at 9 pm makes me start sweating and overheating.

This entire summer, everyone, everywhere seems to be saying “it’s so hot.” But still, as a society, we do nothing. In the US, this foolish government is creating rapid change (so rapid change IS possible!) but in exactly the wrong direction. What will it take? Genuinely, I wonder.

If I’m having these sorts of smaller climate impacts increasingly shaping my daily life, I’ll bet that you’re having some too. Please share your climate impact experiences in the comments below.

With warmth and love -

Peter

About this newsletter

I’m a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (for now, but probably not for much longer), speaking on my own behalf. I’ve been arrested multiple times for climate civil disobedience, because I care, because I want to stop the destruction, because some things are more important than my career.

Like many climate scientists in the US, my job is hanging by a thread as funding is slashed and missions are canceled. I’m pivoting towards more writing and activism. For 19 years I’ve done this critical work on the side, in my free time, but now it’s time to make it front and center. If you want my voice out in the world, please support my work with a paid subscription. And spread the word!