Last April, after a big warm storm, an avalanche came down the hill across the highway and made it to within ten feet of the pavement. It broke off a few trees, pushed a few others horizontal, and made a pile of snow, 20 feet high in places, that served to remind us that if we get caught in an avalanche while backcountry skiing, our avalanche beacons are not going to save our lives. The beacons will, however, confront our rescuers with the choice of digging us out (dangerous) or waiting for us to melt out (messy, especially if the coyotes get to us first).
Due to a stable snowpack, we had been skiing steep faces and chutes on the hill, but after the avalanche, we stayed away from any slope that might slide. A wet storm atop a loose powder base means that the snowpack might become stable by summer. We were still seeing good-sized snow slides in the high cirques of the Sawtooths in late June.
The snow pile across the highway lasted into July, preserved by a cloudy spring. It was a reminder of a long and cold winter.
We’re into our sunny and dry season now, but the valley is greener than in most recent summers. The grass is high. The wildflowers are thick on the hillsides and meadows. If we can get some rain in August (it has happened), we stand a chance of getting through fire season without tens of thousands of acres of the valley’s forests burning. We’d gladly give up next June’s morel season if this September and October we could avoid fire camps and water bombers and helicopters dipping into Redfish Lake, and if we could have breathable air, and still-green trees.
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None of these things are up to us. In April, I started visiting Eye on the Storm, a website that I mentioned in the July 3, 2023 entry of Aftermath. I mention it again this week because of its commentariat, a collection of weather obsessives, disaster freaks, and suicidal storm-chasers who regularly post up-to-the-minute global weather news. Trolls and outright liars are kicked off the rolls, so it’s a mostly reliable place to find out what’s going on with the world’s weather extremes.
What became quickly apparent was that the Pacific Northwest of the United States was about the only place on earth that was cooler than normal. Elsewhere, broken high-temperature records were the norm. A warmer atmosphere was holding and then dumping more rain—sometimes in amounts measured in feet-per-day—onto communities and agricultural lands unfamiliar with flooding. People all over the world were losing animals, farms, homes, and their lives to the weather.
What seemed to us to be a cooler than usual Sawtooth Valley spring, one akin to the ones that I remembered as a child, was one of the most unusual and benign weather regimes on the planet.
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Meteorologists love graphs, but many of the ones I saw on Eye of the Storm needed new templates. Temperatures and precipitation, glacial melt rates and storm losses were exceeding the Y-axes. Normal parameters weren’t containing what was happening anymore, which meant that human expectation was being regularly outflanked by events. Historical norms were no longer relevant. Thousand-year floods and heat extremes were occurring year-on-year. Trends could no longer be extrapolated when trend lines approached the vertical.
It was, as climatologists pointed out, the probable end of the Holocene, a ten-thousand-year period of predictable climate that had allowed the development of human agriculture, the explosion of human population, and the building of cities and vast networks of energy production. Human civilization had only become possible with stable weather, and it wasn’t likely that it would survive when weather patterns turned chaotic.
What was certain was that the temperature extremes on the continents and in the oceans were causing increases in carbon dioxide emissions, partly because of increased use of air-conditioning, partly because of warming tundra, partly because of off-gassing from rapidly warming deep water. Climate scientists admitted that the 1.5 C global temperature increase, the much-advertised target of international climate conferences, would be exceeded this decade. Climate prognosticators went from saying humanity had twenty years to fix things, to ten, to five, to saying it was too late.
Too late is far from the worst of possibilities. The Arctic News blog (arctic-news.blogspot.com), one of the doomier locations on the Internet, has published a bar graph that dispensed with its Y-axis altogether, postulating that a combination of greenhouse gasses, weather pattern changes, the end of cooling from civilization-produced pollution, and changes in the composition and distribution of clouds would together produce a global temperature rise of 18.44 degrees Centigrade (33.2 F) by 2026.
Please note that Arctic News relishes worst-case scenarios, and that this sort of temperature increase would result in the highest form of life on earth being semi-sentient extremophiles living off the black smokers rising from deep-ocean hotspots. A modest cause for cheer: Life will find a way.
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At least we won’t have to worry about avalanches, I tell Julie. But we will have plenty of things to worry about. If the high-altitude Pacific Northwest remains relatively cool, it’s certain that places like Sawtooth Valley will become climate refuges, full of climate refugees. Even now, the shores of Redfish Lake look like lemming migrations without the cliffs, simply because the city of Boise has filled with people fleeing overheated California, Arizona, Florida, and Texas, and for at least two months of the year Boise is also too hot to live in. People come up here to escape deadly heat. But when our temperatures get too cold for them in the mornings, they build campfires, which is another worry.
We worry about mass heat strokes in Death Valley and Phoenix and Las Vegas. We worry about the local gasoline pumps going dry. We worry about mobs of uneducated children riding up the river from Challis on stolen bicycles and mistaking us for our billionaire neighbors in the valley. They’ll be fighting a class war and it won’t be any use to tell them that we’re not the enemy, especially if we have ice in our coolers and food in our bellies and they don’t.
We worry about the Salmon River going dry one week. We worry about it jumping its banks and washing away our house the next. We worry about worldwide crop failures, genocides caused by deliberate famine, governments turning to fascism to maintain hierarchies, tribalism morphing into race war, malaria migrating north to Alaska, right-wing militias declaring the Custer County Free State and making everyone wear camo and report to the Stanley City Park for drill parades and AR-15 field-stripping exercises.
After a point, you’ll be happy to know, worrying itself becomes a waste of energy and emotion. Nobody can say what the climate—atmospheric, political, or economic—will be by 2026 or even next week. Chaos Theory has given us the extensible metaphor of the Butterfly Effect, which in the case of weather demonstrates that the more you know about present conditions, the less you can predict conditions two weeks from now. Supercomputers just make things more uncertain.
On one hand, we have the Arctic News folks telling us we’ll all be dead in two-and-a-half years, and on the other, oil company executives are touting a new technological Utopia on the soon-to-be temperate and ice-free Antarctic Continent. About the only thing everyone agrees on is that the old climate is gone. Nobody agrees on what the new climate will be like.
Almost every climate paper ends with a plea for more study, which means that no conclusion has been reached, and won’t ever be reached, provided further funding is available. Graphs can be redrawn. Parameters can change. Grants can be applied for.
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I used to teach the scientific method in writing classes, as a way of getting my students to think critically. I took them through observation, question, hypothesis, prediction, and testing, and on to the formation of new hypotheses. I never used the phrase “scientific fact,” because there’s no such thing—there are only workable hypotheses that will eventually require maintenance or replacement.
Many of my students were disappointed at the lack of certainty that scientific thinking offered. Doubt was not what they had come to college to learn, but it was what they had gotten. “Try to enjoy doubt,” I told them. “Try to enjoy a future where anything can happen to you.”
I admit that the future I was thinking they might get then was not the future they’re getting now.
When my students wanted certainty, any certainty, I told them that common sense could sometimes give a picture of what the future looked like. Common sense would let you prefer one major over another, put a down payment on a house, or stay in Idaho rather than move to Texas. Common sense was a good thing to have when choosing a spouse, buying a new or used car, or going into debt. It could tell you not to go skiing during avalanche conditions, not to build a campfire in dry duff, not to think science would provide certainty about anything, and not to believe an oil company executive talking about Antarctic utopias or a climate scientist in love with the idea of human extinction.
Now, common sense is telling us that the future is not as wide-open as it used to be. And the scientific method, as slow and tentative as it is, is hypothesizing a climate phase-change that will kill a high percentage of humanity, turn the oceans into purple acid, and enshrine the Law of Unintended Consequences as humanity’s highest and best hope for a sure thing.
You can’t plan for your future even if you wanted to. The unknown variables are proliferating, and the known ones don’t look anything like salvation.
I don’t know what I would tell my students about critical thinking now. Maybe to be careful when using common sense. It has lost survival value in a world that lacks situations where it applies.
About the only other advice I would give them is to live every day as if it were their last (it might be), to love each other (if possible), to be kind (it’s always possible), and to look up at the sky if they want to know what the weather is up to.