Fall Series 2023
Cruel Summer: Coping with Climate Change in the Here and Now
Summer 2023 has broken several temperature records; June and July were the hottest months in recorded history. Heat waves in Beijing, Northern India, Southeast Asia, Morocco, Greece, Italy, and the U.S. Southwest have put stress on human and non-human life. At sea, marine heat waves have killed corals and seabirds. Wildfires in Canada, Hawaii, the Mediterranean, and Siberia have resulted in hundreds of casualties, devastated forests, disrupted animal life, and forced thousands to leave their homes. Severe flooding in India and prolonged drought in the Middle East and Africa have compounded suffering.
This summer’s extreme conditions are a result of the interplay of an El Nino event and human-induced global warming. While it is hard to link specific weather events to climate change, scientists have shown, through the field of ‘extreme event attribution,’ that particular heat waves, droughts, and hurricanes would not have been possible, or would not have been as intense, without climate change (see Scientific American 2022; Philip et al. 2022; Otto, F.E.L et al. 2023). What has been surprising, even to climate scientists, is the unpredictability of extreme weather events, like the 2021 heat wave in British Columbia. Such events sober us to the realization that there may be ‘No Safe Place’ left (Economist 2021).
In How Climate Change Comes to Matter, Callison writes that climate change is a “form of life” that can be “treated simultaneously as object, issue, cause, experience, and body of scientific research, evidence, and predictions” (2014: 11). How does the experience of this summer (and other recent extremes) impact how we—as scholars and humans—think about the concept of ‘climate change?’ How do we reimagine our roles in the world—as climate offenders and climate victims, often both at once? What are the impacts of extreme weather on other species, and how do we envision our responsibility to them? Lastly, does/can our shared (though vastly uneven) experience of extreme summers inspire a collective reckoning – one that endures beyond the summer? One that recognizes that we are in this together – although not in the same way? Or does inequality and privilege inhibit our ability to act collectively? How does the urgency of recent summer extremes impact our sense of agency and action?
Sensing Change
A recently published study by Minor et al. showed that the Inuit of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) are more likely to have “experienced climate change” than residents of other Arctic countries but are, at the same time, less aware of climate change as a “human-caused” phenomenon (2023). For most in the developed world, the opposite has been true (until recently). How do we merge our academic understanding of climate change with our affective, lived experiences of extreme weather?
How do we perceive climate change, through our eyes, ears, nose and touch? What techno-scientific tools (monitors, sensors) have we created to sense climate change better? How do animals, plants, and other non-human life forms ‘sense’ climate change? What does it mean to ‘sense’ climate change when it is both local and global at once? What is the relation between sensing and adjusting – when we start to perceive record-breaking extremes as the ‘new normal.’? Lastly, what is the impact of absence and forgetting, when the Autumn breeze comes, and the memory (for those with the luxury of putting it into memory) of our troubling summer fades, at least until the next year?
Climate Migrations
The UN predicts that there will be one billion ‘environmental migrants’ by 2050 (Vince 2023). Many in developing countries are fleeing the compounded problems of political instability, violence, drought, and heat, becoming climate refugees. In the developed world, extreme weather events create both internal migration, as people rebuild their homes or move to regions perceived as more safe. For the privileged few, extreme summers can be avoided with seasonal vacations and second homes. In many ecosystems, climate change has altered summer breeding grounds, feeding patterns, seedling dispersion, and migration paths. As species move, this creates new relations and interactions between humans and non-humans, such as fishers chasing migrating fish.
What climate-induced patterns of migration are already evident in the human and non-human worlds? How does migration alter ecosystems, landscapes and our collective sense of place and ‘home’? What does migration mean for the places left behind and for the points of destination? Lastly, what happens when there is no longer a ‘safe’ place to migrate to?
Adapting to Change
For those who stay in place, the only response to extreme summers is to endure and adapt. Humans can adapt by building sturdier homes, planting resilient crops, erecting bigger sea walls, managing flood risk, altering insurance, managing wildfires, and so on. Animals and plants too have strategies for coping with extremes. What are examples of human and non-human adaptations to climate change, and in particular examples of bottom-up, hard-scrabble resiliency solutions employed by those without the choice of waiting for larger interventions?
At a higher level, how do we avoid adaptation efforts bending over into acceptance of climate change, by funneling investments away from climate mitigation or creating destructive positive feedback loops (like cranking up A/Cs supplied by fossil fuels)? Responses to immediate problems (like extreme summers) tend to elicit short-term solutions, rather than the long-term systemic interventions needed to solve climate change. In effect, how can we balance adaptation and mitigation—living in the thick of climate change while also fighting to solve it?