For the second time in less than a year, residents of Portland have experienced what it is to be helpless sinners in the hands of an angry planetary god. Last year, our air quality spiked to toxic levels, and the sky turned acid browns and yellows, as forests to the south burned and took entire small towns with them. Our urban safety turned out to be highly relative; Portland proper might not burn, but we were hardly safe from the dangers of fire, or from the sorrow of our fellow Oregonians burned out of house and home. There was no escape from the harrowing air except to stay indoors, or to flee for clearer skies at the coast.
Then, two weeks ago, the city, and the greater northwest, were beset by record-breaking temperatures due to a “heat dome” that had settled over the area. On Saturday, June 26, we got up to 106 degrees; the next day, 112; and the next, 116, which is the all-time record for the city.
The average temperature for this time of year is 73 degrees.
These triple-digit measures are desert temperatures, not temperate northwest ones, but they’re our reality now, in an area where less than half the population has air conditioners, and our infrastructure wasn’t built with such extremes in mind.
As the Washington Post noted, this high-heat anomaly didn’t come out of nowhere; rather, "This wall of unprecedented heat bears the trademarks of human-caused climate change [. . .] Average temperatures in the Northwest have increased by nearly 1 degree Celsius since 1900 [. . .] The number of extremely hot days each year has increased, and the region is cooling off less at night. Statistical analyses show that warming from greenhouse gas emissions accounts for more than 80 percent of the increase in hot summers in the West.”
Many of us are witnessing first-hand that the dangers of climate change, too often perceived as vague warnings of higher temperatures and disrupted climates, are embodied by very definite meteorological phenomena:
Evidence suggests that heat domes like the ones wreaking havoc from Phoenix to Portland this summer are becoming more persistent and intense as the planet warms. These tall, hot air masses sit on top of a region, diverting weather systems and dissipating cloud cover, which allows more-intense summer sunlight to heat the ground further. This feedback loop can produce broiling temperatures lasting for days on end. When a heat dome happens amid the hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change, the results are record-shattering.
The butcher’s bill for this man-made heating is nearly incalculable. So far, authorities attribute 107 deaths in Oregon to the heat wave, including 67 in Portland itself. To our north, Washington state saw 78 heat-related deaths. And in British Columbia, the toll appears to have been far higher, with at least 500 premature deaths attributable to the heat wave.
The consequences for our ecosystems are also shocking and gut-wrenching: scientists estimate some 1 billion marine creatures were killed by the heat wave just off Canada’s Pacific coast, and that these ocean ecosystems could take years to recover. Such mass death points to the amoral and self-destructive recklessness of the planet’s current climate trajectory, where we approach tipping points beyond which ecosystems cannot recover and the climate warming and chaos feeds inexorably on itself.
Reading analyses that this could well be counted as the coolest summer for the rest of our lifetimes inspires dread, helplessness and despair. Along with the 2020 fires, it very much feels like the disastrous climate future long warned against is now upon us, with the fury and truth of revelation. This is obviously a highly personalized perspective, the result of my own daily experience; but I am guessing this is how the full reality of climate change is dawning upon most people, through encounters with unprecedented events that verge on the uncanny. After the fires last year, for instance, my relationship to the forested northwest feels permanently altered; all that beauty now revealed as a stressed, ticking time bomb, ready to reverse its carbon sinking, oxygen-disbursing function with the careless flick of a camper’s match or the force majeure spark of a lightning strike.
But I have to hope that I’m not alone in finding these experiences utterly radicalizing; and that this common experience will help galvanize the radical, rapid changes that we need to slow, stop, and reverse climate change. The fact that we are all experiencing this together should activate an innate solidarity in most people, and prime us for greater awareness of disparate impacts based on wealth and race. This is a case where the instinct for self-preservation is well-aligned with the instinct to band together in common cause (though alternate possibilities — of those who choose to hunker down and look out for their own — are very real, and must be consciously and actively repudiated).
In Portland, there’s been a lot of understandable and necessary news coverage of what more the city and county could have done to save Oregonian lives in the face of the heat wave. Underlying whatever political failures occurred, though, is a systemic failure to grasp the reality and threat of climate chaos. Tragically but not surprisingly, this feels deeply intertwined with the reality that the most vulnerable people are also the poorest, most politically-underrepresented citizens. For instance, there is evidence that the highest death tolls in Portland correlated with less well-off neighborhoods in the southeast of the city (where, not coincidentally, there is far less tree canopy that could have helped cool homes). In this respect, the deaths of so many Oregonians require that we hold accountable those politicians who, either through failure of imagination or moral failure, did not act as they could to protect the lives of Oregonians from an extreme heat wave that was predicted at least a week out, and whose extremity was presaged by more recent extreme heat events in the region.
But essential talk of resilience and preparing for the next heat wave can’t take primacy over the long-term, more fundamental effort needed: to massively reduce the carbon emissions fueling climate change, and to support and grow our ecosystems so that they can absorb more carbon out of the air and back into living systems. As David Roberts reminds us, there are no moderate positions available for fighting climate change, only radical ones that either address the fundamentals of the challenge or allow unthinkable catastrophe to enshroud the planet. Politicians whose rhetoric and proposals fail to match this moment don’t deserve anyone’s support: they are either in denial of the facts, or unable to grasp their import, disqualifying attitudes in either case.