The other day on NPR, I heard the first serious discussion of storing food and water in case of a breakdown in services or the need to stay in the house in the event of an outbreak of an infectious disease. These potential outbreaks are another indicator of climate change.
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Pierced.
Orlando, January 1999.
Warm moist green heat dawn. A breeze carries the scent of oleander and chlorine from the hotel pool and I can feel the light rising from behind the buildings on the resort’s campus. I am sitting on a concrete front step surrounded by tropical plants covered in heavy dew, fragrant lawns and winding crushed stone pathways. I’m waiting for a car to take me away and I am tired beyond tired; I wear my weariness like a shroud, a shroud that shrouds not only my movements but my entire outlook.
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You may notice I’ve included the venerable (and venerated) sci-fi classic Dune by Frank Herbert on my Reading list. That’s because this environmental tale has a lot of resonance when compared with various climate change scenarios. The universe revolves around a substance called Spice (oil) that comes out of the ground in the desert. Spice is the only thing that makes space travel possible and without it civilization will fall back into medieval ways.

The mythology and names (Bashar) are Arabic and the Fremen are nomads like the Bedouin. They control the oil, …err I mean spice.

A finely balanced environment creates the climate for spice production. Global powers seek to unbalance that environment to pursue their own agendas. A war breaks out over control of the spice, throwing the entire system into chaos.

The message is familiar: Our addiction to oil has led us to the potential destruction of our planet as a place friendly to human life, yet we continue to burn it and fight over it. And our political leaders don’t have the will to take any action.

Edit: I completely skipped over the response to environmental disaster that underlies the story. Arrakis, the desert planet, has no surface water. It is implied that it once was different. The native people have had to adapt drastically to survive this ancient cataclysm: moisture-reclaiming suits, a society that prizes toughness over any other consideration, the ability to live on very limited resources. Think about what a ten degree increase worldwide would mean to us. These fictional issues wouldn’t seem too draconian in a world where most major cities would be underwater, diseases run rampant and weather is violent and unpredictable.

Gardeners are the first observers of changes in climate. Their intimate knowledge of how plants respond to changes in temp, light, humidity, micro-climates and more gives them a sense of environmental change earlier than most of us. Most serious gardeners base their planting choices on hardiness maps that divide the planet into Zones which indicate average low winter temps.

Because we are near Lake Ontario, our climate is moderated by the slower changes in temperature of the water in the lake. It acts as a heat sink, stabilizing temps through seasonal changes. As a result our hardiness zone is warmer than those to the south of us. However, in recent years, our zone has changed to the next level warmer which cannot be explained by proximity to the lake. This change is graphically shown by this hardiness map comparing changes throughout North America in the period from 1990-2004. The striking thing about this is how the entire range of warmer zones is moving northward.

For my girlfriend, who is a plant fiend, this means we are increasingly able to plant semi-tropical plants in warmer areas of our garden without worrying about them wintering over. It’s not just us: municipal arborists in England are now replacing dying street trees with species that can survive warmer climates. Given the lifespan of a tree, this indicates a committment on their part to acceptance of warming.

Watch the gardeners….