Commentary: I live in Seattle, just west of Los Angeles.
SEPTEMBER 28, 2023
The bike path is lovely in September, first thing in the morning, the fog thick and low, the waterfront deserted. In TruSeattle, way up north, it is ninety degrees and sunny, but in NuSeattle, the town formerly known as Santa Monica, in otherwise sunny southern California, it is grey and cool. Last weekend it rained, both mornings.
We used to be able to cope, back when this coastal weather pattern ended in June; in fact, we were so smug about paradise that we gave a funny nickname to the one less than perfect month. June Gloom meant thirty cloudy days interrupted by a couple of hours of late afternoon sun if we got lucky. That was okay. We had the rest of the summer to look forward to bright sun, ocean breezes, and no need for air conditioning.
June kept us too humble to gloat, which made us more fun to be around. And that’s who we were, come July, the people other overheated Angelenos wanted to visit. By August, the clogged beach exit on the 10 freeway headed west stretched back to the exit before it.
When late-night-and-early-morning-clouds got ahead of themselves a little bit – that’s the meteorological term for sunlight that seems to disappear before it’s fully out – some wag came up with May Gray, and we chuckled and shrugged and kept our eyes on the midsummer prize.
This year I wracked my brain and could not come up with a clever rhyme for August or September, but it looks like we’re going to need them. The summer tourists who came from several elsewheres to sit on our beaches were not happy. They sat on the beach anyhow, because that’s what they were here to do, but too often the blankets were wrapped around them, not spread out underneath them.
The fall tourists, who waited until after Labor Day to miss the big crowds, had more room to spread out their blankets and no big worries about sunburn.
And yet climate-change deniers are tenacious: They insist that nothing’s changed even though NuSeattle looks like TruSeattle, TruSeattle looks like Phoenix, and Phoenix looks like the inferno. Skeptics point out that it’s cooler west of Los Angeles than it used to be, insisting that global warming is clearly not the issue – but anyone who’s lived through June Gloom knows that hot air inland sucks cool air in from over the ocean. The hotter it gets at Dodger Stadium, the cooler it is at Muscle Beach.
What used to be a month’s weather joke now extends into the fall, not that anyone who’s unconvinced seems willing to budge. Our rights as Americans, it seems, include not only free speech but free rein to do whatever we want, even if that includes loading up a plastic-intensive picnic lunch of processed foods into our gas-guzzling SUV.
Or maybe not: A group of young environmental activists prevailed recently in a Montana lawsuit claiming their constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, one of several such lawsuits, this one focused on fossil fuel development.
State officials have not surprisingly announced their intention to appeal, but if you’re looking for a glimmer of hope – a brief ray of sunshine, to torture the June Gloom analogy – this isn’t a bad one. The wheels of climate justice grind slowly, attached, as they are, to one of those oversized gas guzzlers, but every now and then they inch forward.
This January will be 18 years since the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, and I remember well-intentioned people throwing up their hands at the time because there was so much we had to change about how we lived our lives. It was an overwhelming challenge to a people raised on convenience foods and the car vacation, people who thought that a plastic fantastic universe was progress. Faced with too much to do, many people balked; nobody wanted to feel like a failure for having done too little, so they did nothing at all.
But I also remember a comment that producer Laurie David made, even if I can’t find it among the myriad interviews she did at the time. I remember the gist: Whatever small changes we make are more than we did before; in the aggregate, they make things better.
It feels like time for a sequel, though, more Nike tagline than empathy: Just do it, already, whatever “it” means in your life -- buy products in bulk to reduce plastics, or compost, or cut down on paper towels. Stop hiding behind the notion that one person’s effort won’t make a dent, because you can see firsthand what not enough people’s efforts have wrought.
I find it hard to imagine that we can reverse-engineer the climate to look the way it did back when June Gloom was the end of gray, though I’d be happy to hear from a scientist who says it’s possible. In the meantime, I have to believe we can keep it from getting worse. Do plan a visit NuSeattle on your summer vacation next year, as so many people do in August. Just bring a sweater.