Whether it’s weather or not: we must make dramatic changes now to slow and stop global warming

On a steamy July afternoon, I stood next to Dad in the gravel yard between the house and barn and looked up at him. His long, narrow face was turned to the sky as dark swollen clouds wearing a sickly shade of green loomed over the barn, rumbled in the west, and towered above the trees behind the granary. On the east side of the yard, where the long driveway bent away from the cornfield and around the corner of the roll-top fence surrounding the lawn, a squall of bickering sparrows in the box elder were now quiet. The distant hammering of a woodpecker against a dead cottonwood north of the barn stopped. Cicadas fell silent. It seemed we were all waiting for something.

With our faces tipped to the sky, Dad tried to read the signs. Wary of the darkening clouds’ unusual color but still uncertain and resigned to waiting, he eventually turned toward the small wire gate in front of the old farmhouse, and I followed him. For each of his steps, I took two as he sauntered through the dead-still afternoon. Then, something thumped on the granary roof, as if one of my younger brothers tried to Andy-Andy-over a stone but didn’t make it.

Dad looked over his shoulder and then barked, “Run!”

I scrambled ahead of him, through the gate, and up the three concrete steps. With Dad right behind me, I yanked the screen door open. We rushed inside just as the sky came undone and hailstones rained down, bounced off the gravel, tore through the box elder and corn stalks, and rang against the steel cover of the cistern. The air between house and barn hissed with falling ice, and the ground grew white and seemed to move under the pounding and tumbling of marble-size hailstones.

Then, we stood there, behind the screen door, Dad worrying about a lost crop, me astounded by the welter of ice in the midst of a summer day.

As a kid, I grew up on that farm, which Dad rented on shares in Brookville Township in southern Minnesota in the 1960s. This was long before cable TV, the internet, satellite images, and weather apps, back when we got our forecasts from AM radio, page 2 of the New Ulm Daily Journal, and the ten o’clock news on the only TV station we could pull in with the antenna on the roof. Because information wasn’t as pervasive or immediate as it is now, we listened to old-timers, watched the sky and animals, and learned to read signs of impending changes in the weather.

Dad pointed out that rain was imminent when barn swallows flew low over the ground, cows gathered under trees, dogs ate grass, or the wind came out of the east instead of the west or south. He claimed that if rain fell on Easter Sunday, it would rain on each of the next six Sundays; that if March comes in like a lion, it’ll go out like a lamb; and that if you sleep in moonlight, you’ll likely get sick. He even resorted to verse when conditions were right: “Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailors’ delight.” And that day as we stood behind the screen door, he was again convinced that green storm clouds forewarned hail.

All of this suggested a reliability in the weather, that if you paid attention to nature, you’d begin to recognize dependable signs and patterns and that the predictions resulting from these first-hand observations were more immediate and often as accurate as those in the Journal or on the ten o’clock news.

But recently I’ve noticed anomalies in Minnesota that make me wonder what’s happening. Vultures, which I never saw when we were kids, are now almost as common in southern MN as in Texas. An invasive type of mourning dove that I saw on recent visits to Laredo — the Eurasian collared-dove, which is pigeon-size with a black ring on the back of its neck and a rasping call rather than a coo — wasn’t in Minnesota in the 1970s and 1980s, but now they frequent the evergreens and maples here in Walnut Grove. In southwest Minnesota, this year’s heat and drought has resulted in an almost entire absence of mosquitoes even though they’re typically so common that we jokingly refer to them as our state bird. And in the Twin Cities, June 2021 was the second hottest on record.

Plus, other parts of the world are experiencing dangerous extremes in their weather. The Pacific Northwest endured a brutal heatwave earlier this summer, including an all-time record of 121 degrees on June 29^th in Lytton, British Columbia, which then burned to the ground in a wildfire. Germany, Middle Tennessee, and China’s Henan province all saw extraordinary downpours, which led to flooding that destroyed buildings and property and took dozens of people’s lives. Wildfires have consumed immense swaths of the western U.S., Greece, and Turkey. Rain fell on the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet for the first time in recorded history. Water levels have sunk to historic lows in two of the largest reservoirs in the U.S. And for seven years in a row, Atlantic storms have begun forming earlier than the June 1^st official start of the hurricane season.

Weather, of course, is not the same as climate, but individual weather events form patterns, much like those that farmers like my dad observed when I was a kid, and those recent patterns are symptomatic of climate change. That’s what makes the conclusions cited in this year’s UN Climate Report so relevant and disturbing.

According to the report, we’re on the cusp of changes that can’t be turned back, changes resulting from our continued burning of coal, oil, and gas, which has steadily warmed and continues to warm the planet. Unless we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, explain the scientists who authored the report, we will experience more deadly heat waves and associated wildfires more often, more widespread water shortages due to droughts, the extinction of animal and plant species, storms of greater frequency and severity, rising sea levels that increasingly threaten coastal cities and island nations, and even destabilized ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

Unlike Dad’s observations and predictions, this report is based on thousands of comprehensive scientific studies that make it undeniably clear that people alone are responsible for these changes and that governments, industries, and we must make dramatic changes now in order to slow and stop global warming — the root cause of climate change.

Simply put, it’s up to all of us. Whether you think it’s just weather or not, outside your front door climactic changes are altering life while too many people still stand by and watch.