Or "climate floods," or "climate droughts."
I’ve been trying to imagine from across the country what it’s like to live through the fires. |
I’ve read that the smoke smells like a camp site; that the ash is like snow. I wonder if, for the people of Portland and San Francisco, it’s like the coal smog of last-century London — “the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,” licking “its tongue into the corners of the evening.” |
If it’s hard to imagine the smoke, it’s impossible to imagine the actual fire — the size and scope of it, its terrible heat and appetite. |
But no matter how far away you are, you can’t ignore it. And that’s the difference between fire and climate change. Today, Stuart Thompson and Yaryna Serkez, two of my colleagues in the Opinion graphics department, propose a new way to talk about climate change through more immediate, tactile threats like fires and floods. |
“Climate change feels like an amorphous threat — with the greatest dangers lingering ominously in the future and the solutions frustratingly out of reach,” they say. Instead, what if we talked about “climate fires,” “climate floods” and “climate droughts”? |
They’ve built an interactive map of the United States that lets you click on your own county to see what climate-related threats you face. Where I live in Pennsylvania, it’s extreme drought. Also: extreme rainfall. |
“We’re bad at contending with hypothetical threats,” Stuart and Yaryna say. But thinking about climate change as something we can see happening right outside our windows could push us to act. |
It turns out I wasn’t too far away to see some of California’s wildfires after all. I was pushing my kids on the swings last night when my husband pointed out the hazy sunset. “It’s the smoke,” he said. |
I looked it up in my local paper, the Courier Times, and he was right. The fires “produced smoke so pervasive that it was carried 3,000 miles by prevailing winds” across the Northern Plains, across the Great Lakes, across my backyard, and beyond. |
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Here’s what we’re focusing on today: |
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