Unstoppable warming cycle if we continue our polluting ways
I will briefly tell you about five weather events that contributed to my current understanding of climate -- and as science tells us, the role we humans have played in the climate change we’re seeing.
My sixth-grade teacher told us about the Blizzard of 1888. She was a young girl living with her parents in the house where she still lived in 1950. The snow had begun on March 11 and when she awoke on the 14th to a bright sunny morning, she realized the snow was drifted to the middle of her second-floor window. That storm had paralyzed the entire East Coast, from Virginia to Maine, and had taken 400 lives. At the time no one thought that the blizzard was in any way man-made -- it was simply an “act of God.” Yet, well before 1888 several major European cities had restricted usage of certain fuels for heating due to the severe air pollution. These facts were the beginning of my awareness that we humans could impact weather and climate.
Then came the Great Flood of Norwalk in October 1955. A no-name tropical storm parked itself over southwestern Connecticut and dumped about 14 inches of rain on us in 24 hours. That Saturday night my buddies and I went bowling as usual. We wouldn’t be intimidated by a little rain. It was a scary experience. I didn’t get home that night, but we survived. The rivers all rose beyond flood stage and then a dam gave way several miles upstream. The inundation wiped out most of the bridges, hundreds of homes, and many businesses, including a four-story retail/office building that was built across the Norwalk River. Twenty-eight lives were lost. Bodies were washing up on the famously polluted shores of Long Island Sound for weeks. How was man responsible? Maybe by inadequate infrastructure and the tendency to build in flood-prone areas. That flood led to greater awareness of climate issues.
In 1978 I was working at Norden. One morning it began to snow like crazy. At lunch I sent all my staff home and left myself. It took me an hour to plow through ten miles of snow in my ’69 Buick Riviera, but I finally got home. Later that afternoon, our Governor Ella Grasso closed all the highways in Connecticut to all but emergency traffic. The 40-plus Norden employees who stayed until the end of the workday found they could not leave. The road-closing order lasted three days. Those employees had to break the lock off the cafeteria refrigerators to find food for their very uncomfortable three days of “overtime.” By then, I was really starting to develop awareness of the effects of climate even for everyday Americans like me.
In the 1990’s we first heard the term “El Niño” describing the warming of the Pacific, which impacts the climate worldwide. By August 2004 I had retired, and we were living the “snowbird” life -- condos in both Connecticut and Florida. Then Hurricane Charley visited our Florida home. Damage to the building itself was minimal but we lost the air-conditioners off the roof, the pool equipment, the fences and most of the landscaping. My wife and I weren’t there at the time -- a few neighbors rode out the storm. But I was condo association president and spent the next year putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again, and gained more awareness of the impact of climate and how it was changing.
On September 28 of last year, Hurricane Ian devastated my Florida condo building and most of Fort Myers Beach, which we all called “paradise.” If my wife were still alive, she’d be equally devastated. Now, nearly a year later I remain displaced, not even knowing whether recovery is possible. Needless to say, Ian and my awareness of the power of weather and climate have radically changed my life.
Years ago, I had believed that there was a natural 500-year warm-cool climate cycle: 1000 AD Norsemen began farming in southern Greenland; 1500 AD Dutch children skated on the canals of Amsterdam and the Greenland farms had to be abandoned; and now around the year 2000 Greenland’s icecap is melting and there’s not many places left to ice skate. Are we at another peak of that weather cycle?
No! We are breaking century old weather records day-after-day, year-after-year and science has intervened. It’s no longer a theory, rather it’s a proven fact that our human activities over the last two centuries -- largely polluting our air and water -- have broken that natural climate cycle, if there ever was one. We are in an unstoppable warming cycle if we continue our polluting ways. I now am fully aware of these weather and climate facts -- I am WOKE.
Vic Berecz is a retired defense systems software engineering manager with homes in Fort Myers Beach and Connecticut.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Unstoppable warming cycle if we continue our polluting ways
