Let’s talk about this elephant in the climate!
The news of late depresses me as it relays an increasing number of extreme climatic events.
As I listened to how the nations of the world struggled at Cop28 to reach any meaningful accord to avoid life on our planet facing a climatic apocalypse, I reflected on my life experiences which tell me of an ‘elephant in the climate’ which I believe is a significant obstacle to reversing global heating.
I emigrated 47 years ago from a warm, coastal climate to a cold, continental one. Perhaps these 5 years I spent experiencing a cold climate gives me a perspective not held by many commentators on the breakdown of our climate norms.
Soon after our wedding (in 1976), on a warm, long summer day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I enjoyed the beauty of my first North American fall, followed by experiencing my first winter, deep within the heart of continental North America.
I had never known such cold. If my memory is correct, that winter we were treated to 67 straight days when it never got above freezing at any time of day or night!
One experience seared into my warm-climate brain was feeling the life-threatening cold when walking just 300 metres from a heated ice hockey stadium to our parked car. I think the wind-chill that night was colder than 40 below zero!
For people like me, raised in a warm Sydney climate (where the mean daily minimum temperature in the coldest month is +8.7oC), it is hard to imagine why anyone would choose to live in these cold conditions. But humans can, and do, adapt to cold winters – just ask the many migrants who chose to migrate to Minnesota from the higher latitudes of Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.
Many peoples across the world know how to heat their homes, to construct below-ground basements, to organise the shovelling and ploughing of snow on an enormous scale, so successfully that winter cold is not much of an impediment to the large populations living in these climates.
The coldest monthly mean daily minimum winter temperatures in some of these cities of the largely wealthy and influential cities of the ‘global north’, located at high (> 38oN) latitudes, include Washington, DC -4.5oC, Chicago -8.6oC, Moscow -12.3oC, Beijing -9.4oC, Toronto -7.3oC, London +2.7oC, Berlin -1.9oC and Paris +2.5oC. Minneapolis, Minnesota beats them all at -13.6oC!
Ploughed snow banks and glistening freezing rain are a common sight in a Minneapolis winter.
Which brings me to the question of the elephant in the climate – my proposition that many people living in colder climes probably do not mind a little global heating. If this is so, why is it not talked about more often?
I know, from personal experience visiting friends and relatives in Minneapolis over many decades, that winters there are now less severe. Understandably, most see this as a good thing. I hasten to stress that I am not implying any criticism of anyone, especially my friends and relatives, for enjoying less severe winters! It is a natural response to living in a seasonally cold climate.
In support of my anecdotal claim above, the warm and snowless Christmas Day experienced in Minnesota last week was newsworthy enough for the New York Times to report on it.
I don’t know what residents of Siberia think but I can imagine that at least the farmers of that region might be quite excited at the prospect of growing seasons less constrained by cold weather.
People living in seasonally hot climates like Austin, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona, are already suffering from excessive heat as described by Jeff Goodell in a podcast about his book ‘Heat: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet’.
If this ‘elephant in the climate’ is a real phenomenon, the world must urgently address this obstacle through education before we will be able to muster sufficient collective global commitment to solving the problem of a runaway climate.