Postcard 033 - 80' in October
I remember Thanksgiving 2013 — my first one in the Bay Area. I was visiting my then-girlfriend's family in Fremont and baffled by the fact that the temperatures were in the 70s.
Having just finished over a year of work on Chasing Ice, I was so confused why more people weren't concerned. I had never experienced a Thanksgiving at anywhere near this temperature, especially on the West Coast. But I would learn that this temperature at this time of year was a feature, not a bug (to a certain extent).
I thought a lot about that first Thanksgiving this past weekend. When I left Seattle on Thursday morning, the temperatures were in the 50s and the week had been grey. The following day in Walnut Creek, the temperature broke 90'. Similar to 2013, I was disoriented and concerned. While I remember the "second summers" we'd have in SF, even a year and some change away and it felt foreign to me.
Perhaps more than even in the Bay Area, I thought about this on the drive home, as I rolled past dried up lake beds and stopped to charge in what felt like the desert. This past Monday, I regularly stepped out of the car into 80' weather... in October!
I think this was so top of mind after the wild heatwaves that we had this summer, some of which I experienced firsthand (100 degrees in Paris was unwelcome, to say the least, and I had a hotel room with air conditioning). I've always been climate-concerned, but the rate at which we're trending in the wrong direction feels alarming (though - sadly - there's no shortage of things to be alarmed about right now).
It made me wonder how long California would look like this, or how long many places may look like what I remember. Have we actually hit a tipping point or are we still able to reverse things?
I don't have any answers, but after marinating on this for 17 hours in the car, I had a lot of questions.