She lamented the “seemingly small things” that were previously taken for granted and could no longer be counted on: winter frost, hedgehogs in London gardens, bumblebees at picnics. In 2014, in an essay for The New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith mourned the vanishing of the seasons that she once knew. At best, these are dull, anxious times that recall pandemic lockdowns at worst, they are life-threatening. Instead of slinging on backpacks, we fill and refill our go bags, wondering whether a sack of aspirin and granola bars will be of any use at all. We nervously refresh weather reports and wildfire maps, text reassurances to friends and family, and restlessly scroll Netflix. Those outdoor plans are increasingly disrupted by wildfires, smoke, and extreme heat-events that confine us to our homes, or to emergency shelters, and tether us to our screens. And, if fossil-fuel use continues unabated, the summer of 2100 could last for nearly half the year.įor my family, as for many others in the American West, summer was traditionally a time for weekend camping trips, mountain hikes, and theatre and music festivals. Even if greenhouse gas emissions peak at mid-century and decline rapidly thereafter, warm temperatures will engulf more of each year until at least the end of the two-thousands. In 2011, it lasted about ninety-five days. Climate scientists report that, in 1952, the summer heat lasted about seventy-eight days in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. But the seasons are increasingly out of balance, and even the most ambitious attempts to curb climate pollution will not fully realign them.
Instead of clear skies and autumn chills, we can expect hot, hazy mornings and smoke-stained sunsets for weeks to come.įor those of us in the planet’s temperate zones, the annual return of four roughly equal seasons-one cold, one hot, and two in between-has shaped our history and our habits. Despite a relatively quiet start to wildfire season, by Friday firefighters were battling sixteen large fires in Washington and Oregon. This week, Sacramento reported an all-time high temperature of a hundred and sixteen degrees, and Death Valley reported what may be the highest September temperature ever measured on earth: a hundred and twenty-seven degrees.
The triple-digit temperatures that descended for a week in late July and intermittently in August returned to the West last week, breaking records from Southern California to Montana. But where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, the season shows few signs of departing. The end of summer arrives, as every child knows, when the first bell rings on the first day of the school year.
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