Yesterday evening in the D.C. area, a freak storm appeared without a whole lot of warning. What had seemed like an ordinary spring day with an ordinary forecast all of a sudden turned into a violent maelstrom where people were afraid to drive their cars. The sky turned an unidentifiable color (greenish?), and bizarre giant lightning explosions filled the sky. There were warnings of large hail and flooding and tornadoes and go shelter in the basement and derechos.
Huh? Derechos? Yes I know what a derecho is. Dangerous horizontal, non-tornado winds that destroy things. But where did these things come from? I had never heard of derechos. Now there are derechos. They are apparently, like a certain president, the new normal. But this storm was anything but normal. It was green and peculiar and throbbing and weird, and it had me watching the large tree by the street to see if it would uproot and fall on our house. Maybe our house would uproot simultaneously and get out of the way.
News organizations have developed a whole new area of weather coverage. Weather used to be, umbrella or not? Now it’s how many homes are about to be destroyed by freak storms.
Do you enjoy the change of seasons? Good, because there are more and more of them: summer, winter, falling tree season, Category 5 hurricane season, fire season, flooding season, tornado season, drought season and the newly minted tropical-disease season. And spring, when the grass and the sky turn green in what is now a grab bag of unseasonable everything, including our new friend derechos.
But we are responding! Don’t forget that Americans are a can-do people. We have responded to the crisis of a breaking climate by electing a president who is endeavoring to get the coal mines back open even as the sacred free market flees from them. And while the his administration has promised to quit the Paris climate deal, they are sticking around long enough to try and make certain that conflicts of interest have a good seat at the table.
We are now in the exciting moment in history where we no longer have to look forward to the burgeoning effects of climate change, or look back at our missed opportunities to save ourselves. We can settle down and watch both, right now in real time, from the comfort of our soon-to-be scorched-from-fire, sodden-from-flooding, airborne-from-derechos couch-potato couches.