As a heat wave hit much of the U.S. in June, Post Opinions asked readers to share how their feelings and experiences of summer have changed in a warming world. Here's what readers said:
When I moved to Dallas from Florida in 1988, I had to buy winter clothes. Now I have clothes I can wear all year round in preparation for much warmer winters. As for summer, it's downright dangerous for me as a senior with diabetes to go outside. When it gets above 90 degrees, I stay inside. In fact, I stay inside most of the summer. I try to acclimate with limited exposure each day, but it's not helping much. Combined with Dallas' air pollution, which has received an F grade for high ozone pollution from the American Lung Association, it can be hard to breathe outdoors. Air conditioning costs take up a third of my Social Security benefits.
Being away from the healthy amount of sun we all need has also had a negative impact on my mental health — I feel like a canary in the climate mine.
In the late 1970s, I was a graduate student working towards a Master's in Education and took intensive classes during the summer semester. I studied in the backyard while my two young children played on the swings or in the sandbox. The windows were open, letting in a cool breeze. We didn't need the air conditioner until the end of August. Now, the air conditioner starts in May and runs on for the rest of the year. We installed a roof and several ceiling fans on the patio. Otherwise, we never go out to the backyard in the summer.
I remember well the first Earth Day: We should have listened more carefully to the alarming predictions.
Allison Strickland, Seminole, Florida
Although the air conditioning in my car broke and I'm saving up for a pricey repair, I now plan my life around avoiding the heat. If I know I need to go out grocery shopping, I park my car in the shade a few hours before I leave. Stocking up on enough food and other necessities means I don't have to drive for days. Thankfully, I work from home, and coming back into the heat from an air-conditioned store or office makes me sick.
When I go outside, the sun in which I used to bounce 40 years ago is gone. The sun used to warm me, but today it is scorching hot. I miss the cool rain.
Carol Karas, Indianapolis
I grew up in Arizona, moved away, then returned in 1996. During the summers of my childhood, the monsoons would arrive every afternoon around 4pm, bringing thunder, lightning, and heavy rain for about an hour. It was a cool change from the 100 degree desert heat, and we could plan our lives around the rain.
Rain has been sparse in recent years, and temperatures are often in the 110s. We added double-glazed windows and screens and turned up the air conditioning to a comfortable range. We drive less, run errands in batches, and take the bus to work. We used to take trips to the mountains in the summer, but the temperatures are too high for rest.
So far, climate change has not changed my feelings about summer much. That's because, even though I grew up in relatively cool Pennsylvania, I lived in very hot Kansas and Nebraska for 20 years, doing long distance training and fieldwork in scorching heat. The main difference is that even in New England, where I live now, there seems to be much more concern about extreme rainfall, flooding, and drought conditions. From my perspective, all the changes so far have only made me feel like I'm back in Nebraska and Kansas, with more very warm and dry days, more floods, and more dry periods. By the way, I'm a big believer in anthropogenic climate change.
Carl Hastings, Narragansett, Rhode Island
The West's late-summer wildfire season has become a year-round phenomenon due to drought, a warming climate and human suppression of small blazes that naturally clear forest cover. Carbon dioxide emissions are making the planet hotter and, in some areas, drier, creating breeding grounds for fires that produce oxygen and sequester carbon dioxide.
From Santa Fe, we watched the 2000 Cerro Grande fire, which destroyed 200 homes, damaged Los Alamos National Laboratory, and caused an estimated $1 billion in damages. At night, we watched as uncontrollable “controlled burn” flames loomed over the historic Pajarito Plateau, and eerie darkness descended on the “nuclear city” as the lights went out for the first time since 1943. A friend who grew up in Ruidoso, New Mexico, where the two most recent fires converged, remembers a childhood spent fearing that the surrounding ponderosa forests would burst into flames. This deadly new conflagration, which devastated nearby Mescalero Apache communities, has been followed by floods that have stripped the topsoil from burned areas and contaminated groundwater and aquifers. My daughter, her husband, and grandson live in the valley above Boulder and are always ready to leave, with their dog in tow.
During wildfire season here, the evening sky turns an apocalyptic orange and the accompanying smoke makes the air toxic. On the John Muir Trail in California's Sierra Nevada, we spent a day walking through thick smoke, not knowing if a fire would close in on our group. Living amid the majestic beauty of the mountain forest means living in constant fear of arson, downed power lines and lightning.
Climate science predicts that this summer will be the coolest summer of the rest of our lifetimes.
We live at an elevation of 7,000 feet, but thousands of people from lower elevations come here to escape the heat. We've planted fruit trees on old, damaged cattle ranches and built passive solar houses with Trombe walls and collectors. It's hard to imagine what else we could do. I'm old now, and I probably won't live to see how it all plays out.
Elizabeth Winter, Taos County, New Mexico
Grow roses while you can
I used to be obsessed with the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. That romance has vanished as the temperatures have risen. The scorching hot Southern summers have gotten even hotter. I've rearranged my activities. Summer picnics now happen in the fall, barbecues start in the early evening instead of mid-afternoon, and Christmas is now so warm that it just doesn't feel like Christmas at all.
Most garden vegetables burn and nightshades stop growing when temperatures drop below 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and this temperature occurs earlier in the year than it did 10 years ago. The unbearable heat forced me to retire from gardening. My favorite plants can no longer tolerate the stress caused by the heat, and stressed plants quickly become susceptible to disease and insects. Rain doesn't seem to come as often as it used to, making watering a hassle, wasteful, and expensive.
Barbara Dunn, Savannah, Georgia
What is the opposite of snowbird? Since my husband retired, and in the face of increasingly hot summers, my husband and I have become snowbirds. We get out. We try to spend as much time as possible somewhere else during the humid, sticky, unbearably hot 90+ degree days. We can't be gone all summer, but we get out as often as we can. We are avid gardeners and love flower beds, but we've realized that the flowers we plant need to be hardy and low-maintenance for us after mid-June. When we're home, we might water before 10 a.m., but we're not in the mood to weed in the heat of summer.
Lisa Libowitz, Granite, MD
As I grew older and could no longer stand the heat, and the number of days we had over 90 degrees increased, I bought a house by the sea to spend the summers there. It costs more than I can afford to pay for my retirement, but it's much more comfortable there. But our supposed getaway is now getting more 80 or even 90 degree days. That never happened when I was growing up there. Sixty years ago, it was rare to get a 70 degree day, and never 80 degrees. So we've had to accept that climate change is very real and adjust our lives accordingly.
Kelly Haas, Oregon City, Oregon
I moved back to my native Michigan from North Carolina, where I spent my summers the same way I spend my winters here: inside as much as possible. It was not comfortable going outside.
I figured that being relatively close to Lake Huron now would make the summers more bearable, but last summer we had just as much heat and humidity, plus smoke from the fires in Northern Ontario just a few hours away, and I was pretty sick all summer.
I have a degree in history and I'm a Great Lakes specialist, so I mostly follow boats in the Upper Superior Lakes. Recently there was a sort of swimming race around Duluth. The water temperature was 60 to 65 degrees. That's crazy. During my time around the lakes, the water temperature in the summer on Lake Superior, especially up north, averaged 42 to 45 degrees. That's crazy.
Marianne Latimer, Brown City, Michigan
