Nature on the Attack

For many people, the masks were back on last week as the air quality on eastern Long Island resembled that of Los Angeles in the 1970s before the imposition of strict environmental rules and the widespread use of catalytic converters.

Today, the air quality there is much improved ... but it took four decades. We don’t have that much time, and air quality — as the smoke tsunami from Canada demonstrated — is now a global scourge.

On that peak smoke day last week, driving past Long Beach provided quite an experience of colors: the brown haze, the blue-green water, whatever yellow sunlight broke through, and the occasional glimpse of blue sky. It was like the fires were not in another country but only a short distance to the west, like the Sunrise Fire in 1995.

It was something like an apocalyptic vision, and I could not help wondering how commonplace this phenomenon might be when my 17-month-old granddaughter is a teenager, if not sooner.

I do believe that World War III is underway. No, not a possible expansion of the Ukraine vs. Russia conflict or a direct confrontation with China, though both can happen and we’ll segue into World War IV. Not enough of us have grasped that we are at war with our own climate — in the United States, in China, in Russia, in Africa, etc.

But this “enemy” is not evil like Hitler, lusting for power and the subjugation of others. On a global scale, with some regions in worse shape than others, the climate is doing what climate does when it has been attacked by man-made forces: It is fighting back.

For life to survive on this planet, we need air and water. An absolute necessity in this thus-far-undeclared war is a strategy to at least stop air and water from becoming further degraded and hence more harmful to us. Overcoming the entrenched and strengthening forces of climate change is a formidable challenge.

Last month, the World Meteorological Organization issued a report stating that global temperatures are likely to soar to record highs over the next five years, thanks to the twin impacts of human-caused global warming and the climate pattern called El Niño. The report further offered that there is a 98 percent chance that at least one of the next five years will exceed 2016, which was Earth’s hottest year. But whether one does or not, the average temperature from 2023 through 2027 will be the warmest for a five-year period ever recorded.

You’re reading this column in a local community newspaper, so a question could be: Why should we care about such a big picture?

Well, how many of you never thought you’d be breathing in Canadian smoke while on Main Street in Sag Harbor or while at a park in Westhampton or Amagansett?

One might also think that the Southwest has nothing to do with our resources future, and it is true that there is no direct connection between our respective climates. But eastern Long Island is part of the Northeast region that might be part of a bail-out plan if — or when — the Southwest and other sections of the U.S. become less habitable, which is already happening.

Among the forecasts in a study published last month by the journal Environmental Studies and Technology was that if a multi-day blackout in Phoenix coincided with a heat wave, nearly half the city’s population, some 790,000 people, would require emergency department care for heat stroke and other heat-related ailments. As many as 13,000 of them would die.

That is not 10 or five years away — that is now.

But how likely is that? Get this: Nationwide, the number of major blackouts has more than doubled since 2015, while over that same period heat waves in the Southwest as well as elsewhere have become more common. (Remember the killer heat wave in the Northwest?) So, yes, that dire scenario can play out in Phoenix and in other metropolitan areas in the region.

What longer and more intense summer-like conditions will do around the U.S. is put greater pressure on our power grid. The journal study also predicts that this summer, which officially begins next week, two-thirds of North America could experience shortfalls in the power grid, straining resources.

That’s where we come in — well, all of us.

The groundwork for World War III was laid during the decades of heavy dependence on fossil fuels and the depletion of freshwater resources. Lately, it is more evident that nature is on the attack. What is happening in Canada is a smoke signal further alerting us that we face the double whammy of more and more intense wildfires, and the resource most needed to contain them — water — is becoming scarce. Nature is both enemy and victim. It is lashing out like a wounded animal, the most dangerous kind.

It also can be seen as the equivalent of fascism in the 1930s, though without an evil intent. Nature does not want to kill or subjugate us; it needs to be healed, or at the very least not to be further damaged.

One could suggest that the problem is too big and ultimately may not matter anyway. Global political and military tensions will rise to when the nukes finally begin flying, and that will take care of that. Or a new and more powerful virus will do a Black Plague on us. Or A.I. will pass a point of no return and “Terminator”-like machines will grind us into pulp.

But let’s try to be a bit more optimistic, shall we?

About that strategy: The deal recently brokered by the federal government to get four states to cooperate on saving the Colorado River from drying up was encouraging. The feds need to be proactive like that.

What can we do locally? Just as the five East End towns cooperated on identifying the need for a Community Preservation Fund and then succeeded in getting residents to approve one, we need to cooperate again on at least studying and forecasting the impact on us here of air quality and freshwater degradation occurring elsewhere.

Then, of course, the question is: What can we do? Obviously, we can’t control smoke from Canada and other blazes. But as we learned during the pandemic, simply wearing a mask is not enough.