Susannah Meadows writes in today’s NY Times:
The evidence of our planet’s warming is all around us. But many of us have been able to comfort ourselves, if only slightly, with the knowledge that the more cataclysmic fallout is still a ways off, that it may be preventable. Perhaps the gradual nature of the worsening conditions we see everyday has lulled us into a sense of complacency.
What I saw in Yosemite feels like a wake-up call that’s come too late.
Sometimes it takes 20 years to see a drastic change.
Coming into the park from the south, up California 41, I looked out onto mountains that appeared studded with giant charred toothpicks. The 2018 Ferguson fire had decimated this once magnificent forest.
Other trees were dying off, victims of bug infestations abetted by warming temperatures and milder winters. The waterfalls were pathetic wisps in the wind, shadows of the lush, white horse-tails that spilled down the summer I lived there.
Wildfire, tree-death, and dwindling waterfalls are natural occurrences. But these problems are exacerbated by climate change, according to the National Park Service.
With the worsening heat — it hit 104 degrees in the valley this month — you can’t enjoy being there as much. The West Coast is being battered by those three awful cousins, drought, heat and wildfire. When will the hot weather leave certain unforgettable, vertical hikes, like to the top of Half Dome, out of reach?
Yosemite’s last two glaciers are rapidly retreating. They will most likely disappear in a few decades, threatening the summer and autumn water supply in these mountains. By the time I visited in the first week of July, some of the streams in the high country — relied upon by animals and backpackers alike — were already dry. The river that threads through the valley, the Merced, was low and listless. When I lived alongside it years ago, it was so swollen with melted snow and the rapids so loud, I would have to close my window before making a phone call.
Read the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/opinion/yosemite-west-coast-smoke.html
Here in northern Minnesota, the once Mighty Mississippi is down to a trickle. We can no longer kayak down the river. Climate change has Minnesota in a desperate drought and the air is choked with wildfire ash. We have the hottest summer temperatures on record.
We must stop climate change now. . Use the US House of Representatives website to contact your representative today! https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative Tell them now is the time to end climate change.