Weather Report
This week in Copenhagen, negotiations are going on toward producing a pact to fight global warming, a pact that is supposed to be ready for world leaders to ratify at the end of the week. Whether or not the pact will be completed, or will be strong enough to accomplish what people who want to fight global warming want it to accomplish is unclear at this moment. But it does at least show that the world is trying to contradict that famous saying by someone who may or may not have been Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
One of the first pieces that I ever shot for Vanguard, back in the summer of 2005, was a story set up by Adam Yamaguchi, looking at the shrinking of glaciers in Alaska.
Glacier (Video)
What we saw was pretty shocking, in terms of weather changing the landscape of Alaska, but as someone who’s been living in Southern California for many years, the idea that the weather can have a big impact on your life wasn’t actually a novel idea. I’m a native of Michigan, and, growing up, it was always my ambition, to leave and move to southern California, sunny southern California, to get away from weather. Ironically, as it turned out.
Certainly, in my adopted state, I can barbeque in my backyard on New Year’s Eve more easily than one can in Michigan—I tried it last New Year’s at my father-in-laws, when it was 10F, and it’s doable, though bracing. But, as it turns out, cold and snow aren’t necessary the kind of weather that can have a big impact on your life.
Here’s where the irony comes in: It stopped raining yesterday in Los Angeles, much to the relief of the people living in my canyon, because the rain ended before the mudslides began. There was a danger of mudslides because the side of the canyon 400 yards from my house was entirely denuded by fire this past August—one of the early fires in what turned out to be nearly a two month siege of them, including the Station Fire, the biggest fire in the recorded history of Los Angeles County. The fires came because it’s been so warm and sunny—and dry.
The fire came into my canyon as I was driving home early from work on what seemed like a pretty great day---as I was driving Laura Ling and Euna Lee were in the air, en route home to LA from North Korea in Bill Clinton’s plane. I saw a plume of smoke from the freeway, and thought to myself, “on this good day, someone else is having a bad one,” and pulled into to my canyon to hear sirens. At first I couldn’t see anything, but then a car with fire department officials pulled in front of me, and four officials got out and looked up at the hillside where there was perhaps a fifty foot wide fire. I drove on into my driveway, and said to me wife, kind of casually, ‘there’s a fire in the canyon.” We stood on our front driveway watching it, and within minutes it was half a mile wide, and very loud—it was crackling like a fireplace in a Christmas commercial. We ended up calling out kids and telling them not to come home, then evacuating our photo albums, dog, turtle, rabbit, guinea pig, my son’s guitars and my daughter’s harp. The next day, we returned—and fortunately no homes in our canyon were hurt. But ever since, the majestic pine in my neighbor’s yard looks like a potential torch of death.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that in my native Michigan, I felt annoyed and persecuted by the weather, but in my adopted southern California we are sometimes obliged to be afraid of the weather. And that seems to be what they’re debating in Copenhagen, whether or not the world as a whole, in general, should start being afraid of the weather, and, in contradiction of Mark Twain or whomever’s observation, start doing something about it.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Au revoir from the Vanguard intern - Dan Ucko
- A shout-out to Doctors Without Borders - Kaj Larsen
- Cocaine Mafia: Coke's huge market in Europe and the African supply chain that gets it there - Christof Putzel
- Lining up - Mitch Koss
- Does Sri Lanka offer lessons for Obama? - Darren Foster
- Kaj’s robot and weapon firing skills are put to the test - Lauren Cerre
One of the first pieces that I ever shot for Vanguard, back in the summer of 2005, was a story set up by Adam Yamaguchi, looking at the shrinking of glaciers in Alaska.
Glacier (Video)
What we saw was pretty shocking, in terms of weather changing the landscape of Alaska, but as someone who’s been living in Southern California for many years, the idea that the weather can have a big impact on your life wasn’t actually a novel idea. I’m a native of Michigan, and, growing up, it was always my ambition, to leave and move to southern California, sunny southern California, to get away from weather. Ironically, as it turned out.
Certainly, in my adopted state, I can barbeque in my backyard on New Year’s Eve more easily than one can in Michigan—I tried it last New Year’s at my father-in-laws, when it was 10F, and it’s doable, though bracing. But, as it turns out, cold and snow aren’t necessary the kind of weather that can have a big impact on your life.
Here’s where the irony comes in: It stopped raining yesterday in Los Angeles, much to the relief of the people living in my canyon, because the rain ended before the mudslides began. There was a danger of mudslides because the side of the canyon 400 yards from my house was entirely denuded by fire this past August—one of the early fires in what turned out to be nearly a two month siege of them, including the Station Fire, the biggest fire in the recorded history of Los Angeles County. The fires came because it’s been so warm and sunny—and dry.
The fire came into my canyon as I was driving home early from work on what seemed like a pretty great day---as I was driving Laura Ling and Euna Lee were in the air, en route home to LA from North Korea in Bill Clinton’s plane. I saw a plume of smoke from the freeway, and thought to myself, “on this good day, someone else is having a bad one,” and pulled into to my canyon to hear sirens. At first I couldn’t see anything, but then a car with fire department officials pulled in front of me, and four officials got out and looked up at the hillside where there was perhaps a fifty foot wide fire. I drove on into my driveway, and said to me wife, kind of casually, ‘there’s a fire in the canyon.” We stood on our front driveway watching it, and within minutes it was half a mile wide, and very loud—it was crackling like a fireplace in a Christmas commercial. We ended up calling out kids and telling them not to come home, then evacuating our photo albums, dog, turtle, rabbit, guinea pig, my son’s guitars and my daughter’s harp. The next day, we returned—and fortunately no homes in our canyon were hurt. But ever since, the majestic pine in my neighbor’s yard looks like a potential torch of death.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that in my native Michigan, I felt annoyed and persecuted by the weather, but in my adopted southern California we are sometimes obliged to be afraid of the weather. And that seems to be what they’re debating in Copenhagen, whether or not the world as a whole, in general, should start being afraid of the weather, and, in contradiction of Mark Twain or whomever’s observation, start doing something about it.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Au revoir from the Vanguard intern - Dan Ucko
- A shout-out to Doctors Without Borders - Kaj Larsen
- Cocaine Mafia: Coke's huge market in Europe and the African supply chain that gets it there - Christof Putzel
- Lining up - Mitch Koss
- Does Sri Lanka offer lessons for Obama? - Darren Foster
- Kaj’s robot and weapon firing skills are put to the test - Lauren Cerre
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- vanguard blog, VG-blog-AY
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- Climate Change, Global Warming, Los Angeles, Alaska, 13 more
