Merry Christmas & Happy New Year! I’m introducing two new topics for next year, more at the end.

Nobody wants our climate to destabilize, and yet that is what we’re doing. In my last installment on better thinking, I wrote about how this blog is a product of imaginative thinking, and below are some more specific points.

Rational people base their thinking on logic and knowledge. The Farmer’s Almanac was able to predict the weather for over 200 years with remarkable accuracy simply by carefully recording weather patterns. Seasons used to be stable enough to plan your crops well. But, in a sign of the times, the old Farmer’s Almanac is going out of business. I don’t know whether climate change had anything to do with their decisions, but accurately predicting weather based on past history is now unreliable. (And, now that the National Center for Atmospheric Research is going to be closed, both climate and weather forecasting will suffer.)

In early June of 2022 I visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, and as I was driving back to California, the weather changed. There was a late season heavy snowfall in the mountains, followed by heavy rain. I remember thinking that the return to warmth and rain would melt all that late snow very quickly, so I decided not to dawdle. A few days later, the Yellowstone River washed out a whole bunch of roads after I passed.

They called the Yellowstone event a ‘500 year flood’, trying to put the event into historic context. But terms like ‘100 year floods’ no longer make sense, because the climate has already changed so much that the floods happen far more frequently either than expected or than they ever did in our written history. A biennial ‘25 year’ flood is oxymoronic.

Bereft of precedents, we need to use our imagination more when we plan the road ahead. You may have planned to retire to some beachfront property like the Outer Banks, but rising seas and more severe storms may make that much riskier than expected. Or maybe you planned a cabin in the woods, but increasing wildfires risk that dream as well. Or maybe you planned to move to a desert retirement community, but rising heat waves and diminished water are making that unsustainable. Or snorkeling coral reefs, now irrevocably damaged. Or seeing glaciers, now disappearing. Of course, there will still be plenty of beautiful places to visit and wonderful experiences to have, but our poor carbon choices are diminishing some of them rapidly. So we need to think ahead.

And it’s not easy. The most arable land in Canada is already farmed for crops like wheat, and much of the rest of the soil is a poor thin layer over the rocky Canadian Shield. So any fertile farms lost to sea level rise in Alabama are not going to be replaced in Labrador. And warmer average global temperatures do not mean an end to winter. Winter is caused by our tilted earth’s angle to the sun, so Greenland will still be dark and mostly uninhabitable for long winter months. Instead, some places in the southwestern US may become practically uninhabitable for long hot summers.

Seasons will continue and will increase in importance as weather becomes more extreme. In the long evolutionary fossil records, the species that are small, light and highly mobile tend to do better than slow moving, heavy creatures that spend all their time in one place, especially in times of climate change. Obviously, being the first species theoretically capable of diverting an asteroid, it’s shameful that we’re not trying harder to avoid the mass extinctions that we’re going to cause with our carbon emissions.

Considering all this I am writing two new monthly series for Saturdays next year. At the beginning of the month I will recommend which national parks to visit in which months, with a few adjustments for the changing climate. And mid-month, I will write about relevant climate consequences. I encourage you to use your imaginative thinking to make the most of your road ahead.