By Willy Blackmore | Word In Black
(WIB) – I started writing regularly for Word in Black back in August, and after a few weeks, I began to worry a bit. My beat was supposed to be climate justice, broadly speaking, but it felt like I was writing almost exclusively about something much more narrow: extreme heat.
There were kids getting severely burned on sun-baked playgrounds, a Chicago heatwave that broke the record highs set in 1995, workers who were dying on the job from heat stroke — and so often, the people dealing with the worst problems related to dangerously high temperatures were Black and Brown.
We’ll look back on 2023 as a tipping point.
There was no doubt that these were climate justice stories; my worry was more that I was missing other stories by chasing record-heat headlines, or that writing over and over again about the incredibly high temperatures and the myriad problems they caused would lead to my stories sounding rote.
But looking back from the vantage point of December, when the roses in Brooklyn (where I live) are still in bloom because it continues to be unseasonably warm, it feels like all those stories were justified. This was, after all, the hottest year ever — a year so hot in so many places around the globe that we momentarily passed the 2-degrees Celsius threshold of warming above pre-industrial levels that, if sustained, spells doom for people and the planet.
Even as the long, hot summer of 2023 ended, there were deadly spring heatwaves in Brazil and political fights over heat-related protections for outdoor workers.
I think we’ll look back on 2023 as a tipping point, really, a year when the climate crisis began to feel both immediate and persistent for a larger swath of Americans than it ever has before.
There have certainly been fire years on the West Coast that have made people across California and the Pacific Northwest feel like there’s no escaping the flames, and individual storms that have devastated specific cities and/or states (Katrina, Harvey, Sandy).
But this year was much more oppressive and much more widespread — not only with the heat, but the shifting plumes of Canadian wildfire smoke, the array of both named hurricanes and more everyday storms that flooded so many different parts of the country (while others that are used to wet weather were tinder-box dry). And all of this, of course, ties into there being simply too much warmth in the air and the atmosphere and the ocean waters.
The good news, relatively speaking, is that there are two big reasons why 2023 was so hot. One is climate change, and the other is that it was an El Niño year (meaning that a large mass of warm water has been swirling around in the Pacific, influencing a variety of weather systems and patterns), and a very extreme one at that.
So in a sense, 2023 can be seen as a kind of preview of what the climate might be like a number of years down the road, if and when that extra warming caused by the El Niño system is baked in on the whole. And if this is a preview, it should be seen as a warning too of the higher highs and everything else that comes with them that we will soon be facing if we fail to completely upend the way society functions.
The preview is not over yet, however: 2024 will be yet another El Niño year, and an even more dramatic one than 2023.