In 1999, my second year of grad school, I attended a talk by my friend鈥檚 dad, who also happened to be the Dean of the Graduate College. Was I ingratiating myself in the hopes of a fellowship? Probably. Did I care about the subject, climate change? Definitely yes. I had just moved back to SLC, Utah, from Portland, Oregon, where I鈥檇 worked for an environmental organization. I had helped promote art-disrupter events with my friend, Vinnie the Fire Boy, who danced down the waterfront as I handed out "You EnDanger" and "Cows Kill Salmon" bumper stickers in the shape of fish. Portland was a great venue to practice wild art. Guerilla art activists replaced the street signs for Front Ave to Malcolm X Blvd. A group from the college I attended hosted a reverse peristalsis event where the artists ate a bunch of oatmeal dyed in the colors of the South African flag and threw up their oats to protest apartheid. ORLO, the organization I worked for, presented Smoke Screen: Smokey Bear at 50, a multimedia exhibit featuring artwork and presentations by three dozen artists. The exhibit sought to debunk 50 years of Forest Service propaganda 鈥渉ypnotizing鈥� Americans into believing forest fires are bad. The exhibit re-evaluated the history of fire suppression, considered the benefit of fire in healthy forests and offered perspectives on fire as a management tool.
In those healthy-ish forests, I hunted for mushrooms and swam in the streams in the Oregon forest. Water defined everything about those forests鈥攖he amount of rainfall made possible the three-hundred-foot stands of Douglas Fir. It catalyzed mushrooms to pop their heads out from their underground mycorrhizal networks. For only a couple of months of the year was it sunny enough to plunge your body into mountain rivers to grapple along the rocks, crawling upstream, pretending you were a salmon.
In Oregon, the environmental questions tended to be about paper product companies clearcutting old growth forests. We campaigned for the spotted owl. We held protests at logging sites. But when I returned to Utah for graduate school, the pressing items differed. Water, the lack of it, defined our conversations. So, when I attended Dean Chapman鈥檚 talk about climate change, I paid special attention to what he had to say about the future of water in the Southwest. As a geologist who worked closely with meteorologists, his climate science research put him ahead of the curve.
The models that predicted future climate scenarios based on what we know now were clear: a half a degree in Celsius predicted some ocean rise, additional forest fires, drought, flooding. As the models raised the degrees a tenth a point by tenth of point, the more exacerbated the disasters became. There was one climate model though that showed the Southwest climate could turn wetter, becoming more like the Pacific Northwest. As air warms, it can hold more moisture. 鈥淚鈥檒l choose that one,鈥� I told my friend, Jeff. 鈥淚 miss Portland.鈥� As if climate change planned to take my poll. I鈥檝e been wishing for that model to take hold ever since.
In 2009, the second year we lived in Flagstaff, it snowed 115 inches on Thanksgiving. It kept snowing and snowing. So much snow. Roofs caved in. School closed. It felt like a disaster. On April 1, the Arizona Daily Sun ran an article that our governor, Jan Brewer, who was foisted upon us because Obama took AZ governor Janet Napolitano to be Secretary of Homeland Security, planned to seed clouds so it would always snow that much in Flagstaff so Phoenix could rely on rain instead of Colorado River water. Not realizing the date, I complained to the chair of our department. 鈥淗ow could we live every year with that much snow?鈥�
Research released this week noted that in 2023, the hottest year on record (the article didn鈥檛 include 2024 which will probably, when all the data is in, register even warmer), fewer low clouds collected in the atmosphere. Like the ice sheets that reflect the sun, clouds help cool the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight back into space, called albedo. But a warming climate makes it more difficult for clouds to coalesce. The dew point makes it harder for clouds to form. Plus, there's the question of availability of condensation nuclei particles for water vapor to coalesce around. Bob Berwyn from Inside Climate News writes, 鈥淕lobal warming itself is driving the loss of clouds by diffusing distinct layers of the atmosphere that promote the formation and persistence of low-elevation marine clouds.鈥� With fewer clouds, more warming. With more warming, fewer clouds. Although it鈥檚 called a positive feedback loop, it is actually a pretty negative situation. The hope that the Southwest, or anywhere, would be wetter, is evaporating quickly.
I would give a lot for the wetter climate model to have been true, but now I feel that I acted like my kids acted when they wanted a snow day from school. Put a spoon under your pillow, wear your pajamas inside out, drop an ice cube in your toilet bowl and pray and pray and pray for snow. I look outside at the towering ponderosas. They don鈥檛 know yet how much snow there is not. They will by fire season. It鈥檚 enough to make me want to call Jan Brewer and ask her exactly how this cloud-seeding thing works鈥攅xcept, from what I can tell researching it, cloud seeding during drought is another hope that, like spoons under our pillows, doesn鈥檛 have a lot of basis in reality.