The below entry is fiction. It's how I see global warming playing out, on a very local level.
It started slowly. All sorts of little events, strung together in hindsight, but at first brush, completely independent of one another. Hindsight is always right – isn’t that what they say? And yet, we’re still myopic. In denial.
I should back up. My name is unimportant. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and have for all my life. In hindsight, the changes, the little events, I had never really taken in aggregate. I assume most everyone else didn’t, either.
My daily routine consisted of all the usual things – wake up in the morning, go to work, take a walk, go home, and do it all over again. My daily walk was about 2 miles long, around a lagoon in Burlingame, California, on the shores of the San Francisco Bay. I’d try to complete it every day I was at the office, weather permitting.
In the fall of 2009, I was taking my walk along the lagoon at high tide, and I told myself, geez, that’s a high tide. Much of the vegetation along the shoreline was submerged. Along the bay itself, it was the same sight. The wind was blowing at 20 miles per hour or so, not really unusual for that time of year, but the day is clear in my mind. There were white caps on the water, and I watched one of my company’s 747s landing at the airport, just 2 miles up the road. A wave hit the levy, the shoreline, and splashed onto the manicured lawn of the park. I kept walking along the water, and it was the same. Water was splashing onto the banks.
In the winter months of 2010, we got very little rain. The Governor had stated that we would be facing water rationing in the summer months if we didn’t receive more. It was just the cherry on top of the last 4 years of below average rainfall.
In February, 2010, it was a day like any other. Temperatures in the 50s. I took my walk as normal. The tide was higher than I’d ever seen it. Higher then it was when I noticed the high tide in the fall, too. I completed my walk and went back to the office. The water kept rising. My office was located along the lagoon, and we had an underground parking garage, well below the water level. The garage began to flood. I was able to get my car out in time.
The freak high tide that affected us in San Francisco affected areas as far south as San Diego, and as far north as the Columbia River on the Washington/Oregon border. The tide was the highest ever measured. Nobody really knew what had happened, or why. Coastal towns were severely damaged. In my home in Foster City, some of the storm drains backed up and flooded the streets. All over the Bay, similar damage occurred.
Parts of the San Francisco Airport flooded as well. I called my friend up at our maintenance hangar, and drove by. He escorted me onto the ramp to view the flooding firsthand. The water left as soon as the tide went out, and operations for the airline weren’t seriously disrupted, only partially.
Nobody knew why it had happened the way it had. For six days after the initial tide, the tides were abnormally high, but still several feet below the initial one. I continued going on my walks as normal. The city cleaned up the park, and all was well again.
In April of 2010, the tides once again began to get abnormally high. Almost, but not quite as high as the initial event, but, enough to flood the parking garage every few days. I took to parking my car outside, on the upper level. The path around the lagoon was repaved and rerouted away from the lower laying areas. Other parts of the Bay experienced similar issues. An entire neighborhood in Pacifica was condemned and torn down. The Port of Oakland stopped being able to offload ships at high tide, and began to beg the state, quietly at first, and later publicly, about the need to alter their facilities to face what was now turning into a regular event. Similar murmurs from companies and businesses affected began to turn into a roaring chorus.
By June of 2010, the "Rogue Tide Recovery Act" passed Congress without a single Republican vote, and was passed into law by President Obama. This act approved funding for a system of levies and dikes to be built around most major coastal cities over 5 years. The worst hit cities were fast tracked. Notably absent was Florida from this system. The official word was the cities would need to be abandoned if this situation did not come under control. The water situation affected the western and eastern seaboard of the country. The Indian Ocean also faced abnormally high tides. It was business as normal elsewhere, for the most part. By the end of June, for the most part, the wild swings in the tides had subsided, and water levels ran just over 2 feet above the historical ‘normal’ number at high tide.
We dealt with rolling blackouts throughout most of September of 2010, as the state’s water situation continued to deteriorate. We were rationing water. In Foster City, they turned our water on for only two hours a day. People who misused the water – to water their lawn for example – were prosecuted. I filled the bathtub at my condo to the brim with water. My Danish neighbor – an old man who’s seen everything from the Nazis to the Commies and survived it all – suggested I run anything I got from the taps through activated carbon. Just a tad paranoid for me, but I did drop some chlorine in. Just in case.
The first rains of the season came early, in October. Storm after storm arrived, with no respite. By December, they’d already declared that we were at 100% of rainfall totals for the year. The rain continued, unabated, until March 2011, ending the season with 230% of normal rainfall. The reservoirs were overflowing. For me, though, I just went about my job as normal. The parking garage still seemed to be flooding with some regularity. The building people installed pumps in the corners that were the worst offenders – those closest to the water. I started parking in the garage again.
Boeing spun off its Commercial Airliner division in April, which promptly declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Just another victim of the economic collapse we faced. It’s not a huge event in the grand scheme of things, but, for our company, this was a terrible turn of events. 80% of our fleet was Boeing planes. We had put significant money down to be among the first to receive the new 787’s. At the corporate level, there were rumors of bankruptcy stemming from the several billion dollar loss of assets we’d be receiving. The management, in the end, decided the best option at this point to be to quickly retire our older 767’s and replace them with used Airbus A330s – at least they’d be slightly more efficient.
I kept walking around the lagoon. They rebuilt the bridge over the mouth of the lagoon to be three feet higher. The original bridge was consumed by the high tides. Some development and construction began around the shores of the bay. Raising the levies to a higher level. Most of it was done with old debris – concrete from torn down bridges and roads, and other assorted junk. How strong a barrier could rusty rebar and concrete make against mother nature? They closed my path for a few weeks while they shored up the levies from a barge.
The clearest sign, I think, that we should have known something was seriously wrong was the Summer and Fall of 2011. They called it The Great Heat. Summer was fairly normal up until mid-July. At that point, temperatures rose to levels never seen in the area. The entire Pacific Northwest experienced the phenomenon – temperatures running 15 to 20 degrees above normal for the entire summer. I used to get my weather reports from the National Weather Service at the time, and, I’ve always been something of a geek for scientific chatter – I read the forecaster discussions. One quote that sticks out in my mind was from early on during the Great Heat: "Sustained high temperatures of this nature and duration are unsupported by climatology."
Save for a two week break in August, when highs were in the 70s, daytime temperatures in the San Francisco region were regularly between 100 and 115 degrees. The evenings offered little break – mid to low 90s for evening temperatures. Wildfires broke out, with a severity we’d never seen before. Entire swaths of western Montana burned. Mount Diablo, here in the San Francisco region, burned as well. Visibility was less than a half mile during the worst of it – the smoke enveloped the area. My asthma wouldn’t give me a break either.
My company was under further strain. The temperatures were such that we couldn’t fly aircraft in some cases, and those that we were able to dispatch flew with severe weight restrictions. It was the same for the other carriers. The air was so hot, they couldn’t get their planes airborne within the confines of the runway. Of course, they could get them airborne, but if you can’t fly a full load of cargo and passengers to Beijing without a fuel stop, or if you have to jettison the cargo – well, there goes any and all semblance of profit for that flight, so what’s the point?
I took to sleeping in the office. My condo didn’t have air conditioning. The society seemed to alter itself, too. Crime, already high on account of the economic conditions, skyrocketed in the heat wave. I was lucky – nobody ever broke into my condo or car. Businesses altered their opening and closing times. People began to shift to sleeping during the day, and conducting business at night.
By late September of 2011, things began to shut down. Cellular phone service failed around the Bay Area. This, coupled with a spike in fuel prices as refiners shut down to switch to a winter blend, caused riots. It was still hot. People were rioting – for jobs, food, cool air, whatever. The riots spread from Oakland to San Francisco, San Jose, to Portland, to Seattle. The state national guards were called in to contain the rioting. Rioters were fired upon by the Washington National Guard as they attempted to storm the state capital in Olympia. There was relative calm for a while, as all took stock of the situation. The riots ended quickly, as the Federal Government mobilized and started providing relief packages to the affected areas.
A cooldown began, and relatively normal weather pervaded for the rest of the year. The tides continued to be a problem, and slowly, they were rising higher again. Eventually, our building was condemned by the city as unfit for habitation – due to the flooding in the basement. The company relocated to another building, about a block further inland. I made it a point to go back to the old building and watch on the day they demolished it in May of 2012. The hotel next door, a Sheraton in better times, was demolished the same day for the same reason.
I continued my walks, but had to be mindful of high tide in the lagoon – it would wash out into some areas. About a month later, the city closed the park. I ignored the warnings, and kept going. The ducks had left the lagoon. I haven’t seen them since.
Operationally, we started looking to move our maintenance base to Vacaville Airport. The ocean situation resulted in our maintenance area starting to flood with some regularity. The terminals weren’t yet affected, and only one of the runways showed that it was prone to flooding. All the while, air traffic was declining. Our 747s and remaining 767s were grounded and sent to Mojave to be scrapped. Our 777s were the largest plane we operated now. We would regularly cancel flights if we didn’t have a full cargo payload. Even if we had a fully booked passenger cabin – without the cargo revenues, there was no money to be made.
I can’t help but feel we are absolutely screwed. Nothing is changing. Gas is $8/gal now, and, believe me, that hurts. My car has a very thirsty V8. But I shouldn’t be complaining – at least I have a job, and a home, and a car. And that’s a lot more than a lot of other people have right now.
They can’t get nuclear plants built because of the environmentalists. They can’t get coal built for the same reason. We can’t produce solar in enough quantity. Tidal power was dismissed outright as too expensive, and we don’t have enough streams to provide enough hydroelectric power.
Our civilization is crumbling, bit by bit. Crumbling from both nature, and apathy from the people, to choose a direction to go, and press forward. Instead, it is a constant state of paralysis by analysis, and we have nowhere to go anymore.
This work is fiction. Will things play out this way in regards to global warming? Probably not. I really want to be wrong. But in the near term, how are we going to see the effects manifested? It starts out slow, but, eventually these things happen.
I've based my global warming scenario on a number of different theories and events that may occur. It's very much a 'composite' image of what may happen, but, realistically, things likely won't shake out like this.
Furthermore, I know this may not be the right forum, but, why not? We need something to imagine. Something to put a human face on what'll happen with global warming...