In the coming migration, people will not leave their homes because of race or job opportunities, like mass movements of the past. This time, Americans will leave because of climate.
Published Aug 09, 2023 • 3 minute read
A billboard displays a temperature of 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) during a record heat wave in Phoenix, Ariz. on July 18, 2023. Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON /AFP via Getty Images
PORTLAND, Maine — When global warming emerged years ago in the public consciousness as an existential threat to the character of the seasons, our worry was winter. What, we asked in the northern hemisphere, would happen to winter without cold, ice and snow? Would winter lose its identity?
It made sense for us in the northeast to fret first about winter and climate change. If the planet was getting hotter, it made sense that this would be its first casualty. Scientists have long wondered about a future without the fabled snows of Kilimanjaro or with Greenland turning green. There, and virtually everywhere else we once considered permanently cold, change would be coming.
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In New England, no snow would mean no skiing at Stowe, Vt. and other venerable mountains. No ice would mean no skating on the Boston Common Frog Pond.
Once, Americans knew the romantic winter of men with horse-drawn carts cutting blocks of ice from pristine lakes; of coniferous trees italicized with dazzling snow; of jolly skaters in their finery in Central Park, illustrated by the 19th century printmakers Currier and Ives. Long gone, of course, and now we face the prospect of no winter at all.
Like history, though, weather doesn’t move in a straight line. Winters without snow did happen now and again in the northeast, which is what entertainers Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby learn in the film “White Christmas” when they arrive in Pine Tree, Vt., in December to find it snowless. Fiction, yes, but we know that some Christmases of the past weren’t white, as Crosby croons, “Just like the ones I used to know.”
For all the apprehension about the end of winter, the immediate threat is summer. If global warming promises to end traditional winters tomorrow, it’s killing traditional summers today.
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The story of 2023 in the United States is the heat. Hot, hot, hot. Unbearably, dangerously hot. The hottest days in history were in July. Records are falling everywhere.
On Aug. 6, it was 105 Farenheit degrees in Austin, Texas, which has had 30 consecutive days of temperatures over 100 degrees. It was 105 degrees in Albuquerque on Aug. 5, breaking the record of 98 degrees in 1995. It was the hottest day in August ever in the city.
New Orleans has had a record 17 days of excessive heat, generating warnings. The humidity makes it feel like 105 Farenheit.
All this makes you wonder: If this is the future of summer, how will we adapt? As we prepare for a warming winter (in Ottawa, for example, accepting less skating on the Rideau Canal and building more artificial rinks) we will have to cope with a scalding summer.
Many will flee the American South; young professional friends of ours in New Orleans are considering moving because climate will make life there unliveable. They are thinking Philadelphia.
For a generation, the Sunbelt has drawn people from the northeast, once home to America’s heavy industry, and more recently from California, once America’s Garden of Eden. In the future, though, we may see a return to New England.
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Many will come to Maine in particular, “the lungs of America.” Although days are getting hotter here, breaking records, coastal winds are strong and the ocean is cold (even if the lobsters, finding it too warm, are going to New Brunswick).
Truth is that the coast, mountains and forests rarely get uncomfortably hot. Foggy and clammy, but not sweltering.
In the coming migration, people will not leave their homes because of race or economic opportunity, like mass movements of the past. Americans will leave because of climate.
Many will no longer holiday in summer in Europe, where it is oppressive this year. They will prefer the shoulder seasons or even winter. Remote work, and a growing generation in retirement, will accelerate this trend.
In the near future, there will still be no better place in the world in July and August than New England, or the woods and lakes of Eastern Canada.
But it won’t be long before we, too, are reminiscing about summers — like winters — that we used to know.
Andrew Cohen is a journalist, a professor at Carleton University and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.
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