How has climate change affected you?

8 comments

1. Climate change anxiety keeps from sleeping at night. I have kids and worry deeply for their future. I feel like I’m doing everything I can on a personal level, but I know there’s not much else I can do. I can’t personally stop it from happening. Winters in my area are getting milder and milder, I didn’t even need to use my heavy down coat last year, and I used to wear it daily during winters. Snow used to be a regular occurrence in the colder months, and now it’s rare. I remember a few days leading up to Christmas last year, it was nearly 80°. We’d normally have a pretty temperate climate, all four seasons were guaranteed. Now it’s like fall just merges into spring. It really does scare me.

2. Maryland: We get so many more high-wind storms, more tornadoes, and you can see the sea level rising if you live on the bay. Summer is getting fucking unbearable, as the classic Maryland humidity combines with higher temperatures. And it almost never snows anymore, whereas when I was a kid it would snow a decent amount every winter. Winter is simply disappearing.

3. I was a climate refugee for 2 weeks last year. I had to evacuate my home because it was at risk of flooding or being wiped out. Had to make a quick decision to get to get myself and my child and 2 cats out asap. If I had waited overnight like some of my friends and neighbors had, I would have been stuck on the highway for 14-15 hours and would have not been able to get out in time. When I get back home 2 weeks later, it was flooded and windows were damaged there was water damage everywhere. There was no water or electricity (and I had to clean out a disgusting fridge of food I couldn’t get out in time). The gas situation was horrendous for at least a month that followed. Driving down the streets when we could was surreal, it all looked like a ghost town… The entire school system was down for 5 weeks until schools were assessed for damage and children had to deal with that following the pandemic which was rough.

   A year later, the city where I live is still working on picking up the pieces. It’s still a very common sight to see damaged homes and billboards down and businesses permanently closed. The whole area still has a while to go before things are fully back to where they were again.

4. Arizona: this is supposed to have been our typical monsoon season, but that eternal heat dome parked over us is keeping it away. The masses swarming into the ER due to heat-related injuries, even from things such as touching a doorknob or falling on the ground. Natural saguaro cacti are giving up the ghost because it’s becoming unsustainable. All this while we’re facing a potential water shortage over the next 10-20 years (and I’m being gracious with the timeline). I’m concerned that this is the beginning of a very dangerous precedent.

5. Extreme weather in all directions. Food prices steadily rising. Water shortages. Anxiety and depression from seeing nature and animals being ruined, as well as seeing owners of horses and similar having to slaughter their pets because the heat and floods decimates the harvests and makes it so that people can’t feed their animals.

   General anxiety and hopelessness from knowing that it’s unstoppable, and that what I and others do doesn’t matter as hailed pop stars and billionaries emit more CO2 in a year than you or I would do in 400 years.

6. Seeing the explosion of climate problems in my lifetime has left me with ongoing grief and fear that just never really goes away. It’s made me absolutely unwilling to have children.

   On a less existential level, it’s made me less happy in the state I live in. We have very intense winters that are now bookended by summers filled with Canadian wildfire smoke. It’s hard to live in a place where the weather is so hostile that there going outside is discouraged for weeks at a time in both summer and winter.

7. Southern California: nothing has been consistent the last 5 years. I am an avid gardener who has had the goal of starting a sustainable farm (if I ever got the money) and it’s almost impossible to predict or keep up with the climate change, extremes and water issues. I’ve decided to focus on breeding my flowers in hopes that they become more resilient to the extremes and properly caring for the harvested seeds, tubers, bulbs etc., to use the following season. The second generation I’m growing right now seem to be doing well but I am scared of how much our world is going to lose because of what’s happened with commercial agriculture. Many many species have been lost and unethically altered. I always saw the writing on the walls but it’s abundantly clear the powers that be don’t want sustainable farming and they don’t want people to know how to do it themselves.

   We regularly go to the beach for recreation and walking our dog on the boardwalk. We had never seen flooding like we did this last year and have already seen due to the rising tides. The inlet has flooded multiple times and multi million dollar rentals are sloppily repaired between storms and tenants. The coastal wetlands were obliterated years ago and the restoration projects were doing wonderful work. Due to the constant sewage dumping and leaking, and general pollution the work that had been done is being tossed back to square one. Nobody seems to care what’s happening so long as the $15 fancy ice creams still get tagged in tourists Facebook posts. They just make sure some poor dude in a golf cart cleans up the dead marine life from the beach before the droves of tourists wake up and hit the sand. I’ve been there at 5am and seen several Dead Sea lions and fish tossed into the cart, seaweed piles shoveled up, a couple trash cans rolled out onto the sand, watched them load up their van and be pulling out of the lot right when a mile of cars flowed in full of families. Within 20 minutes the sand was crammed of pop ups, towels, illegal bbq’s, coolers and surf boards. It’s hard not to be somewhat disgusted by that.

8. We’ve been having so many cyclones and temperature changes in my area.

   It’s supposed to be peak winter now, usual temperatures for this time of the year are around 5-10ºC (40-50F), but yesterday was 30ºC (86F) and today is 13ºC (55F), my throat is shot. It’s been like that since early may.