Summer
Chill
My
parents flew in from India two weeks ago to
spend the summer with us and were greeted by a
blanket of fog and wintry temperatures.
“Oh,
it’s the usual Bay Area summer,” I reassured
them as they stood shivering outside San
Francisco International Airport, “the sun will
be back out soon enough.”
Only,
it hasn’t, quite.
Instead,
we have been living under what the National
Weather Service's Bay Area office has dubbed "No
Sky July" — gray and damp weather caused by a
prolonged spell of low
pressure off the California coast that is
preventing warmer inland air from moving in.
Apparently,
this is the coldest summer we have had in more
than two decades.
Granted,
the Bay Area coast isn’t known for its warm
summers. Usually, I’m thankful for that, given
so much of the United States is increasingly
facing dangerously hot conditions during this
season. But after two straight weeks of waking
up to fog sweeping past my Berkeley home and my
tropical-summer acclimatized parents moping
around the house in thermals, I’m more than
ready for some brighter A.M.s. Though word is
that this cold front is likely to hang around
through much of August.
Even
as I’ve been bundling up, I’ve also been
thinking about how this local weather anomaly,
if you can call it that, harkens back to a time
when No Sky Julys were the norm. My reaction to
it — a longing for sunnier mornings — is a
classic example of the shifting baseline
syndrome. As a relatively recent transplant
to the Bay Area, my baseline expectation for
summer temperatures here is literally several
degrees higher than that of someone who has
lived here since, say, the early 1980s.
All
of this is to say, this summer cold snap serves,
more than anything, as a reminder of just how
much Earth’s climate has warmed everywhere.
Now
that I’ve spent some time dwelling on this (and
given the sun is shining strong this afternoon),
I think I’m going to be okay with “fogust.”
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