Tim, who lives way over on the other side of the country next to Chesapeake Bay, says that sometimes his phone cuts loose with those hundred-decibel civil-defense blares, followed by a scary voice telling him to run indoors. Not, mind you, because Chinese nukes are about to drop on his head, but because a thunderstorm is on the way.
I remember thunderstorms. We had them in the summers when Tim and I were growing up in Georgia. Roiling black clouds, swirling winds, crashes of thunder, spears of lightning, and great sheets of rain that nobody took all that seriously and TV weathermen referred to as possum pounders. Or, if the weathermen were in a particularly frolicsome mood, toad stranglers. And instead of fleeing indoors, we ran out to the street to see if the storm sewers had overflowed. Because if enough rain sheeted down, geysers of water would be shooting up from the manholes and we could twirl on the covers like boogieboards.
Half an hour later the clouds would have passed; the winds would have settled into still, humid air; the lightning would be somewhere over South Carolina; and the rain would just be drops of water glistening on pine trees in the late-afternoon sun: a change so sudden and so complete that when it happens nowadays it’s referred to as “weather whiplash,” something we’re supposed to be terrified at rather than get a kick from.
Not, mind you, because Chinese nukes are about to drop on his head, but because a thunderstorm is on the way.
We don’t have thunderstorms in Oregon where I live now, but we do have the Pineapple Express. Or, rather, we used to have the Pineapple Express: clouds carrying much-needed moisture from the warm waters around Hawaii to the parched farmland of the American West. In recent years these gentle, life-giving weather systems have been transmogrified into sinister-sounding phenomena known among the cognoscenti as atmospheric rivers, which bring catastrophic flooding to the uninhabited deserts of California. Atmospheric rivers can be so dramatic, at least in the minds of those attuned to meteorological drama, that they become superstorms.
What superstorms are has not been disclosed to me, but the very name makes them sound so massive, so unearthly in their destructive power, that they could be distant, astronomical phenomena, dreadful things occurring in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
All these new terms, all this lexicographical inventiveness, I’m pretty sure, has something to do with the folks who make a career out of publicizing global warming, folks I’d have more sympathy for if things having to do with global warming didn’t always turn out to be my fault.
I got to thinking about this when the Portland Oregonian (Sunday, July 19) sported a frontpage article announcing that our state “and 13 other states want the federal government to treat extreme heat . . . as major disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes.”
Treat extreme heat like other disasters, Oregon, other states urge
The move this week is the latest in a series of evolving strategies as emergency managers and health officials search for ways to cope with climate-fueled heat waves that are increasingly common, longer and consistently deadly.
The timing of this article seems suspiciously appropriate as Portland was in the process of climbing down from a spate of five days — five whole days – in which thermometers soared into the 90s. Back when Tim and I were growing up nobody had air conditioning, but we still had plenty of hot weather. At least I think we did, but it must not have been a big deal because I don’t remember it one way or another except that, between thunderstorms, days regularly broke a hundred and nobody worried about dying from it. Here in Portland, in 2024, when the temperatures are in the 90s we open emergency cooling centers where street people can go to escape being killed by the heat. Except that not many street people seem to think the heat is much of a big deal, either, preferring to stay in the street along with their fentanyl. Demonstrating, I suppose, that privately purchased medicinals can have more of a chilling effect than expensive, tax-supported boltholes.
A few days after Portland experienced this not-so-hot record warm snap, we experienced the coolest day ever recorded for that date, which brings up the whole question of how we determine the record highs and, sometimes, record lows, we seem to be encountering with such alarming regularity.
Or, if the weathermen were in a particularly frolicsome mood, toad stranglers.
Out here on the Upper Left Coast, formal weather records haven’t been kept all that long, mostly because the sort of people who care to keep formal weather records hadn’t arrived yet. Some temperatures appear to have been jotted down as far back as the 1870s, but the system we use now wasn’t put into use until 1923. And that makes me think that in 1923 every single day notched both the highest high and the lowest low ever recorded for that date. Then, in 1924, any temperature that didn’t exactly match the one from the year before would make that day the coldest, or the warmest in history. Higher math has never been my highest accomplishment, but I can’t help thinking that a bit of that statistical stuff may still be with us, and that some of our current weather extremes are nothing more than what you’d expect if nothing unusual happened at all.
But the Oregonian tells us that climate-fueled heat waves are consistently deadly, and who am I to argue with the Paper of Record of Multnomah County? Still, how anybody can determine when somebody died from the weather, rather than from something else, is one more thing that seems mysterious. Years ago, I read an Ask-the-Weatherman column, or some such, in which a concerned citizen wanted to know whether, if he tumbled down the basement stairs and broke his neck when the power went out during a freeze, his death would be considered cold-related. The answer was an emphatic yes! I can’t find that column, but I did come across a paper entitled “Criteria for the diagnosis of heat-related deaths: National Association of Medical Examiners,” which states that “in cases where the antemortem body temperature cannot be established but the environmental temperature at the time of collapse was high, an appropriate heat-related diagnosis should be listed as the cause of death or as a significant contributing condition.”
In other words, nobody actually has to die from the heat, they just have to die during hot weather in order for heat to be charged with the crime. Much of this killer heat seems to result from a heretofore undetected phenomenon known as heat domes. Rather than just sliding by on the weather map as gently-curving isobars in the way heatwaves used to do, heat domes squat on unsuspecting cities like lids on pressure cookers.
With bomb cyclones, fishermen are likely to need more than just a layer of oilcloth.
In winter, “global warming” transmutes into “climate change,” and heat domes disappear from public view in the way nipples winked out of sight during cold snaps back in the 60s, as young ladies pulled sweaters over their see-through blouses. In winter, we have polar vortices, great, swirling masses of cold twisting down from the North Pole, just itching to off homeowners heading into the basement to discover why the lights went out. Polar vortices are what used to be called cold fronts.
As disappointing as it may be to certain overheated cultural types, the mild weather around here means that Oregonians don’t have to worry much about polar vortices. People on the East Coast have to do that, although I’m not sure anybody particularly does. Not with the threat of bomb cyclones looming over their heads. Bomb cyclones, generated by especially cold cold fronts, are the big, mean, never-before-seen older brothers of the nor’easters that once caused Maine fisherman to shrug on sou’westers before pulling lobster pots out of the ocean. With bomb cyclones, fishermen are likely to need more than just a layer of oilcloth. Bomb cyclones sound like a job for Kevlar.
There are plenty of other scary weather terms, and I used to know what they were. I stored them in my iPad for handy access when I got around to writing about them, and they’re still there, too. At least if the street kid in Colombia I accidentally gave the iPad to hasn’t cracked the four-digit pass code and erased them. Never mind, there’ll be more of these terrifying neologisms coming at us. Lots more. The lexicographical inventiveness of folks looking for something to be scared of knows no limits.
