Tennessee Floods: Climate Change Hits (My) Home

 It's been a grueling day.  By around noon, news reports out of Nashville reached us in South Carolina.  Major flooding in the Nashville area and other parts of Tennessee; I-24 and parts of I-40 closed.  A handful of deaths already confirmed, a few others missing.  My husband and I were alarmed.

Nashville and the Middle Tennessee area were my home for thirty five years. Practically all of my extended family are still there.  My eighty-year-old mother is there, and she lives alone.  I began to make phone calls.  No answer on my mother's home line or her cell.  I tried two sisters. No answer, and their phones just rang and rang.  I couldn't leave a message. I was able to get my sister-in-law on her cell. She and her husband were on the road returning from a weekend trip to Memphis. Memphis was also inundated with flooding over the weekend.  Parts of the interstate were closed.  Detours were frustrating their efforts to get home.  Not at all reassuring.

Finally their was a phone call from my sister in Nashville.  But the news wasn't good.  My mother was supposed to be celebrating her eighty-second birthday today. A family party was planned.  Instead she was trapped in the upper floor of her house.  The ground floor was five feet deep in water.  It had happened really fast.  My sister had just alerted the police department, who promised to send rescue workers.  The rescue would be by boat.  My sister promised to keep me apprised.

Several anxious phone calls later, receiving news of my mother bit by bit, I learned that she had been rescued and taken to a safe location, where she was picked up by a family member. We don't know all of the details, but we think she was rescued through a window by ladder.  She was/is understandably shaken up, but at least she is safe. An hour or two later, we finally hear that my sister-in-law and her husband have made it home safely.  Their trip took over seven hours.

I lived in middle Tennessee for roughly 35 years--most of my life. In all that time, I never experienced a flood.  Tornados are the only kind of natural disaster that is normally seen there.  The flooding is already being compared with that of Hurricane Katrina, at least among the locals.

There is little doubt in my mind that the record rainfall and flooding that is ravaging its way across the heartland is the result of man-made climate change.  There is no doubt in my mind that climate change isn't just coming--it is already here.  By coincidence, I got a book on the subject from the library just a few days ago.  I was going to write a hub on the urgent need to move to new non-polluting energy technologies.  I had no idea I would be writing it so soon and from such a personal place.

"The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has--even if we don't quite know it yet."

These profound words are found on page 2 of McKibben's just-published book on climate change. McKibben, an author and former staff writer for the New Yorker, wrote his first book on global warming twenty years ago. It was titled The End of Nature. Now he is making a renewed attempt to wake us up to the reality of climate change as it is happening before our eyes today.

McKibben states that the Earth's temperature has already risen by about one degree Celsius due to burning of fossil fuels. While that may not seem like much, in reality it is huge in its effects. He cites a 2008 NASA study linking severe storm increases (land and sea) to global warming. Global rainfall is steadily (or unsteadily) rising. Lightning strikes sparked 1700 California fires in just one day in June 2008. The gradual melting of the polar ice caps has become anything but gradual in the past two or three years. The legendary Northwest Passage is no longer just a legend. It's been open for business by commercial and cruise ships the last two summers. And the West Antarctic is melting 75% faster than ten years ago.

As global temperatures rise and tropical regions expand, so do arid subtropical regions, such as in the American Southwest and much of Australia. Drought conditions have become the new normal in these areas. Drought is becoming a worldwide chronic problem, McKibben informs us.

So is McKibben fatalistic in his predictions for our future on this planet? No, he is not. He contends we can still cope with the reality we have created by employing novel solutions like cutting back, going organic, and sharing.