Don't get used to it, it's not normal

Having come here in 1985, and having lived in Spokane before that, my idea of a normal summer includes high heat reaching into the 90s. Now, we’re trying to accept the latest triple-digit trend as the “new normal.” That’s a mistake.

Just because we live through a heat wave, or “heat dome” two or three times, doesn’t mean it’s OK, normal. It’s not, and our changing weather seems to be changing our landscape, with fire the great change agent. Burn scars don’t always rebound to their prior state. There used to be more sagebrush on the hills around here than there is now. Such changes can be part of a cascade of changes, each triggering the next.

It was 108°F several days in a row, unless you lived around Lone Pine, where I’m told people recorded 111 and higher. What I consider normal would be a summer of 80s and 90s. A day or two of triple digits every few years would have been cause for complaint, not alarm.

But triple-digit days have been lasting into the weeks in the last few years, which you and I can remember. But will the next generation? Or will they see such heat as normal, then get used to it as it creeps upward, like frog in a slowly heating kettle.

Only if they’re lucky. It’s very possible there will be no new normal, with weather patterns shifting continually.

My wife and I live in town. (Which isn’t saying much. An aerial view shows you not much between our community and the wild semi-arid desert, grazing land, or forest). But we’ve had to evacuate twice in the last six or seven years, I think, as wildfire cascaded down the cliffs about two blocks away, just behind city hall.

Every year, seasoned firefighters tell me they were surprised at the speed of a wildfire’s spread. The last one started about a 45-minute highway drive west of here. It reached us in 10 hours.

Half the 1.4 million-acre Colville Indian Reservation has burned since 2015.

Even far northwest of here, last summer, Lytton, B.C., a six-hour drive into the mountains of Canada, was erased by wildfire as a heat dome sat over the region, pushing temperatures past 120°F, obliterating weather records.

There is no greater single issue facing humanity right now than addressing climate change. Most of the other political issues that grab our attention, serious as they may be, are mere distractions from what we need to focus on for our children and grandchildren to survive at all. It’s here now.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher