Rain, Rain, Come Our Way. . . .

It may have rained last night; the ground looks damp, and the neighboring roof is shining in the morning sun.

I sure hope it rained. It has been more than 70 days since we’ve had anything like what you’d call rainfall in Portland, Oregon.

Official reports recorded only a “trace” in the entire month of August. In September, a couple of fat drops hit me on the evening of Friday the 14th while I was on my way to see a friend’s production of Yasmina Reza’s “Art”; and a week later I awoke to a damp and shiny neighborhood somewhat like what I can see this morning. Two nights ago, a local news station said we’d had a total of four-hundredths of an inch for the entire month.

Most of the rest of the state of Oregon, and indeed, the Pacific Northwest, has been just as dry. Seattle went 48 days without any rain until mid September.

Normal rainfall in our city at this time of year is a little over an inch in August, a little less than two in September. I can’t say it’s been unpleasant; we’ve had a week or more of 90-plus temperatures and a couple days that exceeded 100, which is not that uncommon for us.

I lead walking tours of downtown Portland for visitors to the city, and tourists from Palm Springs, Phoenix, Texas, and Naples, Florida happily told me they had escaped relentless three-digit temperatures—plus the high humidity that is even more rare than 100 degrees here.

But as a native Oregonian and a resident of Portland the past 21 years, week after week of sunshine and no precipitation (we haven’t even had that many overcast days!) feels very, very strange.

Meanwhile, monsoon-style downpours soaked the American Southwest. In early September, Las Vegas got 1.75 inches in one fell swoop that flooded homes and streets and delayed flights at the airport. Similar rains washed out mobile home parks in Southern California, broke a dike in southern Utah, and stranded Navaho Nation residents in their Arizona homes.

I’m not going to proffer these unusual conditions as any sort of evidence of permanent global climate change, but I firmly believe it is happening. Sure, there have been massive weather fluctuations over the course of decades past, not to mention centuries, but I think it’s pretty obvious that human activities have grown too broad and massive not to have contributed to our (dire) future climate.

When the unmistakable proof comes to convince all the doubters, it will be the least satisfying “I told you so” in human history, because by that time it will probably be too late for our species to survive. How comforting will it be to say “it’s not my fault” as millions of people die in floods, fires, tsunamis, and droughts?

What will finally convince the nay-sayers?

When the North Pole melts entirely, one of these summers? (I expect that to happen in my lifetime.) Or when it fails to freeze again, throughout the entire year (which won’t take much longer)?

When seacoast cities become subject to permanent standing water from rising ocean levels? (Just imagine wading year-round in the streets of Galveston, Boston, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Miami, Shanghai, Barbados, and New York City itself. We could all live to see this.)

There’s another reason I’ve been praying for the kind of rain we used to take for granted in Oregon from week to week: smoke-filled air. From a size and life-threatening perspective, wildfires in Oregon and Washington this season have not been particularly huge or deadly, but combined with the record lack of rain and lazy wind patterns, they’ve left a stinking haze over our cities. And prayers for an air-cleansing rain.

Unfortunately, a lot of people may still not be convinced that climate change is here and may spell our doom, because they’re distracted by the secondary effects. Increases in drought and flooding in various parts of the world will not only boost unnecessary human fatalities but increase the likelihood of wars as nations fight over dwindling resources – not the luxuries of gold, diamonds, and chromium that have been responsible for millions of violent deaths in Africa, but simpler commodities like fresh water and food.

There will likely be mass migrations, away from the parched and growing desert lands of the Sahara, the American Southwest, the Middle East, or wherever global warming hits soonest and hardest, and those crowds of refugees will mean more starvation, more poverty, more overcrowding and stress in the still livable regions of the planet.

My wife took the dog for the morning walk. She says it didn’t rain.

We’re still waiting.