I took a trip last week to meet up with some old college friends. We live all around the country, so we’d chosen New Orleans as our meeting place. One of my friends went to medical school there, and he and his wife could drive there from their home in Houston—with a 6-month-old baby I was aching to meet.
Spending time with old friends at this stage of life always feels like an exercise in accepting differences, from new babies to new marriages to new houses to new cities. But what I thought might be a relaxing weekend with people I love best turned into a shared revelation about the one thing we have in common: how climate change is inextricably altering the landscapes around us, regardless of where we live.
On Friday morning, while we were walking through New Orleans to get breakfast, I began getting frantic texts from my girlfriend back in New York, who had tried to walk the dog and was immediately caught in an intense downpour. I scrolled social media, trying to learn what I could about the storm, and saw footage of people wading through streets in my neighborhood and water streaming through cracks in the walls at my subway stop. All told, more than seven inches of rain fell in Brooklyn, my borough, over a single day, and six people had to be rescued from their basement homes.
As I frantically kept up with the storm from hundreds of miles away, I learned that my friends, despite living in the path of hurricanes themselves, didn’t know that Hurricane Ida, which tore through New Orleans in 2021, also swept through New York a week later. That storm killed almost a dozen people, who were trapped in their basement apartments and drowned. It flooded in New York during Ida too? they asked, incredulous. That many people died?
That night, after the rains at home had stopped, we met up with some friends who still live in New Orleans. We were sitting at a bar in the Mid-City district, a little over a mile away from Bayou St. John, a waterway that snakes through the center of the city. A couple blocks away, a handmade commemorative marker showed the chest-high levels the water had reached in that neighborhood during Hurricane Katrina.
This couple, who have two babies around the same age as my friends’ daughter, told us about their latest environmental worry living in New Orleans. Because the Mississippi River’s water levels have been so low this summer, thanks to widespread drought, and sea level rise on the Louisiana coast so pronounced, salt water is slowly creeping up the river toward the city. The salt water is going to ruin drinking water and corrode people’s appliances and pipes. They’ve only got another couple of weeks until it hits.
What are people living here supposed to do about it? I asked. They weren’t sure. The government is working on stopgap solutions—the president declared a state of emergency last week, and the Army Corps of Engineers is installing a levee and expensive desalination machines. But those temporary fixes aren’t going to address the whole problem. Maybe they’d find a way to get out of town until a big rain upriver can flush the salt water back out to sea.
Another friend chimed in with similar news about Colorado: In a region at the southeastern edge of the state, the aquifers have been so overpumped that arsenic is leaking into the drinking water. This friend had moved to Colorado just before the pandemic, and she was one of my first texts when the wildfire smoke hit New York City in June and made our air unbreathable. You don’t realize how oppressive and scary wildfire season is, she told me, until you get to a place where it happens all the time.
What do we do about this? my friends asked me, the climate reporter. The answer isn’t particularly satisfactory. If you don’t control a massive amount of wealth invested in fossil fuels, or a huge oil company that you can suddenly shut down, your personal carbon footprint doesn’t mean much; the best course of action is to get involved in local politics, to formulate plans to keep each other safe, and to draw down carbon emissions as much as possible. But the simple, harsh truth is that even the most aggressive policies in your city won’t substantially change the way the earth seems to be revolting under our feet (and over our heads).
There at the bar, looking at the babies in front of me, I felt the ecological despair that was ever-present during the hottest summer on record. But I also felt a weird solidarity too—a small, neurotic comfort that I wasn’t alone in watching my environs change in terrifying ways. We’re experiencing this horror together, and trying to figure out a way through it.
When we said goodbye, I asked the folks in New Orleans to keep me posted on whatever they decide to do about the salt water. And I made plans to visit my friends in Houston in the winter, when we could go outside with the baby. We’d realized during the trip that because temperatures in the city were dangerously hot this summer, our weekend walking around New Orleans—in gorgeous fall weather, with light breezes and surprisingly low humidity—was the longest stretch of time their daughter had spent outside. This little baby, whom I’d immediately fallen in love with, has had to live most of her life thus far indoors.
The World Bank said last week that it would increase its lending to developing countries to fight climate change by $100 billion over the next 10 years.
More than 100 Amazonian river dolphins were found dead in the past week, after water temperatures in the Brazilian Amazon topped 102 degrees in some places.
That’s the concentration of microplastic found in cloud water gathered from mist at the peaks of Mount Fuji and Mount Oyama, according to a recently published study—the first piece of research on the presence of microplastics in clouds.
The Texas Tribune skillfully covers how flooding and rains—coupled with inadequate government response for residents harmed by storms—has all but decimated a small town in Texas.
Decades ago, there were as many as 100 occupied homes in Sam Houston Lake Estates, a densely-wooded neighborhood about 60 miles northeast of Houston. Today there are fewer than a dozen, according to interviews with locals.
Water hasn’t flowed to the homes in this neighborhood in more than three years—the water company says it can’t get vehicles in to maintain its well—and first responders won’t attempt to navigate the neighborhood’s narrow bridge and eroded dirt roads.
When someone is sick or injured, residents have to drive, or carry, their neighbors out of the woods to reach medical help.
This river bottom flooded often in the past, former residents said, but not like it has in the last decade. Climate change has likely intensified flooding and accelerated erosion, experts said.
Read Erin Douglas’s full piece at the Texas Tribune.
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by contributing deputy editor Molly Taft. Sign up here.
