Fires, Floods, and Droughts: Impacts of Climate Change in the U.S.

Introduction

It was in 2019 that I listened to Greta Thunburg’s speech on Climate Change at the September 2019, United Nations National Climate Action Summit. She is the youngest person ever to be named Person of the Year by TIME magazine. In her speech, she talked about how people are suffering and dying, and how entire ecosystems are collapsing. She mentioned that we were at the beginning of a mass extinction, and about the negligence of political leaders not taking adequate action, and only focusing on economic growth and profits. She expressed that for more than thirty years the science behind climate change has been crystal clear and no action has been taken. On another occasion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2019, she stated, “Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.”

I have been living in San Jose, California since 1997, and I have personally experienced a lot more warmer weather days recently, than I experienced when I first came to the area. Previously, we experienced a maximum of two weeks of warm weather during the last week of June and the first week of July. Now we are experiencing at least two months of warmer weather days. For example, the highest temperature recorded for San Jose in 1997 was 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the highest temperature recorded thus far, for 2022 was102 degrees Fahrenheit.¹

Watching Greta’s speech, and my own personal experience got me thinking about how I could bring awareness among my students that climate change is impacting California. Since California is the largest producer of agricultural products in the United States and climate-based measurements and models project water scarcity in much of the western United States, I decided to create a unit which focuses on some of the impacts of climate change in California.