Forecast: sustainable future dim, far off possibility

Another month, another rain report. Regular readers know – and hopefully come to expect – a first issue of the month summary of the previous month’s rain and temperatures. For the thousands in the La Conner School district who don’t regularly receive a paper, this is a regular feature, as much as school news and sports. Just what is going on with the weather? Inquiring minds want to know. They find that answer in the Weekly News, the place for news about your community.

A strong editorial voice is included every week, also.

Editorials don’t make predictions on the weather, but, along with championing a new library for our region, the peril of unmitigated climate change gets regular attention. This week the secretary general of the United Nations is again telling the world’s leaders that their rhetoric does not measure up, that carbon dioxide levels continue to build in the atmosphere and the day definitely looms on the near horizon when the nations of the world will not be able to clean up the mess we have created.

Is this local news? It is. While 2018’s British Columbia forest fires and the weeks of smoke hanging in our summer air are a dim memory, Skagit Valley farmers don’t need to keep daily weather records to know that the rains did not come this summer, either. The USDA declared Skagit County along with three other Washington counties “primary natural disaster areas” last September, a result of drought. Our farmers were eligible for disaster relief from the federal government.

It doesn’t get any more local than that.

Snow has dusted the western Cascade foothills and Mt. Baker glistens white, but late winter snows up there and early spring rains in the Valley are tales told of past years. Our recent history, again as regular readers know, has been one of dry springs and drier summers. The snowpack melts too soon and the Skagit River is monitored for minimum flow levels, kept to assist salmon: More volume means cooler water temperatures and protected fish habitat.

But even decades of dry weather does not mean that massive rains will never come and melt Mt. Baker’s snowpack, bringing flooding to the western Skagit Valley. In La Conner the government is making plans for a ring dike northeast of town. That is “thinking globally, acting locally,” the 1970s Earth Day slogan.

The Weekly News will report those local stories, whether it is the budgeting and building of the dike or the duration and aftermath of a flood. These are climate change stories reported locally.

We may need the children to lead us, but the noise and attention they occasionally make with a climate strike action here and there is typical teenager scatteredness. Alas, plans and actions are needed on the municipal, county, state and national levels.

For 2020 and beyond, “think globally, act locally” has evolved into “saving our local community means acting statewide, nationally and globally.”

Not a prediction readers want to read from a local community newspaper. Alas, in all probability it is deadly accurate, if not this year or this decade, certainly in our high schoolers’ lifetimes. What will the results of climate change look like in 2050? Consider your world of 1990, 30 years ago: no cell phones, no electric cars, using fax machines and shopping at malls and big box stores. The world spins on, ever changing in ways unimagined.

Discussions in Madrid, Spain the next two weeks will center not on unimagined change but carefully calculated catastrophe. The prediction: action must take place now, daily, for years to come across the decades.

An accurate forecast, that, whether delivered by your local newspaper or not