When does it get personal?

The impacts of climate change are very often described and thought about in the abstract, especially if you live in a place where there are little or no actual impacts. Statements like "Expect sea levels to rise by 0.5 to 1.0 meters by 2100" or "Expect 5 more extreme heat and smog events every summer by 2050" don't necessarily carry a whole lot of weight. Could a 2 degree Celsius change really impact my life all that much? These projections and estimations, ripe with uncertainty and ranges and controversy, are hard to discern, and hard to feel. They don't touch us. We don't feel it, and therefore tend to ignore it to wait and see.

That urge to wait and see, that abstraction, starts to fade when you can feel it personally. This spring, Lake Champlain (located between New York and Vermont, near Canada), where my family owns a small cottage with about 100 feet of lake front, has had the highest water level since the records started. Below is the 2010 lake level, with the bold red being the maximum level ever observed. You can see during April and May, the lake level has never exceeded 102 feet.

The next graph is the lake level so far for this year, and you can see that the late-April and May period has been record-breaking, by about one foot. In Early May, the lake level exceeded 103 feet for the first time ever.

What does a foot of extra water look like? How much does it impact a shoreline? First, a picture of our shoreline from 2004. Note the tree behind Sam (in the orange hoodie).

Here's a picture taken during a particularly windy day early this May. Note the tree, the same tree that was behind Sam earlier. Also note the water making contact with our little boat house.

Here's a picture from 2002 looking out at the lake. Note the tree (a different tree than before) and a stump just beyond the rock-wall of our shore.

Here's a picture from last weekend. You can see the tree next to my Dad and a friend, and the stump out in the water.

The rock wall has been demolished, and you can see significant erosion, with exposed roots and dirt.

The records of lake level started in the 1800s, so let's say that they've been kept for 200 years. A lake level like this, then, could be considered a 200-year event, and we would expect it to come once every five-generations or so. That "200-year event" phrase is slippery, since we only have one data point. But as my family plans and figures out how to deal with our shoreline, we are trying to determine if we should plan for another 200-year event.

And since there is so much data, and publicity, and controversy regarding global warming, the topic has been brought up. Should we build a wall? How big do we need it to be? What lake level should we plan for? Is this related to global warming, or is it just an extremely unusual year? We're wondering if this 200-year event might become a 100-year event.

And since we don't really know what to expect in the next 100 years, because the planet is changing in observable and predictable ways, because Mother Nature is no longer regular and our historical records no longer hold the same weight that they once did, every new strong storm, extreme weather event, and record lake level has shifted in meaning slightly.

(The same can be said for families struck by the record-setting tornadoes this April, families impacted by Katrina, families impacted by the extreme drought in Australia, families worried about freshwater coming from the Colorado River, or heat-waves in Chicago, and the people living on the drowning island of Tuvalu.)

All of these events, which would be devastating during any era, are no longer necessarily Acts of God, or the regular cycle of Mother Nature. They all now all have a slight tinge of: "Is this something we're doing? Is this partly our fault?" We are having a harder time making decisions, because we can no longer confidently look into the past to get an idea of what the future might bring. And that makes it much more personal.