News & Articles

In a few days, I’ll be heading out of town. First, it’s a bus trip to St. Paul. Then taking a train to Montana. I’m spending some time in Missoula. And while I’ve taken hundreds of trips through the years, this will be the first time that I’ve been monitoring the climate and weather conditions before heading out.

Right now, there are 24 fires in Montana. The Miller Peak Fire, which is 8.5 miles south of Missoula, has already grown to 2,724 acres as of July 29th. 

There are currently wildfires in Montana, Oregon, California and the western region of Canada. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, in the middle of July, there were more than 60 large wildfires burning nationwide. The wildfires had already burned more than1.2 million acres. 
In California, nearly 20 times more acres had burned compared to the same time last year. The Park Fire burned more than 330,000 acres about 90 miles north of Sacramento. And as of July 27, this wildfire was 0% contained.

As documented in Lizzie Johnson’s book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, the governor of California, Jerry Brown, held a news conference at the Emergency Operations Center in Sacramento in August, 2018, to talk about wildfires in his home state. 

“The predictions that I see, the more serious predictions of warming and fires to occur later in the century, 2040 or 2050, they’re now occurring in real time. It’s going to get expensive. It’s going to get dangerous, and we have to apply all of our creativity to make the best of what is going to be an increasingly bad situation,” stated Brown. 

Given the growing number and intensity of wildfires in the U.S., and media reports that we’re experiencing the hottest temperatures ever recorded, it’s becoming clearer by the day that we live in a different world. A very different and dangerous world for millons of people. 

Three noteworthy events are highlighted in John Vaillant’s book Fire Weather: On The Front Lines Of A Burning Weather. On Nov. 5, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson received a report from his science advisory committee which stated that increases in carbon dioxide would contribute to significant changes in the atmosphere and that these changes “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.” 
In 1978, James Black, a senior science adviser at Exxon, mailed some documents to their research and engineering division with a cover letter stating that there is a direct correlation between  rising CO2 levels and rising temperatures, and the data indicated that the rise in carbon dioxide was due to the fossil fuel industry. 

And the following year, in 1979, Switzerland hosted the first World Climate Conference, which would explore how man-made changes in climate might be adverse to the well-being of humanity.
If the world is different, then how do we and how does the city of Duluth choose to respond? 

Will we choose to think differently, to behave differently and to live differently? Will Duluth govern and manage its affairs differently? 

On Sept. 6, 2023, the Associated Press reported that “the Earth has sweltered through its hottest North Hemisphere summer ever recorded.” 

And according to the World Meteorological Organization and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the previous month was not only the hottest August ever recorded but also the second hottest month after July, 2023. 

And then this summer, on June 22, the Washington Post reported there were 1,400 new high temperature records set around the world. And on July 12, EcoWatch reported that new data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service indicated that the global average temperature for the 12-month period of June 2023 to May 2024 was 1.63 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. 

Here’s what we know. The CO2 levels continue to rise. A number of high temperature records will continue to be broken. Each year, we will see more extensive and intense wildfires. And we’re definitely experiencing more extreme and severe weather events in every corner of the planet.

In the past seven days, we’ve been hearing about the growing decline in the insect populations, a polluted Seine River during the summer Olympics in Paris, devastating downpours and floods in Vermont, and Antarctica’s temperature increasing by 45 degrees in only two days. 

Think about it. We’ve already put ourselves in a bad situation by electing a congressman who won’t talk about climate change and a mayor who’s publicly stated that climate change is not a priority in his administration. 

Duluth needs a new perspective, a new set of priorities and new political leadership.

Given the response to a new climate briefing that was distributed in the past several weeks to some of our community leaders, a group of us will launch a citizens’ climate commission in late August. This year-long initiative will hopefully engage many of our fellow citizens in identifying and then initiating various climate actions around Duluth.

It’s a different world. And it’s time the citizens of Duluth find new and different ways to engage, educate and empower each other as we collectively address the many challenges of climate change in our city. 
Thinking back to Governor Brown’s news conference in 2018, we need to be very creative and our city needs to think outside the box. It is no longer business as usual.