Climate Change from a Personal Perspective

During the winter of 2007–2008, this county, called Aroostook, located in the most northern part of the U.S. state of Maine, set a new snowfall record for this region since records were kept going back to the mid 19th century. The NOAA weather service recorded over 122 inches, equal to 3.099 meters of total snowfall that winter. Imagine snow tunnels on both sides of all of the roads so high, you couldn’t see over them. The snowbank on the left side of the driveway in the picture above was so high by March, I couldn’t get the walk behind snowblower I had to blow the snow up to the top of the snowbank anymore. I always moved the snow to the east side of the driveway due to the wind direction mostly blowing in from the west.

The winter before that, we set a new cold record of -49 degrees Fahrenheit or about -55 Celsius in the county. I remember it was -45 F that morning at my house by the outdoor thermometer next to my kitchen window.

In the following winters, the weather went back to what we called normal until 2014. In the Spring of 2014, we had our usual snow amounts for that area but, in April, we had a freak warm up and it rained. Heavily.

Imagine this basement with a meter of water in it after that rain. I was able to shut off all of the electricity to the house to avoid serious damage to all of the machines down here. But is sure was a cold night with no heat. The next day I was able to purchase one of the last sump pumps available at the local hardware store and pump all of the water out finally. It took nearly all of a day to get all of the water out and start the cleanup. I was fortunate in that I didn’t lose too much. None of my furnaces or appliances were severely damaged. I just had to take them all apart and dry everything out. A lot of other people in my county were not so lucky.

I owned and operated a major home appliance service company when I lived there and I received a lot of calls after this freak weather to try and repair damaged machines.

In 2015, due to ill health, I sold the business and the house to move to central Texas. My two oldest children told me that Texas was great for military veterans and the weather was a lot better than Northern Maine. My wife and I lasted five years there before realising we had made a big mistake. Most of our regrets had to do with the weather. Once again, climate change had a direct impact on our quality of life.

We moved there in April of 2015. Within a month of moving to central Texas, hill country they call it there, I found a decent job and with salary, my Army pension, and some little bit of Veterans disability, we were able to buy a 1600 sq. ft. cookie cutter house in a small subdivision outside of this little suburban town just a few miles northeast of Austin, Texas. They had to build this house for us so it took a little over six months before it was ready to move into. My wife had never experienced this phenomena coming from a congested northeastern Chinese city. Watching some company build her a house from scratch just the way she wanted was more than she had ever dreamed of. Well, mostly.

As most Americans know, these homes have a limited design range and some restrictions. Such as HOA’s. But to her, it was part of her American dream come true. Until it wasn’t.

Our first encounter with climate change was in the spring of 2016. We had moved into our new house in February of that year and up until that spring, Texas had been experiencing a mega drought. We were out in the hill country on business one weekend when we encountered our first dam busting rain storm. The rains started on a Friday afternoon and by the time they were finished the next day, the whole countryside was awash with rivers bursting their banks and major floods everywhere. We made it home safe but a lot of people lost their homes as the overflowing rivers took them out, along with a bridge or two.

In August of 2017, while my wife was out of town for a spell visiting relatives, Hurricane Harvey paid a visit to Houston, Texas. I was home in central Texas and it rained so hard for three days straight that it flooded the area once again. My house lot was in the back side of our subdivision and that was when I learned that the whole neighbourhood was built next to a small flood plain. The large stretch of open land behind the row of house across the street from me was one big lake after the hurricane left the area. I was fortunate once again in that I didn’t have any water come close enough to my house, but some of my neighbours across the street weren’t so lucky. The water came right up into their backyards.

I tell you all this because this is part of the problem with climate change. Developers are building houses in places they shouldn’t be without a care in the world as long as they get paid up front. So what if your house floods a couple of years after you move in. So what if the potable water dries up going to your new house in Phoenix, Arizona. So what if your house burns up in a west coast wildfire. So what if your house gets destroyed by a freak hurricane in a part of the country that no one would expect, such as western North Carolina and East Tennessee.

In central Texas, after the cleanup up of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the weather only seemed to get hotter. The summers became brutal. So much so that my wife didn’t like to even leave the house during the day. By 2020, we were also dealing with bad water from a local water treatment plant that the feds had fined, twice. My wife and I were getting sick and when I decided to only use bottled water to cook with and drink, the majority off our symptoms disappeared. Imagine that. Between starting to see some foundation issues in our, still relatively new, house, the bad water, and more and more people running from California to our area, we decided it was time to get out. The slab our cookie cutter house was built on was settling and cracking due to the ground underneath being unstable from all of the extreme weather.

We left just in time, on the last day of October, 2020 because the following February of 2021, Texas experienced the most brutal winter weather they anyone could remember. Below freezing temperatures nearly statewide and snow a foot or more deep, for which the state was woefully unprepared for. We talked to friends there who showed us pictures of the snow and shared stories of burst frozen water pipes. A lot of people died, a lot of houses were ruined due to flooding from busted water pipes.

Here in central Virginia, were we moved to, everything seemed idyllic until this January. We have had a day or two in the past four winters when the winter temps got down to 20 degrees F / -8 C but only for a day or so. Never prolonged like we did this year. I have a spare bathroom and a spare bedroom on the east side of my house, along with my office/recording studio. I have incurred the water pipes freezing a bit once in a while since moving here but I was always able to clear out the ice rather quickly and that would be it.

Not this year. Due to North America experiencing two extreme polar vortexes in January, the cold and snow went as far south as southern Louisiana and Texas. Here in central Virginia, we had a couple of good snow storms and cold temps that stayed cold almost the entire month. My water pipes in that spare bathroom stayed frozen for nearly three weeks despite my efforts to keep them clear.

Which brings me to why I can’t record a podcast today. My office/studio sits right next to that spare bathroom and last Thursday, as I was working in my office, I heard water start to run. I ran to the bathroom expecting to see water running from the open taps, as I had left them on to try and thaw the pipes. Instead, I heard water running in the wall behind the bathroom vanity and toilet. I panicked and ran out to the garage to shut off the water to the house. When I returned to the bathroom, there was water running out from underneath the vanity, flooding the little bathroom and out into the hallway where we have hardwood floors. It also ran under the wall to flood part of the spare guest room, soaking the carpet pretty good.

I managed to find another shutoff valve and stopped the water in the wall from running anymore but the damage was already done. My carpet in the front spare bedroom was soaked pretty badly, and, as I found out last Monday, so was the hardwood flooring where the water had overflowed out into the hallway. Not to mention the wall behind the vanity where the burst pipe was located.

That was also when I learned that when they built my current cookie-cutter house over twenty years ago, the skimped on the wall insulation. Back then the winter temperatures never got cold enough to worry about frozen pipes. My how times and the climate have changed.

Right now, as I sit on my sofa in the family room writing this, I have the constant background noise from the water removing equipment on the other side of the house, reminding me of how expensive climate change is for everyone, everywhere in the world, except for the houses of the morbidly wealthy.

It’s too noisy to even attempt to record a podcast in my studio until the cleanup company is finished drying everything out and putting everything back together. My hardwood floors will never look the same. That spare bathroom is nearly gutted, between the plumber, who I hired to repair the broken pipe in the wall, to the recovery company, who had to remove sections of drywall, hardwood flooring and maybe eventually some carpeting in order to try and dry everything out.

I am thankful for the small things such as the stone tile flooring in the flooded bathroom that managed to survive.

Now I will have a deductible to pay, and a claim to file with my homeowners insurance company. I wonder if they will raise my annual premium rate now? The plumber and recovery company both told me that they were dealing with a massive amount of broken water pipes in my area from this freak weather pattern. For anyone who doesn’t know this, when a region of the country takes a hit like this, the homeowners insurance regulators calculate all of the losses and pass them on to the customers in the form of increased insurance premiums.

Most people usually see this with their car insurance when they move to an area more prone to car accidents or car thefts. But this also applies to homeowners insurance as well. Think about Florida with all of the hurricanes where homeowners insurance is handled by the state because the insurers refused to offer policies there. Think about California where home insurance companies are walking away and not offering homeowners insurance coverage in wildfire prone areas now.

I don’t think I have to worry about having my insurance cancelled but increased premiums? Yeah, I’m expecting that for next year.

Meanwhile, as we all deal with climate change in unexpected areas of the continent now, I plan to fortify my house as best as I can for the future. The weather scientists are predicting that these polar vortexes will be getting worse as the Arctic Circle warms up even more in the coming years. They’re saying that the warmer air up there over the last several decades is driving the cold weather downward, creating these vortexes. As the planet continues to warm up, these polar vortexes are supposed to become more frequent and colder around the world. North America is not the only place these vortexes effect. Europe, China and Russia have all experienced them in the last few decades. Just to give people a perspective. Last winter, China experienced one of the coldest and snowiest winters in a long time. Here in North America, it was one of the warmest. This winter, it was just the opposite.

I will be packing the east wall around my water pipes with lots of blanket wall insulation before the contractors repair the drywall so this doesn’t happen to me again. Will the people in my part of Virginia learn a lesson from this? With what I have observed in the last few years watching people deal with these weather anomalies, I doubt it

Most will make the repairs and forget about it. Then, when it happens again, they will wash, rinse and repeat instead of fortifying against the new weather patterns. And complain as their insurers keep raising their premiums.

Most people acknowledge that they’ve heard of climate change. Most will shrug their shoulders and continue with their daily lives until they can’t. Like the people after a hurricane or a tornado takes out their house. A lot of them will scream at the sky asking “Why me?” Then, rebuild in the very same spot where a weather event just flattened or washed away their house. “Climate change? Who me? No way.”

I do realise that for some folks, leaving a place that their ancestors and families have lived for decades is too daunting for them. Massive change like that is too much to handle. So, as long as the government and insurance companies keep giving them money to rebuild every time, they will. Until they absolutely can’t anymore. Which is going to be a thing soon.

There will be parts of the world by the middle part of this century that will be uninhabitable, according to the climate scientists. That includes parts of central America, Europe and Asia. Then there are places in the global south, such as parts of Australia, Africa, and South America that will also fall into that category.

Anywhere near the equator will become too hot for humans, animals, birds and fish to be able to live due to the increased temperatures. We have all heard about this in some fashion or another in the last few years but most people living in the more temperate regions of the global north are too busy trying to survive from week to week to worry about climate change. For them, it’s just another freak weather pattern that will pass.

For myself, I am a survivalist. If I have a problem that’s caused by extreme weather, I fix the house so that it doesn’t happen again. I did that with my house in Caribou, Maine, I did that with my house in Texas, and I am doing it with my house here in central Virginia. I added a lot of extra insulation in my attic when we first bought this house and it has paid for itself already. As far as my walls are concerned, obviously I am not going to gut my drywall to replace the cheap insulation between the walls but, I can make improvements as I can, where I can.

Climate change is real. I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I’ve been watching it come on for years now. It most certainly isn’t going to stop just because a bunch of humans want it to stop. It’s the humans who brought this on themselves in the first place so now, they have to live with it. The planet is past the point of no return now. All we can do is buckle up and hang on, or not. Those who don’t want to use their seatbelts will just have to suffer and die in denial. That’s okay too. That means more for the rest of us until it’s my time to go. Something I will try to pass on to my children and grandchildren.

I will record and post my weekly podcast as soon as I can. I have to wait until the noise from the machines is gone. Which I hope will be within the next couple of days. We’ll see. Until then, stay safe. Sláinte

Thank you to everyone who may read this. I know a lot of people just hit delete on their phones without bothering and that’s okay. I produce these podcasts and write the occasional blog article as therapy for a lifetime of running around the world with the U.S. military trying to save the United States from external enemies. Boy, was I lied to. And for all of those lies we were, and still are, being told, I have paid a heavy price. My physical and mental health is not where it should be for someone my age and I have to live with that. As one VA doctor told me recently, she was sorry that I had to endure that and that she couldn’t fix me. All of the sorries in the world won’t stop the nightmares and rapid physical deterioration from all of the chemicals and toxic substances I was exposed to over the years (not to mention the bullets and bombs). Which is why I continue to talk about the things that bother me the most on any given week, whether anyone pays attention or not. If I can reach one person, I consider that mission accomplished.

I use these platforms to try and bring some sense to my world and maybe to a few others who care to listen. Even if no one listens, I would still shout into the void just to make myself heard by the wind and the trees, if nothing else.

As I say good bye this week, I wish to leave you with this Irish blessing as you go about your lives, trying to stay warm in the meanwhile. “May you find blessings in the small things in your life. May those blessing be returned to you twofold.” Slán go fóill.