A Word From the Elephant (in the room) 3.0 — — Maison Lucy, Deerhorn Road, McKenzie River Valley, Near Cedar Flats, Oregon, PNW, USA

“God’s radar/Is fixed on you/God’s radar/Is fixed on you/No matter where you go/No matter what you do/God’s radar is fixed on you….”

The McKenzie River is up, raging quietly between its banks after a series of flooding rainstorms (“atmospheric rivers”, this is what we are calling them now) hit the Pacific Northwest in early November. It has drowned much of the rocky embankment in front of Maison Lucy, a far cry from the last time I stayed here in September when the river was low and the water temp was rising above a healthy limit for the rainbow trout, chinook salmon and steelhead. The McKenzie is a national treasure, pure crystalline-clear fresh water running from an underground source high in the Cascades more than 90 miles to where it joins the southern Willamette River.. It’s the source of drinking water for about two hundred thousand Oregonians.

In early June I stood ankle deep in the McKenzie near Armitage Park. The air temperature was over 108 F. (42.2 C) I had just returned from the drought stricken high-desert of Southeastern California. I watched in transfixed amazement as the clear cool water ran past my bare feet. I grabbed handfuls of it and doused my face. Eventually I just laid down and let it wash all my weariness away.

All that lovely pure perfect fresh water. A flow that never stops. A wonder of the world.

Ok, I understand not everyone has an equivalent of the McKenzie River running through their backyard. Even though we’ve had a goodly drought here in Western Oregon, the rivers are still running strong. We are blessed with a season (from about October to May) of rain. It clears the air, waters the trees and forest, hides the piercing sun, and gets everyone depressed for at least a month or so. Fresh water falling from the sky! What a miracle. It’s okay to be depressed when you are solidly wet for several weeks. That’s why we have sun lamps and indoor tennis courts….and an Interstate that takes you all the way south to Mexico.

The water temperature in the McKenzie (and all rivers) is important. It normally ranges between 44 and 53 degrees F…. That’s cool enough for the spawning of rainbows, bulls, steelhead and most salmon. This last summer the water temperature in parts of the river were rumored to have reached almost 68 F. Bull trout begin to die at that temp.

You would be surprised how little the temperature needs to rise before things start dying.

Here is one way to start thinking about it: We live on a little planet. All of us. All the living things we know about live on this little planet or very very close to it. It truly is a small planet. About 8,000 miles in diameter, 25,000 miles in circumference, with about 200 million square miles of surface area (of which only 60 million is dry land).

This little ball of life (incidentally the ONLY ball of life currently identified in the known universe) is encased by the thinnest of thin atmospheres. If you travel straight up (outward from the surface of the planet) in only 100 miles or less you have left the atmosphere and are in outer space (no breathing there, no life there, lots of killer cosmic radiation). The VAST majority of life of any kind is found in about the first mile of those 100 miles straight up. Human beings can only live in about three or four of those first 100 miles (most humans live in the first one half mile).

This thin little membrane of an atmosphere has been relatively stable (proportion of gases, air pressure, etc..) for about 200 million years. Over the course of that time it has gotten colder and warmer. Just the difference of a few average degrees has changed the planet and certainly changed the course of human history (see recent Ice Age). It is a well balanced, but fragile system. Capriciously complex in its nature. It’s future unpredictable.

And it doesn’t have to change much before human history is, well,…. history.

A wet bulb temperature of 34 or 35 degrees (celsius, about 96 Fahrenheit) is fatal to humans (and probably most mammals). Wet bulb temp is a combination of temperature and humidity. It basically measures the amount of cooling evaporation that is possible in the air. With a wet bulb of 35 degrees your skin cannot evaporate enough of your sweat to cool off the core of your body. Your insides heat up and you die. It is as simple as that.

We have already begun to see wet bulb temps in the lower 30’s in many places on the planet. This past summer in the very temperate climate of Eugene, Oregon we experienced an air temperature of 45 degrees (111 Fahrenheit). The humidity was 26 percent.

That is a wet bulb temperature of 28C. About 6 degrees away from fatal.

Perhaps when things get too hot to live out of doors we can all huddle in our air-conditioned castles. Maybe the electricity will stay on and we can defend our castles from all the people in the world who don’t have air conditioning. It is a pretty dim scenario, if you ask me.

Wouldn’t it be better to stop driving our cars and flying in planes? Planting trees, growing gardens, banning plastic, eating less meat…well you can easily think of all the things you can do.

Now is the time to start.