The Blue Voice

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

It's hotter than the hinges of hell here today, it may just be the hottest day so far this summer. There is no way to express how tired of summer, of heat, sun, drought, I am right now. Clearly I am not going to survive global climate change in the desert; I hate to be hot. What was I thinking when I moved out here? On the other hand, if I were still in one of the Atlantic coastal areas where I have previously lived, I'd be jumping with hurricane jitters from early June till late November. Living through one relatively small hurricane (Bob, in 1991) during our Cape Cod years was all the hurricane experience I needed to make me nervous every summer thereafter. Given what's happening now during hurricane season, I'd be living on Xanax for months. Right now I'm actually hoping that Dean will bring some byblow in the form of rain storms this far north of its next Mexican landfall. Keeping my garden alive for the hummingbirds, butterflies and bees that populate it is becoming a fulltime task, as the summer monsoon season never happened this year.

Increasingly I'm hearing people talk about buying air conditioning units, or installing central air, in their houses out here. They seem to have given up on the cooling system mostly in use, including here in our house: evaporative cooling, using what is colloquially called swamp coolers. Here's Wikipedia's short take on it: "Evaporative cooling is a very common form of cooling buildings for thermal comfort since it is relatively cheap and requires less energy than many other forms of cooling. However evaporative cooling requires an abundant water source as an evaporate, and is only efficient when the relative humidity is low, restricting its effective use to dry climates."I can feel good that this is not AC, with its attendant evils, including power use, but at the same time feel bad because of the use of a resource that will become ever shorter in supply as things heat up: water. Water for my flowers (and they're mostly native plants, too), water to cool the humans, water for the desperate birds that flock to the dripper in my birdbath. For those of us in the desert, this will eventually become a fluid more important than oil. Hurricanes on the coasts, drought and wildfires in the West, who designed this system? Oops, wrong question. Real question is, who's been tampering with the system for the past hundren and fifty years or so?

Technorati Tags: drought, global climate change, heat, hurricanes, water

posted at 5:51:00 PM by marigolds2

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