Local View: Don't let Northland 'paradise' fool you on climate change

Where is paradise? To be precise, there is a Paradise, Michigan, 315 miles as the crow flies at the eastern end of Lake Superior. Actually, the entire region of the Upper Great Lakes is paradise. You live in paradise.

Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, though. It was 42 degrees in Two Harbors the morning I started writing this. Yes, we have cloudy days. Yes, it reaches 80 humid degrees. And yes, it still snows in winter — hopefully.

However, that is not what is happening in the rest of the world. We are shielded by our location in the center of the continent and the cold, clear waters of Lake Superior.

Much of the rest of the world is seeing searing heat. France this year experienced its warmest summer in recorded history. So did Ireland, the UK, China, Mongolia, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Kuwait, and Morocco. Record temperatures are being seen from Mexico to the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Australia, Niger, Saudi Arabia, Siberia, India, Mali, South America, and the Caribbean, to name a few places. Closer to home, records have fallen in western North America as British Columbia, the Yukon, Alaska, and the Northwest Territories saw record heat this summer. Washington and Oregon, as well, suffered through record heat waves.

It isn’t just temperatures on land; the oceans are warming as well. Ocean temperatures are the highest seen in more than 50 years. Last year saw the warmest ocean temperatures worldwide ever recorded. Historic high temperatures are being seen in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.

Earth has been warmer: 50 million years ago, the world’s average temperature was 84 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average of 57. There were no humans then, of course.

The warming trends have other disastrous impacts, too, including severe droughts in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, South Korea, Maritime Canada, Morocco, Italy, and Greece. At the other end of the scale are floods. Flooding has been experienced in the UK, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, parts of India, Central Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, Spain, and, recently, central Europe. Pakistan, including the Kashmir region, has been particularly hard hit by floods; more than 4 million people have been displaced.

This has a tremendous impact on agriculture, with the devastation of rice crops in Pakistan and of other commodities in Turkey and the Mediterranean.

Studies indicate that Europe and the U.S. may see as much as a 40% decline in agricultural production due to climate renovations.

In addition, rising temperatures and droughts have led to wildfires, as we saw during our very smoky summer here in the Northland. There have been historic fires in Spain, Germany, Greece, and Turkey that have burned more than 2½ million acres. Siberian Russia in the last two years has seen wildfires devastate 33 million acres, which is almost 2,000 times the acreage of the devastating Brimson Camp House and Jenkins Creek fires this year in Northeastern Minnesota.

One more impact of climate change is greater than all the droughts, floods, and wildfires. It’s the impact on the environment and ecosystems — the diversity of microbial life, insects, and creatures that create our soil, clean our water, and help produce our food.

So far along the Upper Great Lakes, the North Shore and the rest of Lake Superior’s coastal areas have been largely spared the intense heat, major droughts, floods, and devastating wildfires seen throughout the world. Our region has not seen the extreme impacts from climate change. For now, we have escaped.

But this is no time for complacency or feeling haughty. Unless we prepare, we may see the same misfortune as elsewhere. We must manage our forests and waters. We must continue to speak out for our environment and work to switch off climate change.

Yes, we live in paradise. Let’s try to keep it so.

Russ Mattson of the Two Harbors area is an electrical engineer and engineering consultant who since 2012 has been an advocate for environmental issues, including with at least two national nonprofits.

Contributed/Russ Mattson