In my work, I travel to a lot of the weird, funky places that humans have found a way to live, from the extreme desert that surrounds Las Vegas to the arctic tundra of Alaska to the stormwracked coast of Louisiana.
Two things that come clear in these travels. First, we are beautifully adaptable. We are what biologists call generalists. We can eke out an existence almost anywhere, subsisting on almost any kind of food.
When British explorers first pushed into the high arctic, they were shocked to find Inuit people living comfortably, even casually, in a landscape that to outside eyes seemed impossibly barren.
I felt something of the same culture shock when I was traveling recently in Kansas, where temperatures soared each day during my trip into the triple digits.
One dusky evening, I was driving and saw a bank sign with a thermometer that still read 107 degrees, even though the sun had dipped below the horizon.
Why do people live here? I thought. And more to the point: How do people live here?
That question has become more pressing in this age of climate change, when NOAA researchers and other scientists warn that changing weather patterns — including summer heatwaves — are sort of like an athlete on steroids.
We found that extreme heat events were roughly 20 times more likely in 2008 than in other La Niña years in the 1960s and indications of an increase in frequency of low seasonal precipitation totals.
[C]onditions leading to droughts such as the one that occurred in Texas in 2011 are, at least in the case of temperature, distinctly more probable than they were 40-50 years ago.
For many of us, these slight shifts won’t be catastrophic. A few more really hot days each year? No big deal. One or two measurably bigger storms each season? Not a life-changer. A few less inches of rain? Survivable.
But for many of the Americans who already live on the margins, in places that are vulnerable to weather or offer barely enough water for survival, these slight variations will likely be game-changers.
What will happen in places like Arizona, Kansas, and West Texas if there are just a couple inches less rain a year? Or a dozen more days with temperatures int he triple digits?
What happens if the number and severity of storms slamming against communities along the Gulf Coast increases just a little?
Some climate change skeptics have suggested that huge amounts of warming would be needed before the warming trend affects our economy, our lives, even our safety, in significant ways.
My point is that a lot of us already live in places where we are pushing the envelope. We occupy ecological niches that were sketchy for humans from the outset, with very little margin for error.
For those communities, the climate tipping point might be much closer than we like to think.