*[Enwl-eng] Earth Island Journal: Summer Chill

[ecology]

On the Bay Area’s unusually cold weather and shifting baselines.

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                                News of the world environment


                                 NEWSLETTER | AUGUST 1, 2025

























                                Summer Chill

                                My parents flew in from India two weeks ago 
to spend the summer with us and were greeted by a blanket of fog and wintry 
temperatures.

                                “Oh, it’s the usual Bay Area summer,” I 
reassured them as they stood shivering outside San Francisco International 
Airport, “the sun will be back out soon enough.”

                                Only, it hasn’t, quite.

                                Instead, we have been living under what the 
National Weather Service's Bay Area office has dubbed "No Sky July" — gray 
and damp weather caused by a prolonged spell of low pressure off the 
California coast that is preventing warmer inland air from moving in.

                                Apparently, this is the coldest summer we 
have had in more than two decades.

                                Granted, the Bay Area coast isn’t known for 
its warm summers. Usually, I’m thankful for that, given so much of the 
United States is increasingly facing dangerously hot conditions during this 
season. But after two straight weeks of waking up to fog sweeping past my 
Berkeley home and my tropical-summer acclimatized parents moping around the 
house in thermals, I’m more than ready for some brighter A.M.s. Though word 
is that this cold front is likely to hang around through much of August.

                                Even as I’ve been bundling up, I’ve also 
been thinking about how this local weather anomaly, if you can call it that, 
harkens back to a time when No Sky Julys were the norm. My reaction to it — 
a longing for sunnier mornings — is a classic example of the shifting 
baseline syndrome. As a relatively recent transplant to the Bay Area, my 
baseline expectation for summer temperatures here is literally several 
degrees higher than that of someone who has lived here since, say, the early 
1980s.

                                All of this is to say, this summer cold snap 
serves, more than anything, as a reminder of just how much Earth’s climate 
has warmed everywhere.

                                Now that I’ve spent some time dwelling on 
this (and given the sun is shining strong this afternoon), I think I’m going 
to be okay with “fogust.”






                              Maureen Nandini Mitra
                              Editor-in-Chief, Earth Island Journal





                                Photo by Zetong Li





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From: Editors, Earth Island Journal <editor at earthisland.org>
Date: сб, 2 авг. 2025 г., 2:45
Subject: Summer Chill



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