When Edna passes by

Track of Hurricane Edna, in September 1954

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com

Americans are famously impatient – not good in something open-ended like a pandemic that might be with us for at least for a year or two,  probably in waves, before a vaccine hits the market. And we’ll tend to see the whole crisis as  having ended when it passes by our locale for a while. It reminds me of a 1954 essay by E.B. White called “In the Eye of Edna,” in which he noted that once a hurricane of that name went by Boston, the big news media lost interest in it even as it was slamming the Maine Coast. We’re already seeing this in the stock market on some days in which there’s news that reported COVID-19 cases might be leveling off. Sorry, we don’t know how this thing will unfold. It’s very early and information is very incomplete.

On opening up the economy, I’m a little Trumpian. The closures now in effect could soon do more direct health damage, as well as economic damage, than the disease. We need to start opening up business in early May, while being prepared for perhaps several years of cycles of lifting  social controls and then reimposing them in hot spots as the pandemic recurs, hopefully with less severity than this first round because of widening herd immunity. It’s obvious now that at least for the next few years, most of us will be living differently than we had before the virus. Until memories fade?

God help many small businesses and social organizations. Some people may permanently avoid them for fear that customers and members  might be a source of disease.

Many people will permanently lose their jobs because of the closures. Some companies are already finding that they don’t need as many people as they thought. All the more reason to institute Medicare for all who want it, to offset the loss of employer-provided private health insurance, and start a national infrastructure-repair-and rebuilding program  to employ millions of people and make the country more competitive.  America  may need civil engineers more than it needs software engineers. .

Our weather narcissism

  By ROBERT WHITCOMB

Inevitably, some politicians and entertainers (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) are having great fun with the cold and snowy winter in the East and Midwest, saying that this shows that “global warming” is a fraud.

But they are extrapolating from immediate experience and anecdote, not science. I suspect that most of these people know better, but, hey, they’re in show biz.

Actually, January, for instance, which the news media lamented for its cold, snow and ice, has been rather severe in the eastern U.S. because of a huge dip in the jet stream that has brought cold (though not unprecedented cold) to the Upper Midwest and the Northeast while out West, including Alaska, it’s generally been very warm and dry for this time of year. Northeasterners and Midwesterners have endured temperatures 10, 15 or more degrees below normal; Alaska and California have been 10-15 degrees above. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that January was, on a global basis, the fourth-warmest on record.

That the Northeast is so densely populated and that much of the national news media are based in New York and Washington mean that the idea that this winter is particularly bad has particularly strong currency. It recalls E.B. White’s funny 1954 essay “In the Eye of Edna,” in which he noted that the nation lost interest in Hurricane Edna after it moved beyond Boston’s radio and TV stations to wallop White’s comparatively remote Mid-Coast region of Maine.

Then there are such relatively new weather-news outlets as the Weather Channel and Accuweather. These commercial outlets will die if they fail to constantly dramatize such old weather phenomena as “The Polar Vortex” — a low-pressure area in upper latitudes that now is presented almost as a new and lethal threat to civilization. Weather events that would have seemed par for the course of a season a half century ago are now characterized as world-historical events.

Changes in the route of the jet stream from time to time bring cold air deep into the eastern part of the United States while the other side of the country becomes much warmer than usual as the jet stream brings in mild, Pacific air from the southwest. The jet stream’s position, of course, can vary widely but it can sometimes get stuck, meaning warm, “open” winters for us some years and cold ones in others. The general trend, though, is for milder winters. The trouble is that we confuse events in our areas that are part of weather’s natural variability with global climate change.

The confusion of one’s particular circumstances with the wider reality reminds me of the heartening rise in recent years of “evidence-based medicine” as opposed to the more traditional “expert-based medicine.” I am simplifying, but evidence-based medicine relies much less on individual physicians’ experience, values and judgment and much more on cold, hard data derived from rigorous collection and analysis of information from broad populations. As with medicine, so with climate, follow the data.

Anyway, New Englanders have suffered through another week of below-normal weather and are heartily sick of it. That the population is aging and that old people, in particular, find winters wearisome may reinforce the winter fatigue of younger people, too.

In some winters, snow drops and crocuses would be popping out of south-facing slopes about now. It looks as if we’ll have to wait a while for them this year. Still, a gradual change in the mix of morning bird song and that there’s bare ground around the base of trees where there was snow a week or two ago reminds us that the sun is getting stronger by the day: Some birds are coming north again and there’s more solar energy for the trees to absorb. And on one of our recent, and for this winter, rare mild days, I found the worms wiggling enthusiastically in our compost bin, whose contents seem to have been frozen solid a couple of days before. Worms: A reminder of the cycles of death and life.

***

The Feb. 23 New York Times business section story “Loss Leader on the Half Shell: A national binge on oysters is transforming an industry (and restaurants’ economics)” was heartening for a coastal New Englander. It implied that our estuary-rich region could benefit a lot from much expanded shellfish aquaculture. Unlike, say, casinos, which are a net subtraction from a region’s economy, or local businesses that recycle money that’s already here, aquaculture, because it has exportable physical products and brings people here from far away to buy them in our eateries as local specialties, increases our region’s wealth.

And the business, with its demands for clean water, prods us to keep our coastal environment cleaner.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former  Providence Journal editorial-page editor,   is a Providence-based writer and editor and the overseer of www.newenglanddiary.com.  He  is also a director of Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com).