50 Below, 50 Above

It is 24 degrees this early morning in my Southern Oregon backyard. Thick frost coats the ground like powdered sugar on a pastry, my rubber chore boots crunch, crunch across frozen mud dollops, and crispy dead oak leaves. The valley is still and quiet, bathed in a blueish lavender glow as I slide open the chicken coop door to let the flock roam free. The birds coo and stay on the roosts, nuzzled next to each other for warmth. I laugh and tell them, “If I’d known you were sleeping in, I wouldn’t have gotten up so early!”

It’s not that cold compared to what my friends in Alaska just endured. Three weeks ago, it was 75 degrees colder there than in Oregon this morning. Can you imagine? Fifty below zero and then some. One of the coldest nights of the year (so far) in Alaska happened to land on my friend Joe’s birthday, January 6th, ringing in at an impressive minus 54 degrees Fahrenheit in his yard. His Facebook post that day read, “It’s hard to bake yourself a birthday cake when it’s too cold for the propane to flow!” Someone from somewhere else commented, “What do you do when it’s that cold?” His response, “Feed the wood stove.”

Another friend lives down the road from the birthday man and posted a heart-wrenching photo of a red-breasted nuthatch sitting on the rail of his front porch that same day. White frost coated the little tyke’s feathers, and the bird was puffed out trying to keep warm. Bird feathers are coated in oil to keep moisture out - a crucial component for any creature surviving in cold temperatures. Peter Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, explains in an article by the Smithsonian Institute, “Birds fluff up in the cold to trap as much air between their feathers as possible. The more trapped air, the warmer the bird.” It makes sense. But still, how does a tiny little songbird in January in Alaska have enough caloric energy and body heat to warm 50 below zero air? And, how did we humans end up with bare skin in this world? We seem woefully underdressed and tragically unprepared for Climate Earth.

Around the holidays, a meme was circulating for a while on social media. The photo showed a backyard wood privacy fence with a foot of snow bermed up against it. A guy laid in the shaded snowdrift from his waist up, wearing a down parka and a ski cap, and from his waist down, he laid in sun-soaked green grass wearing shorts and flip flops. The meme read something like, “Winter In Oregon.” It should have read “Winter In Alaska” because two weeks after Joe’s birthday in that same Alaskan town, it was nearly 50 degrees above zero. Some places in Alaska reached +53ºF that day. Anchorage clocked in at +47ºF breaking the previous January record of +45ºF.

Some may argue it’s vapid to talk of the weather when there are more pressing things to speak of in our times. But what used to be small talk to break the ice in a conversation has now become alarming reporting on local backyard climate change. It’s what climate scientists wish we had talked about fifteen years ago when the documentary An Inconvenient Truth was released, describing then what we are living now.

It’s not that 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit in Alaska is an anomaly. It’s a low temperature you can find nearly every winter somewhere in the state. The anomaly was the 50 above in January, two weeks later.

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Thin, spotty ice slowly melts under noon sun rays on the black asphalt of Highway 238 as I tail a forest green Subaru for twenty miles on the way to town - town being Grants Pass, Oregon. My eyes rest on the black lettered white bumper sticker stuck to the back window, “As Above, So Below.”

The sky is blue, as it has been for nearly thirty days. January is, on average, one of Southern Oregon’s rainiest months. Not this year. Not last year either. We’re stuck in what west coast weather wizard Daniel Swain calls “A Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” or an anticyclone. It’s when a persistent high-pressure system blocks the prevailing westerlies that bring storms. The “RRR” closes the storm door, contributing to the severe drought Southern Oregon and California are experiencing.

On January 26th, 2022, the National Weather Service in Medford, Oregon, reported their morning weather balloon reading of 0.16 inches of Precipitable Water (water vapor) in the atmosphere. It was the driest weather balloon measurement since 1948 for that area in one of the rainiest months of the year.

Residents in Southern Oregon have the Blue Sky Blues. Every day here in January, people woke up to blue skies, no clouds in sight, no rain, 50 degrees above zero. Yet social media was full of sad face emojis on every perfect weather report, with people nervously asking in the comments, “When will we get rain? Where’s the rain?” There is no answer. The drought has come home to roost here in Southern Oregon and California, and no one knows if it’s the new normal or just a month of weird weather.

In 2021 the CO2 concentration in the earth’s atmosphere was 415ppm. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in 2002 was 372 ppm. By 2030, global carbon emissions are expected to rise 16%. I’m too scared to do the math.

As above, so below.

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Back in Alaska during the January mercury plummet, Mark Vail, a neighbor living in an off-the-grid, small cabin several miles down the road from the birthday man, was up early on January 6th. He checked in online with this post: “After 6 hours of sleep [the cabin] was down in the 40’s, but the stove is back to full crank and I’ll try to get that hundred ° differential going again while I’m in the loft drinking coffee.”

Allow me to translate: he slept six full hours without getting up to put wood in the stove, so the fire burned out, and the temperature inside his cabin dropped to 40 degrees. Since heat rises, he fired the wood stove up, made a cup of Joe, and drank it in the loft - the highest, warmest part of the house - while the cabin slowly warmed to +50 degrees, making the indoor temperature a 100 degree differential from the outdoor –50ºF.

50 below, 50 above.

Then two weeks later, when everyone in that remote Alaskan town was experiencing temperature whiplash, Mark was out grooming ski trails and skidding firewood because how often is it that warm in January in Alaska? Make firewood while the sun shines. The birthday man’s neighbor was outside building a shed wearing a single layer while his front porch buzzed with happy, warm, red-breasted nuthatches and chickadees. Joe, the birthday man, hopefully baked himself a cake.

I’d like to think January 2022 was an outlier, a weird weather month full of anomalies that ranged from whiplash temperatures to droll carbon copy days of blue from the west coast to Alaska. My intuition however, is scratching in the back of mind, inspiring me to write about this as a kind of record or reminder to our future selves. Once upon a time these strange weather patterns were unusual. Someday, it may be 50 above the entire month in Alaska in January, and possibly even 50 below in Oregon. I hope not. I hope we humans will do what is necessary to stabilize the trajectory of future weather reports. But ultimately, Climate Earth will decide.

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Big thanks to Mark Vail and Joe the birthday man for allowing me to quote them.

A telling of the strange west coast weather in January 2022