Becoming Subtropical

The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos started yesterday, discussing themes like, “How can we build prosperity within planetary boundaries?” So it seems that climate change is on the agenda for the world’s most powerful (sort of, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of profits), but it’s being overshadowed by all the talk of tariffs and annexing Greenland.

It probably doesn’t help that most of the West is relatively chilly at the moment. It’s easier to overlook the evidence of our warming planet when it’s a bit cold outside, but today’s story will take you right back to the sweaty facts of last summer’s heat. Because of course there’s a good chance that this summer will be right up there on the leaderboard of hottest ever, as we keep on pushing those planetary boundaries and redefining the world we live in.

Where were you when New York City’s climate was reclassified from humid continental to humid subtropical? I was in a borrowed apartment on 101st Street, overlooking the west side of Central Park. The apartment belonged to a widower, a man who kept a gun in a filing cabinet that he warned us not to open. His hallways were lined to the ceiling with boxes overflowing with photos and paper scraps, a memorial of sorts to his deceased wife, and to the grief he would not let go of. There was no table in this apartment, so we stacked some of these boxes by the window overlooking the park, a view worth more money than I’d ever care to have. Living in that apartment felt like one of those rare summer days in this century – not too hot, almost indecently pleasant, but already unraveling at the edges. The type of day where sublimity is found in a makeshift table of a single plank of wood laid upon a lifetime’s worth of loss.

I was sitting at that makeshift table when I saw the July 2020 New York Times’ headline, tucked into the Climate section, a headline worthy of the opening lines to a romance novel: “Sultry Nights and Magnolia Trees: New York City Is Now Subtropical.” As I sent the article to friends, I realized its insinuations of pleasant, exotic things like palm trees and mild winters did not aid my insistence to anyone who would listen that this mattered. That August was ranked the third hottest on record globally – a title that was superseded in August last year. Despite the heat, or perhaps amplified by it, demonstrations for racial justice were shaking the streets of nearly every major city across the U.S.

A close friend of mine, who was encamped outside New York’s City Hall, called me after sleepless nights of being terrorized by the police, insisting that the revolution was nigh. I believed her. The city’s energy that summer felt unstoppable, ready to build a new world from the detritus we’d leave behind. And amidst the cacophony of protests, joyous and furious alike, a different barrier was crossed. Though that threshold break barely registered as news, our city on the North Atlantic is now, climatologically speaking, a part of the tropics.