A Global Climate Emergency Through the Eyes of Cleveland, OH (Part I)

by Emily Qian

 The Oxford Dictionary annually nominates a Word of the Year, intending to reflect the usage, culture, and overall mood of the passing year. 2016 was post-truth, 2017 was youthquake, and 2018 was toxic. As for 2019? Climate emergency.

Oxford Dictionary defines climate emergency as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it”. The phrase completely encapsulates the heightened attention, increased urgency, and progressively more direct impact that has met the climate issue in the past year. If we’re paying attention, the marks of this have permeated every headline, both international and domestic. From some of the worst wildfire seasons in California, to rapidly melting Antarctic ice sheets, to the destruction of natural habitats, 2019’s seen it all in terms of the real time impact of the climate emergency. To combat these prevailing issues are motivated and passionate individuals, organizations, and movements, such as young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and participants in the increasingly popularized climate strikes.

Yet while there’s been much coverage in global and national politics, much less is known about the climate emergency on the local level. So, inspired by this shortage, I’ve decided to dig deeper into the impact of climate change in our very own city, starting foremost with what got me inspired in the first place: the unusually warm temperatures in Cleveland, OH, this winter season.

To start off, I chose to focus on the week of Christmas for 2019: December 22nd to 28th. After a bit of research, I compiled the high and low temperatures of each day in that period from 2010 to 2019.

*For the graphs above, I would recommend not focusing on each year specifically, but instead, observing the overall trend. While adjacent years may be difficult to distinguish due to color similarities, the purpose of this color-coding scheme is to juxtapose the earlier years (darker blues) versus the more recent years (lighter blues).

Additionally, I’ve created a graph representing the data as averages (Dec 22-28, high and low) of each year:

With the exception of 2017, which seemed to be an outlier (and thus dimmed to black for the high and low temperature graphs), the general trend indicated increasing temperatures from 2010 to 2019. Certainly, it wasn’t a perfect progression, but we must keep in mind that these changes occurred over a period of only 10 years. The climate crisis will undeniably continue in the decades to come, and if the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid of this year was any indication, these changes will only worsen. In the future, the seemingly small differences observed between years will most definitely be magnified to a greater, and more detrimental extent. If the climate emergency has thus far seemed to be a problem for other countries, other states, or other people, hopefully this can serve as a gentle shove, reminding all of us of the close proximity of this issue. 

This concludes Part I of this series, “A Global Climate Emergency Through the Eyes of Cleveland, OH. Part II will include an examination of another aspect of Cleveland affected by climate change – one more specialized to the region – as well as a report on the current environmental efforts of our city.