COOLING IT ABOVE THE 45th PARALLEL
Pssst. Listen up. Here’s a hot tip for you: Buy land above the 45th Parallel on Earth, any parcel of real estate that’s above the half way mark between the Equator and the North Pole. You are going to thank me big time for this little tidbit if you want to cool your jets by the Year 2050.
Got friends who live in an old converted schoolhouse that stands smack on the 45th Parallel. Yes sir, even got a big green New Hampshire state wayside sign across old snaking Route 145 that says so. The very topknot trimline of Vermont that straddles the 45th is just a few miles away, stretching straight west a hundred miles to that heathen Empire State. Here in the Granite State, all the land above the 45th is the 300,000-acre township of Pittsburg and a few odd and end parcels in the hamlet of Clarksville. That acreage will be the coolest place in the Lower 48 soon, literally. I swear it. Pittsburg has more resident moose right now than residents, but by 2050 I’ll bet it will be a city of a million, unless migrants from Megalopolis decide life will be way more cool at Lac St. Jean in Quebec or in St. Anthony, Newfoundland.
You see, up on the 45th, things are changing rather quickly. Forty years ago, in January, they use to endure a week’s worth of 40 below zero nights each year, sometimes twice a year. That’s why they burn wood up there. You can’t keep a house warm without a wood stove blazing when it’s 40 below Fahrenheit or minus 40 Celsius. Now, folks on the 45th don’t see just 10 below too much anymore. Up there, summer was a six-week affair. Now it’s nearly three months. By 2050, summer on the Parallel should be like summer is today at the haute Hamptons along the beaches of Long Island or on the Jersey Shore (of Governor Christie’s beach-chair fame).
This is where that real estate tip I was talking about begins to make sense.
You ever hear of a University of New Hampshire climate scientist (paleoclimatologist, really) by the name of Matthew Huber? He’s a fellow who any house flipper in Fairfax County, Virginia or the Golden Triangle in North Carolina should be paying attention to today. Here’s his take on our lonesome planet a little more than three decades down the pike, as quoted in Peter Brannan’s nonfiction bestseller, The Ends of the World:
“The problem is that humans can’t even handle a hot week today without the power grid failing on a regular basis. What makes people think it’s going to be any better when the average summer temperatures will be what, today, is the hottest week of the year in a five-year period, and the hottest temperatures will be in the range that no one has ever experienced in the United States? That’s 2050!”
Now why would someone who has his nose pressed to a computer screen for six months a year say something like that? Climate change deniers, like some larger than life character the birds tweet about these days, think someone the likes of a Mr. Huber is a heretic. I’m somewhat surprised the D.C. dandies haven’t called for a burning at the stake ceremony on the National Mall as yet.
Anyway, Mr. Huber must spend his waking life and, I suspect, sleepless nights modeling the impact of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and what CO2 levels have been like in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans in deep time. Funny, he’s noticed that when many of the Big Five mass extinctions came to pass in the history of life on the planet, CO2 levels were elevated above 400 parts per million like the levels are today.
If CO2 rates continue to climb at two percent a year as is the case now, he figures with conviction that life in the South and at mid-continent by the end of the century will be, how shall I say, toasty, as in life in the Eocene epoch toasty. In the Eocene 55 million years ago, temps were something on the order of four or five degrees Celsius north of levels that were common in the late 1700s at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
So let’s see, four degrees Celsius translates to a bit more than seven degrees Fahrenheit. Okay, seven degrees by the end of the century. No big deal, except the scientist is talking mean global temperature, not the little extra temperature tacked on to any given day. At that level of temperature increase and climbing, the northern reaches of Canada and Alaska would eventually become favored haunts for such friendly living things as crocodiles, alligators and palm trees. Eocene-era fossils of such things have been found on Baffin Island and Elsmere Island in the far Canadian north, for goodness sake.
Might be mighty tough to find ice for a highball in 2099. There won’t be an ice cube worth of polar sea ice to salvage and plop into that whiskey sour you will surely need badly by that time.
What would Jimmy Buffet do?
Now, I think you can see what I mean by a cool real estate tip. Best think of making your home at or above the 45th parallel, and launching a career in real estate sales in Arctic Canada or Siberia. Want to sleep well at night with the window open and the fan going at mid-summer three decades hence. No problem. Just get yea to the 45th or well above by 2050.
You couldn’t do any better than buying waterfront property on First Connecticut Lake in Pittburg township in ole NH, or perhaps setting up shop on the Saint John River at Fort Kent or Madawaska, Maine. Like Minnesota? Haul your houseboat to the Boundary Waters, or better yet, cross the international boundary and plop it into the H2O in Lake Winnipeg in Saskatchewan, the farther north the better. Maybe the Yak Valley of Montana would work as a half-way stop.
If you are patient enough to wait around until the turn of the century, Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories of Canada, should be a good bet; the nightlife in Yellowknife ought to be really funky good by then. Or if you like it a little cooler, why not settle in Iqaluit, the far-flung capital of Nunavut Territory, an immense region that encompasses the giant islands archipelago of much of northern Canada. Population 7,200. No traffic jams or traffic lights there, thank goodness.
Here’s another tip. Just keep the kids away from the alligators once they begin showing up in the lakes of the far north.
