Talking About the Weather

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In an ordinary heat wave, Americans typically fume and fuss, grab relief where they can, and slog through the pestiferous weather with sweaty humor and prayers of gratitude to the great god A.C. This summer's record-busting hot spell, however, has aroused an extraordinary response. On top of the usual chafing at day after sticky day of hot, humid and hazy punishment has come a communal attack of the worries. Many Americans have found themselves concerned less about passing misery and more about the whole bruised and abused human habitat. Soggy, unremitting heat sometimes seemed a symptom of general ecological collapse. Had the great breakdown begun?

This fretful mood has been easy to notice in small talk and just as easy to experience. It is evident in tense radio weather reports and the spastic smiles of television weather forecasters as they explain the now well-known greenhouse effect -- the inexorable warming of the earth under the global canopy that civilization has created with gases like carbon dioxide. The friendly, familiar promises of good ol' summertime have yielded to the hallucinatory imagery of technology.

Ecophobia, as the mood might be called, has not been induced by the hot spell alone, even though many places have scored the heat the worst in history. Chicago reported an unprecedented number of 100 degrees days, and temperature records have been broken in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington. Stifling heat made it easy for an all too varied constellation of environmental disasters to mobilize popular anxiety. Consider some of the summer's invitations to fret:

-- Beaches by the dozen up and down the East Coast have repeatedly been closed to swimmers because of waters infested by sewage or contaminated hospital waste such as blood samples and hypodermic needles.

-- Persistent drought has laid waste to America's agricultural midsection. Damaged grain harvests in the U.S., Canada and China will result in the sharpest ever one-year drop in world grain stocks, Worldwatch Institute reported last week.

-- Forest fires have destroyed immense swatches of Yellowstone National Park, where an 18,700-acre burn pushed close to Old Faithful. Other wildfires have afflicted areas of Wyoming, Colorado, Oregon and Idaho, including a 2,300-acre blaze that came within a few miles of Boise.

-- Air quality in the U.S. was reported to be the worst in the decade by monitors of the Environmental Protection Agency. In Milwaukee 18 days of unhealthy ozone levels represented an 80% increase over 1987. Says Steve Howards, executive director of Denver's Metropolitan Air Quality Council: "The air is still breathable, but clearly the trends are running against us."

There was plenty of other fuel for worry: reports of inexplicable fish kills, warnings against eating shellfish, tales of lakes and forests dying from acid rain. Who could forget that up to 12% of all U.S. houses suffer unsafe radon exposure? That by sending up chlorofluorocarbons used in coolants, man is still destroying the ozone layer that protects against ultraviolet rays?