On the Bay Area’s unusually cold weather and shifting baselines.
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NEWSLETTER | AUGUST 1, 2025
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Summer Chill
My parents flew in from India two weeks ago to spend the summer with us and were greeted by a blanket of fog and wintry temperatures.
“Oh, it’s the usual Bay Area summer,” I reassured them as they stood shivering outside San Francisco International Airport, “the sun will be back out soon enough.”
Only, it hasn’t, quite.
Instead, we have been living under what the National Weather Service's Bay Area office has dubbed "No Sky July" — gray and damp weather caused by a prolonged spell of low pressure ([link removed]) off the California coast that is preventing warmer inland air from moving in.
Apparently, this is the coldest summer we have had in more than two decades.
Granted, the Bay Area coast isn’t known for its warm summers. Usually, I’m thankful for that, given so much of the United States is increasingly facing dangerously hot conditions during this season. But after two straight weeks of waking up to fog sweeping past my Berkeley home and my tropical-summer acclimatized parents moping around the house in thermals, I’m more than ready for some brighter A.M.s. Though word is that this cold front is likely to hang around through much of August ([link removed]).
Even as I’ve been bundling up, I’ve also been thinking about how this local weather anomaly, if you can call it that, harkens back to a time when No Sky Julys were the norm. My reaction to it — a longing for sunnier mornings — is a classic example of the shifting baseline syndrome ([link removed]). As a relatively recent transplant to the Bay Area, my baseline expectation for summer temperatures here is literally several degrees higher than that of someone who has lived here since, say, the early 1980s.
All of this is to say, this summer cold snap serves, more than anything, as a reminder of just how much Earth’s climate has warmed everywhere.
Now that I’ve spent some time dwelling on this (and given the sun is shining strong this afternoon), I think I’m going to be okay with “fogust.”
Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor-in-Chief, Earth Island Journal
Photo by Zetong Li ([link removed])
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