If You Need A Heartwarming Weather Story, Here's Two: Baby In A Hurricane And Wedding In A Haboob

Dr. Juan Gershanik rescuing little
baby Christian Stewart from
Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago.
The two have kept in touch 
ever since. 

Christian Stewart of Houston, Texas just celebrated his 20th birthday. 

That shouldn't at first glance be a big deal. Plenty of people celebrate birthdays and you probably don't know Christian Stewart.  

But he's alive today against long odds.  Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina almost killed him. Except a kind, brave doctor saved him.

Stewart was born in New Orleans, nearly three months premature in July, 2005.  He weighed just one pound, 12 ounces at birth. He was still in the NICU at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans when hurricane Katrina hit on August 28, 2005. 

The hospital was swamped with water. The emergency generators clicked on, but the water began to go after those, too. If the backup generators failed, Stewart's mechanical ventilator would stop, and he would die.

Enter Dr. Juan Gershanik, who rescued Stewart via a harrowing helicopter ride to Baton Rouge. 

The obvious spoiler is that Gershanik saved Stewart's life.  The good doctor has been attending Stewart's birthday ever since. 

For the full story in a video, click on this link, or if you see the image below, click on that. Then, below the video, Story #2 starts. 

THE WEDDING HABOOB

Things can get a little dusty with events this time of year in Arizona. Just ask a particular pair of newly weds

As ABC 15 Arizona reports:

Bekka and Jamie Ham just married amid a haboob
near Phoenix Arizona. Photo by Madisen Ruehle

"After a decade together, Bekka and Jamie Ham finally decided to tie the knot. They planned nothing too fancy - just a courthouse ceremony followed by some photos with their photographer and friend Madisen Ruehle to remember the day."

The courthouse ceremony in Chandler, Arizona, just southeast of Phoenix, was quick and flawless. It was the photography afterward that got tricky. 

"'We leave the courthouse and we just see a wall of dust coming. I didn't realize how fast it was coming - we were right in the middle of the dust storm,'" Ruehle said. 

The dust slammed into the couple and the photographer, but a rescuer was nearby.  Paul Roupas was getting ready for the grand opening of his new Aristocrat Coffee Roasters shop in downtown Chandler when he saw the couple in distress.

He hustled them into his shop and made sure they had a memorable if off the cuff wedding reception. Roupas brewed up some heart-shaped lattes, and had the couple pick out music for their first dance on a vintage vinyl record player. He didn't have Champagne, so their first toast to their married life was in the form of his and her ice cream cones. 

Outside, the dust turned into a muddy rain, then a cleaner, but gusty torrential downpour. But the newlyweds were safe inside to start their married life. 

Ruehle put the event on social media, where of course it went viral. She said her favorite comment on her post was:  "If a wet knot is harder to untie, then let it rain."

Here's the news video: Click on this link to watch, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

 

Study: Combating Climate Apathy Depends More On Stories That Stats

A very much NOT frozen Lake Champlain, pictured here
on February 14, 2024 in a very warm winter. Stories about
how climate change affects people, like a lack of ice
fishing, can move people toward caring about
climate change more than statistics can. 

 In order to affect political change and encourage leaders to take real steps to combat climate change, you need to have people sign on to the cause and pressure those leaders to do something. 

But if climate change isn't high up on the public's list of concerns, then that never happens. 

True, everybody has a lot of worries these days. The economy is worrying  There are bad, corrupt and inept governments. (We're looking at you, United States!)  to deal with. We have wars, strife, divisions, poverty, you name it. Things are challenging. 

But so is climate change. Which threatens to make all of the above problems worse. Not to mention add to our growing list of deadly and expensive weather disasters that seem to hit somewhere in the world every time we turn around. 

So how do you get people to focus on climate change?

Turns out stories, not stats, might be more effective, says a study conducted buy UCLA

According to UCLA Newsroom: 

"A new UCLA study finds that presenting the same continuous climate data, such as incremental changes in temperatures, in binary form - such as whether a lake did or did not freeze in the winter - significantly increases people's ability to see the impact of climate change."

In other words, give people the stats, but also let them know what the real-world consequences of those stats are. 

The stats don't resonate, mainly because they seem so gradual. 

"'For years, we assumed that if the climate worsened enough, people would act, but instead, we're seeing the 'boiling frog' effect, where humans continuously reset their perception of 'normal' every few years,' (UCLA communications professor and cognitive psychologist Rachit) Dubey said. 

'People are adjusting to worsening environmental conditions, like multiple fire seasons per year, disturbingly fast. My research examines how people are mentally adapting to the negative changes  in our environment.'"

STUDY DETAILS;

Researchers asked study participants about the climate in the fictional city "Townsville."  

The researchers asked a second group of participants about five real lakeside cities like Lake George, New York and Grand Traverse Bay, Michigan. 

Half the participants were show a graph of temperature increases from 1940 to 2020. The other half was show a graph showing whether it was cold enough to freeze each winter. 

Of course, as temperatures slowly climbed over the decades, the lakes stopped freezing as often. For the real towns, study participants were also told about a decline in activities like ice skating and ice fishing.

Here were the results: 

"When the researchers asked participants to rate from 1 to 10 how much climate change impacted the town, people who learned about a range of temperatures responded lower than people who learned whether the lake froze - on a average, 6.6, compared to 7.5 or 12 percent higher.

Making the emotional connection to local traditions, whether ice skating in the water or freedom from wildfires smoke in the summer, may also contribute to overcoming apathy, said lead author Grace Liu, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon University."

This of course all makes sense. Humans are hard-wired to embrace stories. We like stories more than data, and they resonate so much more than us. Why do you think for thousands of years humans have so embraced music, plays, books, and more recently movies and some online videos.  They tell stories.

The idea of telling stories is no cure-all. After all, as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of other competing worries in the lives of literally billions of people.  But it might be a start.

As UCLA Newsroom writes:

"Making the emotional connection to local traditions, whether ice skating in the winter or freedom from wildfire smoke in the summer, may also contribute to overcoming apathy, said Lead author Grace Liu, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University.

'Our study drives home the importance of discussing climate change not just in gradual temperature terms, but in concrete, either-or terms, showing how life has changed,' Liu said. 

'It's not just warmer winters; it's also a loss of ice hockey and white Christmases. It's not just hotter summers; it's the disappearance of a swimming hole due to drought or soccer practice being canceled because it's dangerously hot.'"