I'm trying to write these earlier in the day.
I used to put off writing until I finished the smaller, more tractable tasks I set for myself. But by the time I finished the little things, I had no energy for writing.
Now, though, I find I don't have the energy for the little things if I start writing too late in the day. If I start writing late enough, I don't have the energy to exercise.
It's 10:15 a.m. Let's see if I can't finish this with energy to spare.
I.
I write to you from San Francisco, a small town on the Pacific Coast of California, servicing a patchwork of commuter suburbs around what we call the "San Francisco Bay Area."
Back in the 1950s, they called the City "Baghdad by the Bay," after its profound ethnic and religious divides, low-intensity urban warfare, and decrepit public infrastructure.
It's awful. Even here in the Green Zone.
II.
Americans like to say that San Francisco has a "Mediterranean" climate. And it's true that it has a Köppen climate classification of Csb, which we call a "warm-summer Mediterranean climate."
Köppen is a three-tier classification scheme. It designates climates by three-letter labels, with each letter dividing the world into finer and finer categories.
The first Köppen letter divides the world into five parts, each designated by the first five letters of the alphabet: tropical A; arid B; temperate C; cold D; and polar E.
Four of the five letters separate the world into mutually-exclusive categories by mean temperatures in the hottest and coldest months, making for a neat algorithm.
If it's above 10ºC in the coldest month, it's tropical A, else:
If it's above 0ºC in the coldest month, it's temperate C, else:
If it's above 10ºC in the hottest month, it's cold D, else:
If it's below 10ºC in the hottest month, it's polar E.
Arid B is an irregularity. It's based on a precipitation threshold, not mean monthly temperatures. It's also hard to characterize in a single phrase, since it varies with the seasonality of the precipitation. It's higher if the precipitation comes in warm months.
But never mind that. It's not arid in San Francisco. That's part of the problem.
In San Francisco's Csb, C stands for temperate, s for dry summer, and b for warm summer.
Temperate means it averages above 10ºC in the hottest month and between 0ºC and 18ºC in its coldest; dry summer means it gets less than 40 mm of precipitation in its driest month; and warm summer means it averages below 22ºC in the hottest month, but above 10ºC for more than four months each year.
Now, is that Mediterranean? It's not obvious to me that it is. Let's go to the map.
III.
Here's beautiful California, in all its climatic variation, courtesy of our friends at the Köppen-Geiger Explorer:
Let's start in the Los Angeles basin, along the borderlands between the yellow and sienna towards the bottom of the map.
Los Angeles divides into three primary climate regions, which provide a useful key to the California experience.
The coast of western Los Angeles, from Santa Monica down to Palos Verdes, and continuing along the coast of Orange County to the south, is a cold, semi-arid steppe, or Bsk.
It's a climate it shares with Colorado Springs, the Texas panhandle, and a swathe of the Eurasian steppe lands, from Crimea to Volgograd to Inner Mongolia.
South and central Los Angeles, south of the 10, but extending northeast to a frontier in Culver City, Mid-Wilshire, and Koreatown, and south through Anaheim and Garden Grove to Irvine, is a hot, semi-arid steppe, or Bsh.
It's a climate it shares with Gaza, the West Bank of the Jordan, Mosul, the Zagros foothills of Khuzestan, Amritsar, and the northern, or Turkish, part of Cyprus.
North of that, extending from downtown across the mountains into the San Fernando Valley, and east across the river to El Monte, Pomona, and Rancho Cucamonga, is the last part of Los Angeles, the hot-summer Mediterranean, or Csa.
This climate, the climate of Glendale and Pasadena, of Burbank and Sherman Oaks, of Van Nuys, Encino, and Calabasas, is what I think of as the actual Mediterranean climate.
Because it's the climate of the actual Mediterranean.
It's a climate it shares with Athens and Rome, Syracuse and Tunis, Jerusalem and Jaffa, Florence and Naples, but not, significantly, a climate it shares with San Francisco.
Because it's too warm for the city by the Bay.
IV.
Now let's look north, to the Golden Gate.
Here you can see that the Bay Area is, as you might have guessed, a homogeneous and indistinct stain on the map of California.
Does it have semiarid steppe lands? No. Does it have hot summers? No. From the South Bay to the Valley, from the West Side to the East Side, everyone has the same climate, and nobody's very happy.
San Francisco shares a climate with Oakland which shares a climate with Mountain View which shares a climate with Sausalito which shares a climate with San Jose which shares a climate with Berkeley and Richmond. It's a climate that stretches, like an open sore, down to Santa Cruz and Monterey.
It's all the same fucking climate.
It's called, as you may recall, the warm-summer Mediterranean climate, or Csb. Not hot summer. Not the summer of Glendale or Pasadena. No. A warm summer.
How warm is a warm summer? Is that a Mediterranean kind of summer? Is that the kind of summer you get in the south of France or the Greek islands? Well, no.
You know who else has a warm summer?
Fucking Galicia, that's who. The Parnassus Mountains. Mount fucking Lebanon.
You know who else has this fucking climate?
The Pacific fucking Northwest. Because it's cold and wet there. Just like San Francisco.
VI.
San Francisco: It's cold and damp!
I fucking hate it.
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