The Bay That Warned Me First
I don’t need scientists to tell me the water is warming — I can feel it with my own hands
As a boy in the 1950s and early 60s, I spent much of every summer on our family boat exploring Narragansett Bay. We’d anchor out for days, sometimes a week at a time, without touching shore. The Bay was a living world — wind, tide, and cool saltwater shaping every moment. Even in July, no one thought the water was particularly warm.
When I ease my own boat into that same Bay today, with family and or friends aboard, I can feel how much it has changed. The water that once chilled now feels gentle. I trail a hand over the side and it’s warm — soft, almost silky, like the Bay itself has drifted south.
The fish have changed too. The winter flounder and tautog I caught as a boy are moving offshore in summer. In their place come visitors from the South — Mahi-mahi, even tarpon — species we used to know only from magazines.
That isn’t weather. That’s climate.
The evidence beneath the surface
Oceanographers at the University of Rhode Island and NOAA have confirmed what anyone who’s lived by this water already knows. Since the 1960s, the Bay’s average summer surface temperature has climbed more than two degrees Fahrenheit. That may sound trivial, but in an ocean system it’s a seismic shift. Plankton blooms now peak weeks earlier. Oxygen drops. The lobsters that once filled local traps migrate north.
The Bay’s rhythm has changed. Summer storms are different. Rain comes in bursts, not showers. Eelgrass thins while algae thickens. You can see it from the deck — the green haze, the shorter winter, the still nights that used to carry a chill but now just hang heavy. None of it happens all at once. It builds quietly, one season after another, until the old normal is gone.
What denial protects
Yet the Trump administration — and its allies in Congress — insist that “global warming” is a liberal myth. They call it a hoax, a scare tactic, anything but what it is: a challenge to power.
The first motive is money. Fossil-fuel companies bankroll campaigns and expect loyalty in return. To acknowledge human-caused warming would be to accept responsibility, and responsibility threatens profit. Easier to sow doubt and let the meter keep running.
The second is culture. Over time, denial became a badge of identity. Within today’s Republican ranks, accepting science can get you branded a traitor to your tribe. It isn’t about evidence anymore. It’s about belonging.
The third is control. Authoritarian populists thrive on distrust. They teach followers that scientists and journalists are part of some vast conspiracy. Once truth depends on loyalty, reality itself can be rewritten to suit the moment.
The conservative I used to be
I was a Republican long before Donald Trump entered politics — back when the word “conserve” still meant something. Teddy Roosevelt built the parks. Eisenhower’s generation believed stewardship was patriotic. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. Even George H. W. Bush tightened the Clean Air Act.
That Republican Party is gone. Today’s party bows to oil interests and talk-show theatrics. It mocks prudence as weakness. When Trump’s aides dismiss rising seas as “natural cycles,” I think of the Bay I grew up on. I don’t need a satellite to know what’s real. The change is right there under my fingertips.
What’s really at stake
Narragansett Bay is more than scenery; it’s a living warning. Its transformation is visible and personal. The fish that once defined it are leaving, the balance of life tilting toward species that never belonged here. You can measure that shift in lab reports — or you can just ask anyone who’s fished these waters for fifty years.
Delay doesn’t buy time; it spends it. Each year we treat science as politics, we trade another piece of the future for the comfort of denial. This isn’t ideology — it’s arithmetic. Energy goes in, heat stays trapped, ice melts, seas rise. The ocean doesn’t care how you vote.
What matters is what kind of country we want to leave behind: one that faced the truth, or one that lied to its own children because honesty was inconvenient.
The duty to bear witness
Some truths don’t need instruments. I knew the Bay’s truth the moment the cold left it. The warmth that feels pleasant on my hand carries a warning that words alone can’t erase.
So I keep boating. My friends and family go with me to the same places where my father once taught me to read a compass and steer a course. The water reflects us all — past, present, and future — in the same shimmer of morning light. It’s warmer now, yes, but still beautiful. That beauty is the reason to fight for it, not an excuse to pretend nothing’s changed.
The Bay warned me first. It’s still warning us now. The question is whether anyone in power is listening.
