Hurricane Ian’s coastal surge; Ian’s destruction was staggering.
What South Florida is expected to look like in under 80 years (from ScienceVibe.com)
“I am not in the pews of the church of the global warming leftist…
I am not a global warming person. I don’t want that label on me.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis during his 2018 campaign.
I am continuingly fascinated by the unending effort to politicize the rules of physics, to subject Mother Nature to the will of the electorate and its elected leaders. Scientific realities, if they were even capable of having an emotion, do not care. Deeply religious people – particularly those evangelicals who believe that after the Great Flood (Noah’s ark era) that punished a sinful humanity, God pledged never to impose a global punishment again – continue to wait for this trek into roiling climatic mega-disasters to reverse.
Climate change deniers claim these “once in a hundred years” super-destructive natural disasters are simply part of normal cyclical patterns that always recycle back. They don’t. Florida Governor DeSantis went so far as to call Hurricane Ian’s massive flooding a “once in every 500 years” disaster. Really?! Every few months now, a mega-climate-related disaster hits the United States. Stand back and stand by, Ron, there’s more from where that came from. “And this summer, DeSantis proposed prohibiting state pension funds from considering climate-change vulnerabilities and carbon emissions in its investments.” Yahoo!news, September 30th.
The fact that such “natural disasters” are constant and intensifying seems to be simply an inconvenient truth that only left-wing tree-huggers ever talk about, they believe. Marginalizers may accept that there may be a negative trend, but we simply cannot afford the economic slam that attempting meaningfully to fix it would cost, that unless big polluters like China and India join in a commitment it is a worthless effort anyway, and/or technology in the future will solve the problem.
So last December, Governor DeSantis – a clear climate change marginalizer – proposed a “checklist of the least number of boxes possible” directive to address his state’s most obvious climate issues: “Titled ‘Always Ready Florida,’ the three-year plan would spend $270 million on more than 76 projects statewide to help deal with problems like coastal flooding, which numerous studies have shown has been made worse by rising global temperatures.
“But DeSantis took pains to keep from framing the plan in terms of climate change mitigation… ‘What I’ve found is when people start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways. And so we’re not doing any left-wing stuff,’ DeSantis said at a [12/7/21] news conference.
“Belief in climate change and what to do about it remain dividing political issues. A Yahoo News poll in October [2021] found that 67 percent of Republicans believe that climate change is ‘not an emergency.’ By contrast, 78 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of independents said that it was.
“But much like aspects of President Biden’s Build Back Better and infrastructure plans, the money in DeSantis’s proposal would be spent hardening Florida’s coastal defenses from rising sea levels that the overwhelming majority of scientists have concluded are caused by climate change. To address the prospect of stronger hurricanes made possible by warmer oceans, the funds will go toward building stormwater pumps in coastal communities and burying utility cables. Funds would also be made available for the state to purchase flood-prone properties.” Yahoo!News, December 8, 2021.
What is most interesting is that DeSantis’ plans really do not address minimizing or reversing the root cause of this amplifying and accelerating climate-change-caused damage: reducing our use of and dependence on fossil fuels. Containing that greenhouse effect. Maybe, under DeSantis’ plan, hurricanes will drain better. Perhaps some of the new barriers might save a few properties here and there. Better building codes will help keep those new structures in better shape to resist damage. But DeSantis has already replaced his chief science officer. Way too little! Ian killed well over 100 people, shut down power to millions, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses and left people to wade through gator-infested waters.
Can Floridians afford to keep DeSantis as governor? He spends millions of taxpayer money transporting asylum seekers in Texas to fly to Massachusetts, to fight meaningless culture wars in public schools but woefully underfunds the kind of climate change legislation his state needs simply to survive! Just look at reality: after any significant rainfall, streets in places like Miami or Key West are routinely flooded. Storm surges continue to take their toll on coastal communities – see the above picture of coastal damage from killer storm Hurricane Ian– and heavy rainfall lasts longer than in the past. Is DeSantis really going to stop South Florida from becoming completely submerged, as the above map suggests? Not under his current plan!
Climate change is not about “everywhere gets warmer.” Winters can be more brutal in parts of the country, but it is warmer polar air that is expanding to push colder air south into the Gulf Stream that generates that winter misery. Giant tropical storms move more slowly than they have in recent decades. Why? Because as the surface temperature of oceans and seas rises, even a little bit, more water vapor gets absorbed into the cloud base… and that extra weight slows the storm’s movement… but not the whirling winds within the storm. Slow means a lot wetter!
As reported by the New York Times on September 29th, “‘Warmer water fuels storms, and waters have definitively warmed,’ our [NY Times] colleague Elena Shao, who covers climate, explained. Daniel Gilford, a meteorologist at Climate Central, a research group, compares hurricanes to engines, like those in a car. Warmer water increases the amount of energy feeding a hurricane, causing it to spin faster… ‘As human beings increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the atmosphere and the oceans both warm,’ he said. ‘That leads to more fuel available for hurricanes.’” Climate change also produces wild swings in natural disasters that go beyond heat.
There are vast flows of political campaign contributions from Big Oil, which is committed to a massive PR campaign of disinformation… suggesting that their policies are environmentally driven. They make money selling oil and gas! Fossil fuel workers also fear for loss of their jobs, even as the work generated by alternative energy vastly exceeds job loss in that fossil fuel archaic industry. Retrofitting our infrastructure is not cheap – though cheaper than allowing disasters from climate change to accelerate and intensify – and it reverses so much of what makes Big Oil profitable. And Big Oil is very powerful. Very influential. As we are learning in the debacle represented by Putin’s war on Ukraine, fighting over access to oil and gas destroys lives, results in mass killings and torture… and basically makes life and the environment so much worse. Hey, Ron, it’s your time to hug a tree and admit how wrong you have been!!
I’m Peter Dekom, and while middle aged and elderly parents and grandparents will feel some of the sting from not dealing realistically with reversing climate change, millennials and younger will shoulder the bulk of the burden of lifestyle misery bequeathed to them by uncaring older generations.
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