Conservatives' Biggest Contribution To Mankind: Climate Change, Planetary Destruction

Anytime you put profit over people in ANYTHING, you risk disaster.
-Dayna Steele, candidate Texas CD-36

30,000 Texans may wind up in shelters. Ten have already been confirmed dead from Hurricane Harvey. Flooding is getting worse, damaged refineries could be spewing toxic fumes, and the public health consequences of the storm are still beginning to make themselves felt. Is it fair to blame the storm on the bribed politicians-- primarily but not exclusively-- who have found it convenient to deny and denigrate the science around Climate Change? You bet it is. And they all need to lose their comfy jobs next year-- starting with House Science Committee chair Lamar Smith. Tuesday morning, in his NY Times column, David Leonhardt wrote that Harvey is the storm that humans helped cause.

Even before the devastation from Harvey, southeastern Texas was enduring a year unlike any before.

The daily surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico last winter never dropped below 73 degrees. You can probably guess how many previous times that had happened: Zero.

This sort of heat has a specific effect on storms: Warmer weather causes heavier rainfall. Why? When the seas warm, more moisture evaporates into the air, and when the air warms-- which has also been happening in Texas-- it can carry more moisture.

The severity of Harvey, in other words, is almost certainly related to climate change.

Yes, I know the sober warning that’s issued whenever an extreme weather disaster occurs: No individual storm can be definitively blamed on climate change. It’s true, too. Some version of Harvey probably would have happened without climate change, and we’ll never know the hypothetical truth.

But it’s time to shed some of the fussy over-precision about the relationship between climate change and weather. James Hansen, the eminent climate researcher, has used the term “scientific reticence” to describe this problem. Out of an abundance of academic caution-- a caution that is in many ways admirable-- scientists (and journalists) have obscured climate change’s true effects.

We don’t display the same fussiness in other important areas. No individual case of lung cancer can be definitively linked to smoking, as Heidi Cullen, the chief scientist at Climate Central, notes. Few vehicle accidents can be definitely linked to alcohol, and few saved lives can be definitively linked to seatbelts.

Yet smoking, drunken driving and seatbeltless riding each created a public health crisis. Once the link became clear and widely understood, people changed their behavior and prevented a whole lot of suffering.

Climate change is on its way to becoming a far worse public health crisis than any of those other problems. Already, it has aggravated droughts, famines and deadly heat waves. In the United States, global warming seems to be contributing to the spread of Lyme disease.

Now we have Harvey. It has brought yet another flood that’s being described as unprecedented. It is terrorizing thousands of Texans and submerged large parts of the nation’s fourth-largest city, Houston.

...“The heaviest rainfall events have become heavier and more frequent, and the amount of rain falling on the heaviest rain days has also increased,” as the National Climate Assessment, a federal report, found. “The mechanism driving these changes,” the report explained, is hotter air stemming from “human-caused warming.”

Heavier rain can then interact with higher sea levels to increase flooding, as seems to have happened with Harvey. In Houston’s particular case, a lack of zoning laws has led to an explosion of building, which further worsens flooding. The city added 24 percent more pavement between 1996 and 2011, according to Samuel Brody of Texas A&M, and Houston wasn’t exactly light on pavement in 1996. Pavement, unlike soil, fails to absorb water.

Add up the evidence, and it overwhelmingly suggests that human activity has helped create the ferocity of Harvey. That message may be hard to hear-- harder to hear, certainly, than stories of human kindness that is now mitigating the storm’s toll. But it’s the truth.

Beyond Harvey, the potential damage from climate change is terrifying. Disease, famine and flooding of biblical proportions are within the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, stories of potential misery have not been enough to stir this country to action. They haven’t led to a Manhattan Project for alternative energy or a national effort to reduce carbon emissions.

The progressive Democrat running to replace House Science Committee chair-- and notorious Science denier-- Lamar Smith (R-TX-21), is Derrick Crowe. This morning Derrick told us that "some 30% of the precipitation from Hurricane Harvey could be attributed to human-caused global warming dynamics. But this was hardly the first experience this congressional district has had with climate change. In 2015, Texas lost 15 people and left 12 others missing in devastating floods, and our state climatologist said those floods were some of the best evidence yet that climate change is hitting Texas. And it’s not limited to floods. The 2016/2017 winter was the warmest on record in the Austin area. Peach trees need a certain number of chilling hours to bear fruit. They didn’t get that in this warm winter. That hurt the peach crop in the Hill Country. Some orchards had no crop to bring to market at all. If Lamar Smith were more committed to serving his constituents instead of his corporate donors, he would know this. The chairman of the House Science Committee is not only denying the science of climate change, but he's denying his constituents the benefits of science-based policies that could be mitigating life-threatening challenges here in Central Texas. That's an abject failure of leadership, and it's immoral."

MIT's Technology Review tried shedding some actual light on the problem, asking How Much Is Climate Change to Blame for Tropical Storm Harvey? "The consensus so far: we can’t say climate change caused Harvey, but it certainly made it worse than it could have been."

Writing for the Guardian, Michael E. Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, points out that sea levels have risen by over six inches around Houston during the last few decades as a result of human action. That means that the water surge forced inland by the storm was six inches taller than it would have been in the past.

But, as Hal Needham, from research firm Marine Weather and Climate in Galveston, Texas, says to the New York Times: “A two- or three-foot storm surge alone would not have been catastrophic.” Indeed, it’s the quantity of rain on top of the surge that appears to have made it such a disaster. The storm has already deposited at least 20 inches of rain, and some estimates suggest that the figure could climb to 50 inches in some areas.

That, too, is likely to have been exacerbated by humans. Mann points out that average temperatures in the area where Harvey developed were over 1 °C higher than they would have been several decades ago. The elevated temperatures will have caused between 3 and 5 percent more moisture to evaporate into the atmosphere than would have been the case in the past, meaning that there was more water to fall as rain when the storm hit.

Kevin Trenberth, from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, agrees. He tells the Atlantic that “the human contribution can be up to 30 percent or so of the total rainfall coming out of the storm.”

Mann also speculates that the way Harvey has hung over Houston, offering no respite, could also be our fault. He points to his own research, which suggests that stationary weather anomalies appear to be linked to human-caused global warming.

So, how much blame can we lay at our own feet for Harvey? By no means all: it’s a natural disaster, the result of a series of complex systems that happened to act together in a deeply undesirable way. But we definitely made things worse.