Millions of people in the state whose Republican leadership removed “climate change” from government documents—as if erasing those words would eliminate what they describe—face devastation from Hurricane Milton that scientists say wouldn’t be occurring were it not for what industrial civilization has done to the atmosphere. Here’s Jeva Lange at Heatmap:
Contrary to recent rumor, the U.S. government cannot direct major hurricanes like Helene and Milton toward red states. According to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, however, human actors almost certainly made the storms a lot worse through the burning of fossil fuels.
A storm like Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 227 people so far and caused close to $50 billion in estimated property losses across the southeast, is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Additionally, WWA researchers determined that extreme rainfall from Helene was 70% more likely and 10% heavier in the Appalachians and about 40% more likely in the southern Appalachian region, where many of the deaths occurred, due to climate change.
“Americans shouldn’t have to fear hurricanes more violent than Helene — we have all the knowledge and technology needed to lower demand and replace oil, gas, and coal with renewable energy,” Friederike Otto, the lead of WWA and a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “But vitally, we need the political will.” Alarmingly, the attribution study found that storms could drop an additional 10% or more rain on average as soon as the 2050s if warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius.
Whence cometh that political will Otto speaks of?
Certainly, it won’t come from those 123 members of Congress—every one of them a Republican—who still reject what scientists are saying about the climate crisis. And then, of course, there is Donald Trump. In Milwaukee on Oct. 1, the former president said:
“Global warming wasn’t working because the planet’s actually gotten a little bit cooler recently. But climate change covers everything. It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold. Climate change. Everything is — look, and I’m — I believe I really am an environmentalist. I’ve gotten environmental awards. But I want clean, beautiful air and clean, beautiful water. That’s all. Crystal clean water.”
His usual BS. The planet isn’t cooler. Summer 2024 was the hottest on record, according to the European climate service Copernicus. As far as clean air and clean water, during his four-year reign, Trump worked to trash some 100 environmental regulations.
The political will certainly won’t come from the fossil fuel industry, which has been lying about global warming for decades and continues to make clear its intent with the nearly trillion dollars in investments in new oil and gas fields proposed between now and 2030.
Here’s Bill McKibben at The Crucial Years writing about Fear:
… there are important moments when fear is a crucial resource. A week ago, in the wake of Helene, the veteran climate activist and North Carolina native Anna Jane Joyner wrote this dispatch from New York’s “Climate Week”
There were fancy parties, cheerful sun imagery and giant signs reading “HOPE.” The dominant theme was: We can solve this! We need to tell hopeful climate stories! But there’s no “solving” a hurricane wiping out western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the sea. Only focusing on optimism is like telling a cancer patient that everything will be OK if they just stay positive. At best, it comes across as out of touch; at worst, it feels callous. Yes, we can still prevent the worst impacts and must demand our governments scale solutions and act urgently, but we cannot minimize the horrors unfolding now, or that it will get worse in the coming years.
McKibben goes on to say, “We have 26 days left, and every one of them counts. We need to hold our nerve, do the work, and see if we can bring America safely through Hurricane Trump. That won’t deliver us to safety, but it’s a start.”
More powerful hurricanes, more heatwaves, worse flooding, enduring droughts, and other devastation are inevitably coming our way no matter what we do. But every step taken now to cut carbon emissions can lessen how bad things eventually get. At the federal level and in several states, always having to overcome Republican obstruction, Democrats have moved in the right direction in dealing with climate. Speed, however, is of the essence. And we’re just not moving fast enough.
An International Energy Agency report published on Wednesday notes that renewable energy capacity globally is expected to grow by 2.7 times by 2030. This, however, “is not quite sufficient to reach the goal of tripling renewable energy capacity worldwide established by nearly 200 countries at the COP28 climate summit,” the IEA said. Tsvetana Paraskova reports:
Growth is there, but governments need to boost their efforts to integrate variable renewable sources into power systems, the IEA said, noting that the rates of curtailment of renewable electricity generation have been increasing substantially recently, and already reaching around 10% in several countries.
In a separate report last month, the IEA said that the global goal to triple renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade is still within reach, but massive investments in power grids and energy storage would be needed.
Currently, the U.S. is producing more oil and natural gas than any country in the history of the world. Vice President Harris and other Democrats have touted this fact while simultaneously touting the job gains from the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. Call that a contradiction or a conundrum or a Gordian Knot, or just call it campaign tactics. Whatever the label, this situation cannot be allowed to continue or hurricanes like Helene and Milton will be remembered as minor disasters.
Starting November 6, when, hopefully, the roaring enthusiasm that has greeted the Harris-Walz ticket will be transformed into the political victory essential for taking the climate crisis with the seriousness it deserves, I’ll be offering a series of climate- and biodiversity-related proposals—not all of them original with me—which I think the new administration should adopt. Stay tuned. But, for now, as McKibben says, do the work: GOTV.
