Climate Change Disappeared From Campaigns, Returns To East Coast Tomorrow

Neither presidential campaign or the news media wanted to touch climate change in the debates or along with serious discussions of serious issues like Medicare, or taxes, so here comes yet another major weather event - - a late-year hurricane/super-storm ready to collide with winter air over the eastern third of the US in this year and decade of profound and damaging climate occurrences - - and all opportunity for context and policy advancement is lost.

[Though Ryan and Romney backed cuts to FEMA and flood-control budgets.]

The language accompanying the storm's warnings is similar to what was issued just before Katrina hit. Even with Katrina's last-minute downgrade, the impact was catastrophic.

I'm not saying that human behavior and fossil fuel burn caused this storm, but it's the height of denial to say that our climate isn't reflecting the new, post-industrial 'normal' long-predicted: heavier rain events, extreme weather outbreaks and growing danger to low-lying, coastal areas that will take lives and greatly add to public budgets and emergency spending.

Anyone want to guess at how long it will take to restore electrical power, finish the cleanup, add up the damage and pay off the claims this time?

Because of a monster hurricane. It's nearly November?

The oceans, air temperatures and precipitation are all intricately interwoven; you can call a decade of record warmth and repeated big storms, floods and harsh fire 'seasons' a mere coincidence, but it would have been better, and still would be useful to treat them as real and addressable circumstances.

I don't give President Obama an "A" on these matters, but I think we can say that if Mitt Romney's anti- EPA/free market worship philosophy gets free rein in The White House, and if the Koch brothers are over for dinner, you can expect lower grades.

Cross-posted at Purple Wisconsin.