Sunday, October 28, 2012

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.

4 comments:

noblejoanie said...

Joe Romm at Climate Change is willing to tie climate change to this storm and provides evidence for it.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/28/1101241/cnn-bans-term-frankenstorm-but-its-a-good-metaphor-for-warming-driven-monster-largest-hurricane-in-atlantic-history/

help save the earth said...

This hurricane did not have to happen if we would only cut back our carbon emissions. The power outages will have a positive impact on global warming as if Gaia is taking care of herself for our own good. Thank you for helping to spread the message. Carbon kills!

Anonymous said...

We must immediately stop using fossil fuels to keep the storm away. I am so confused on what to do because people need to be told this but even using my computer to spread the word results in more carbon being emitted. Please help me understand how we can teach people about not using fossil fuels without depending on their use to do it. I am afraid that I may be responsible for a death somewhere just by making this post. I will try to be brief because of this, but I honestly do not know what to do. Please answer, but please, please, please keep it brief so as not to cause more damage. But then, I will have to turn on the computer to view the answer and contribute even more to the death of the planet.

JB said...

Oh can it, Anonymous-8:11. Climate change is real and your pretend hysteria doesn't help matters any. This is a serious situation. Grow up.