gracchusdixit

Confronting the cumulative calamities of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and now Hurricane Maria, many journalists and even many climate scientists have struck a conspicuously cautious note in discussing the connection between these catastrophes and climate change.  Again and again, they have drawn a fine and tortured distinction between the intensity of these events and their frequency, asserting that global warming may affect the one but not cause the other.  We can be reasonably certain, they insist, that climate change made these storms worse, but we cannot be absolutely certain that it caused them.  This, it has to be said, is a distinction without a difference.

This distinction is often accompanied by the observation that major tropical storms occurred before global warming and would continue to occur without it—an observation that is not only trite but utterly irrelevant.  What is more, and as a simple matter of fact, the dichotomy between the intensity and frequency is simply false.

We’ve been tallying the number and intensity of tropical storms for about 150 years, using a variety of metrics and measurement tools.  For much of that time, the average annual frequency of such storms remained more or less constant.  Some years were better or worse than others, but the long-term trend was essentially flat.  That began to change abruptly about 25 years ago, when the running average of major tropical storms and hurricanes started to climb dramatically—as it continues to do.  To imagine or suggest that this is a mere coincidence, having nothing to do with a commensurate rise in global temperatures, is naïve at best and delusional at worst.

It is also shoddy scientific reasoning.

Hurricanes are complex phenomena, which cannot usefully be parsed into classificatory categories like “frequency” and “intensity”.  Even if it were true that the frequency of these storms isn’t increasing, that would say little about cause and effect in any particular case.  Whether we are talking about one storm or a hundred, it is entirely possible that global warming not only magnifies the intensity of a given storm, by producing more moisture and energy, but causes it in the first place.

Do we know for a certainty that climate change is specifically responsible for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, or Maria, which even as I write is sweeping through the Caribbean like a runaway locomotive?  Of course not.  But that specific uncertainty proves exactly nothing.  To dismiss the possibility (in this case, the probability) of a cause-and-effect relationship is both ludicrous and wrong.

It is wrong, not only as a matter of science and logic, but also as a matter of morality.  By insisting on the unknowability of the relationship between a particular cause and a particular effect, unduly cautious pundits and experts cause confusion, sow doubt in the public mind, and undermine efforts to combat climate change precisely when those efforts are needed most.  It is already too late to reverse the consequences of global warming—storms like Harvey, Irma, and Maria are going to batter us again and again—but we still have a chance to mitigate, and defend ourselves against, consequences that are even worse.  This may be our last chance; this window of opportunity will not stay open for long.

Why, one must thereafter ask, have so many otherwise sensible voices been so hesitant to name the problem for what it is, so eager to separate frequency from intensity, so reluctant to identify cause and effect?  Why have they so consistently shied away from stating the obvious?

The answer lies in the legacy of more than 20 years of powerful, persistent, and well-funded climate change denial—by the fossil fuel industry, by its lobbyists, and by the politicians who do their bidding.  After Hurricane Harvey drowned Houston in what can only be described as a modern-day equivalent of a biblical flood, Scott Pruitt, the head of Donald Trump’s EPA, declared, with a straight face, that it would be “insensitive” to discuss climate change when we needed to focus on recovery and rescue.  To any sensible person, far from being insensitive, it would be insane not to discuss the cause of the disaster and its consequences.  Yet, in the end, Pruitt has largely got his way.

This sort of tactic is not new.  It is the sort of dodge that we’ve heard for decades from the National Rifle Association and its bought-and-paid-for members of Congress.  Whenever there is another in the endless string of abominable mass shootings that bedevil our country, we are told that “now is not the time to talk about gun control”.  Instead, we are called upon to send our “thoughts and prayers” to the grieving families of the victims, as if “thoughts and prayers” might somehow undo the crime or resurrect the dead.

When it comes to climate change, a similar drumbeat of distraction, obfuscation, and intimidation has come into play and has had its effect.  Although a large majority of Americans now understand that global warming is real and realize its perils, countless journalists and scientists have been cowed into euphemistic caution.  Rather than speaking the truth forthrightly, rather than calling a spade a spade, rather than saying that catastrophic storms are caused, not merely intensified, by climate change, they continue to parse their sentences and mince their words.

“Thoughts and prayers” are of no greater use to the millions who have lost their homes in these devastating storms than they are to the thousands who each and every year lose their loved ones to gun violence.   If we want to end the destruction, if we want to stop the violence, if we want to save the planet, it’s time to stop mincing words.  If the 300 million guns let loose in America don’t kill us, climate change surely will.