Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
Good thing climate change is a hoax or we’d be in real trouble.
Wildfires ravaged France and Spain last month, forcing the evacuation of 330,000 residents. Traveling north from Madrid to Galicia on vacation this summer, my girlfriend and I witnessed the scorched earth of previous wildfires in the province of Ourense firsthand — trees burned to a crisp as far as the eye could see.
In this summer’s heat wave, Europe has lost 1.3 million acres of land and 25,000 lives, the latter likely an undercount.
Closer to home, July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous U.S., and Texas welcomed me back with a week of 100-degree days.
The National Weather Service’s HeatRisk map shows that more than 75 million Americans, mostly in the South, are at risk of heat illness. And CBS News reported that dry conditions fueled at least 200 major wildfires across the U.S. and Canada.
Yet to describe these dire straits as “the new normal” — as I admit I have done on these pages in the past — is itself misleading.
“This really misunderstands where we are,” Kevin Anderson, an ex-oil engineer turned climate scientist, told Novara Media. “This is not a new normal. On average, this is the least extreme weather that I, you, and anyone else listening to this will ever live through. It’s going to get worse and worse every single year until we stop burning fossil fuels. So celebrate this, [because] it’s going to get worse.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports many so-called “skeptics” decry as alarmism, may well have been giving policymakers and the public at large a rosier picture than we have a right to expect.
“Near-term warming could be anywhere from 10% more to 30% more than the current consensus,” Britain’s The Economist reported last month.
The thermal energy absorbed versus emitted by the earth has been increasingly out of whack.
“Worryingly, the observed energy imbalance is rising much faster than expected,” more than 50 scientists wrote in a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Geophysical Union. Empirical observations were “twice that predicted by climate models — after having more than doubled within just two decades,” they added.
Despite Spain’s state of crisis, a Texan picking up a copy of El Pais, the country’s newspaper of record, wouldn’t feel themselves a stranger in a strange land.
“Climate change is something that’s happened throughout human history,” declared the headline of an op-ed from Partido Popular, the country’s foremost Christian conservative party.
There’s a good chance you have encountered similar reactions from your right-of-center friends and family.
“August has always been hot,” they may declare, adding, “People have always drowned in Flash Flood Alley,” or “This is all just part of the Earth’s natural cycle.”
Except, for the last 800,000 years, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels never rose above 300 parts per million, according to the extensive ice core data collected in Antarctica. Today we sit at 429 ppm, according to Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory.
Indeed, the climate nerds have gotten appreciably better at determining the precise extent to which we humans are to blame for the inclement weather befalling us.
“The scientific tools, observational datasets and methods developed and used for extreme event attribution have advanced considerably over the past decade,” a 14-member panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reported last month. “The highest confidence is associated with findings for extreme heat events and others strongly influenced by a warming atmosphere, such as large-scale heavy rainfall events.”
And the research shows that the havoc wreaked by natural disasters is worsened by the climate crisis.
“Studies of Hurricane Harvey, which dumped 50 inches of rain in the Houston area in 2017 and caused widespread flooding, showed that climate change increased Harvey’s rainfall by roughly 20% to 38%,” researchers recently told the Weather Channel. “Studies also found this led to a proportionally even larger increase in the number of flooded properties, as relatively modest increases in the intensity of an extreme event can sometimes translate into much larger societal impacts.”
While everyday folks suffer the pain, our corporate overlords have been making out like bandits. Exxon and Chevron posted $26.5 billion in combined second-quarter profits.
From leaded gasoline to chlorofluorocarbons to cigarettes to teflon to opioids, it’s a tale of greed-induced denial as old as capitalism itself. And let’s not even get started on data centers.
Despite all the naysaying from the right, a majority of U.S. residents are environmentally woke. A recent Yale University survey shows 54% of Americans describe themselves as “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, while only 22% remain “doubtful” or “dismissive.” A mere 5% identify as “disengaged.”
Similarly, progressive polling from Data for Progress found that 61% of likely voters say the number of extreme weather events has increased over the past five years and 67% believe heat waves have been worsened by climate change.
In July, Democratic lawmakers reintroduced legislation to treat runaway warming as a health emergency. Their proposal calls for a massive investment in community health centers, climate-resilient infrastructure and disaster mitigation.
To their point, health costs tied to climate change and fossil fuel pollution — respiratory ailments, premature deaths and extended hospital stays among them — have surpassed $1 trillion annually and continue to rise, according to the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health, a George Mason University program representing more than 1 million physicians and health professionals’
Predictably, the Democrat-backed bill stalled in the GOP-controlled Senate and House, though voters will have their say about that come Nov. 3. Unless, of course, you prefer wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on a new war in the Middle East while paying more at the pump.
Until we learn to confront the epoch-defining challenge of our century as citizens of the world, we will continue to suffer the consequences of extreme heat as isolated individuals and overwhelmed communities.
For a contrasting approach, it’s well to remember the paraphrased words of our Founders: “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”‘
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