Day-after-day for the month of May with only several exceptions, Deena and I have heard about ferocious storms sweeping across the heartland of the U.S.  They included tornados; hurricane-force, straight-line winds; damaging hail and so on. Last weekend, seven people in Texas were killed in a tornado only twelve miles from where I once lived.  Hours later, another twister grazed the town where Deena’s son and his family live.  Sunday, my son who is a fire fighter and EMT said he was deployed to the area that the prior tornado struck to presumably clear wreckage and possibly search for more bodies.  This morning, the Dallas metropolitan area suffered extensive damage from an early morning storm.  Some 750,000 people are currently without power.  Deena’s son and his family live in that general area and we’re waiting to hear if they are okay.  Our children are being warned that there may be “strong to severe storms” tonight, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, either in the early morning once again, or at night when it is often difficult or impossible to see the tornado that is bearing down on you. It doesn’t get more personal than that unless you are personally an evacuee. All of this suggests the there is global warming ahead.

This is life in America, today.  I’ve never read, seen nor heard of this sort of relentless battering by the elements in the Midwest during my seventy-five years of life.  It will be a long, hot, deadly six months ahead of us.  Before that six month period is over, the West Coast will be ablaze again and a good part of the country that is not in ashes, will lie parched.

We’re told that climate change (global warming) is somehow responsible for all of this.  Legislators in Florida may be living in a different reality, however as

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation this year that prohibits local governments from passing heat protections for outdoor workers.  Another bill he signed last week deletes most references to climate change from state law, among other things.”

Hoping that a problem will go away if it’s ignored it is probably not a good strategy. Even Dorothy and Toto barely made it back to Kansas alive.

Then, there are hurricanes.  Hurricanes often wind up in Galveston, TX; New Orleans, LA; Savannah, GA or Charleston, SC, but they generally pass through Florida enroute.  And this year is predicted to be worse than most as far as hurricanes and tropical storms are concerned.  We have friends in Florida that tell us of the near impossibility of securing homeowners insurance given the sheer magnitude of past storm damage.  Nor will banks issue mortgages on new or existing homes unless they are insured against loss.

Here is the hurricane forecast for this year:

NOAA National Weather Service forecasters at the Climate Prediction Center predict above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin this year. NOAA’s outlook for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, which spans from June 1 to November 30, predicts an 85% chance of an above-normal season, a 10% chance of a near-normal season and a 5% chance of a below-normal season.

“NOAA is forecasting a range of 17 to 25 total named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher). Of those, 8 to 13 are forecast to become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 4 to 7 major hurricanes (category 3, 4 or 5; with winds of 111 mph or higher.) Forecasters have a 70% confidence in these ranges.”

None of this is new to my blog and I’ve tackled it here and in other posts.

How does the heating of the planet make things worse?

First of all, I don’t waste time with blame.  It doesn’t matter who or what causes the planet to get warmer, though we want the major polluters to stop from making it even worse than it is.  But the history of the geological record tells us that the earth sometimes gets frigid and at other times, it gets more than toasty. It happened at the end of the Pleistocene and that’s what caused the ice to recede.  It’s happening now. But at this rate, we’ll all be toast!

In less than eighty words, the United States Geological Survey USGS explains the reason for the greater amount of storms we are experiencing and the increase in the ferociousness of these storms:

With increasing global surface temperatures, the possibility of more droughts and increased intensity of storms will likely occur. As more water vapor is evaporated into the atmosphere it becomes fuel for more powerful storms to develop. More heat in the atmosphere and warmer ocean surface temperatures can lead to increased wind speeds in tropical storms. Rising sea levels expose higher locations not usually subjected to the power of the sea and to the erosive forces of waves and currents.”

That seems intuitive and simple enough.  However, depending on who the next U.S. President appoints as Secretary of Interior, that definition may be removed for political considerations.  Americans seeking this information might then have to visit websites in Australia, Norway, Canada, even Mexico to learn about the scientific truth.  Else, we’ll all wind up with our heads in the sand.

But the killer storms, the scorching heat which drops people like flies, the hurricanes that flood coastal towns and demolish homes, the fires that incinerate county-sized tracts of land and exacerbate simple, autonomous life functions like breathing for people in other countries (e.g., the Canadian fires in 2023 and the smoke that covered much of the Northeastern U.S.) and the inevitable drought that scorches once-fertile land is just the beginning of the problem.

The water along the Atlantic seacoast is projected to rise by .43 of an inch per year starting in 2022.  That is more than an inch every three years.  Again, this information comes from an official U.S. government source (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA), so you may want to save the page now in case the information mysteriously vanishes from their website a year from now.

Half an inch a year may not seem like much, but then you have the tides to consider, storm surges, etc.  These high tides will move further inland than ever!

Consequences

Certainly, insurance rates rise. Homeowners policies may be written to exclude certain natural disasters (such as flooding.) In states like Florida, insurance companies often flee the state. In fact, sixteen companies over the past two years no longer write new homeowner policies in Florida including AIG and Farmers. As a result of rapidly increasing policy costs and fewer companies to compete in the Florida market, an estimated fifteen to twenty percent of homeowners in Florida no longer carry home insurance.

There there is migration. Picture in your mind for a second the drought map of the U.S. being almost entirely dark red, either by climate change, nuclear war, or for some other nefarious reason. Now, picture Mexico with no color at all, meaning rainfall is either plentiful or at least adequate. Wouldn’t Americans try to cross over into Mexico to feed their families or look for jobs and could you blame them if they did? It may have been a pure accident of birth that Americans (and Canadians) were born in a land of plenty and opportunity while people on the other side of the river were destined to poverty and in many cases, perhaps misery. Why begrudge them for what our own ancestors wanted for themselves? Of course, we cannot take millions and millions of people a year (even year.) But this is a job for Congress to deal with and for the last forty years they have shown no inclintion to do so.

In Europe, migrants from African countries as well as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are moving north to the temperate zones as their countries dry up and whatever precious topsoil they have blows away much as it did in the U.S. during Dustbowl days. There may be some water left here and there, but is that water safe to drink or cook with? There are countries on the brink of war over dams across the Nile, and water rights are a big issue between Israel and the Palestinians as well.

Without water, there is nothing to cool industrial machinery, so countries do not have to opporunity to become industrialized. Many have little appeal to tourists, scenic vistas, historical ruins, the presence of precious metals, oil, or political stability.

We as adults are detroying our children’s and grandchildren’s heritage, and they have no say in the process. It takes a certain amount of political will to preserve our environment and that included species of plants and animals in danger of extinction. Until humanity has the will to care and make difficult choices, it will be “Drill, baby, drill.”