If you want to understand how global warming likely made Hurricane Harvey much worse, according to climatologists, click here. Not that it needs to be restated (actually, it does), but this May 31, 2017 article from the Insurance Journal - you know, the people who write for the guys who have to pay and reject the claims caused by climate change - helps explain what's happening in places like Texas.
Scientific studies have established an acceleration in sea-level rise because of a warming atmosphere. Coal and oil burning and the destruction of tropical forests have increased heat-trapping gases that have warmed the planet by 1.8 degrees since 1880. Earth has been losing 13,500 square miles of ice annually since 1979, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Sea levels are generally rising faster along the Texas Gulf Coast and the western Gulf than the average globally, according to a January study by NOAA.
“The western Gulf is experiencing some of the highest rates of relative levels of sea-level rise in the country,” said NOAA oceanographer William Sweet, lead author of the study. “The ocean is not rising like water would in a bathtub.”
Sea-level rise is making storm surges larger, said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas state climatologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.
Here's the money quote from the Insurance Journal's May 2017 edition: "Apart from sea-level rise, climate change is expected to cause hurricanes to be more intense and produce more rain, according to the NOAA."
The Washington Post helps explain what happened in Houston ...
For the climate change deniers out there, the Vox article cited here, tells us how the science behind climate change also explains why the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey was most likely worse because of climate change. Our real problem now, in the words of my former colleague David Berri (now in Utah), is how vindication for the scientists in the climate field will largely be a Pyrrhic-like Victory for humanity ...
... Notice the language [of the scientists]. Scientists don't speak in absolutes. They talk about where the evidence likely leads.
This makes arguing with climate change skeptics so immensely difficult.
Unfortunately for us, in the future the scientists will be vindicated and the skeptics will look very stupid. They won't be smart enough to know they look stupid. But they will look stupid.
So, yeah, the scientists win, while we lurch forward unprepared for the inevitable. And the truly stupid will live to see another day.
There's got to be a better way.
Sigh ...
- Mark
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