Dear High Profile Climate Advocates: “Did Climate Change Cause Harvey?” Is Not a Stupid Question

“Ladies and gentlemen, I must apologize. This man does not speak for the Council of Alphas. We hold you sub-Omeguloids in the highest regard.” — Principal Skinner
Harvey continues to soak Houston and the rest of southeastern Texas in historic amounts of rain and the forecast is somehow managing to get worse, with Houston at maybe only the halfway point of the deluge and now New Orleans coming under threat as well. (There’s at least a chance that the rain could trigger an evacuation since the city’s pumps are currently being repaired.) There’s no telling yet how damaging the storm will ultimately prove to be, but the names Sandy and Katrina are being thrown about, with at least one estimate already pegging the damage as probably the worst in U.S. history. The two main reservoirs protecting downtown Houston — designed to withstand a 1-in-1000 storm — are about to overflow.
I’m already on record as saying that when it comes to the question of whether or not this unprecedented storm can be blamed on climate change, the answer should be a simple and unequivocal “Yes”. But as articles and interviews with better informed people roll in, I’ve seen a curious pattern emerge that I wanted to push back on. Let’s start with climate scientist and climate communicator par excellence, Michael Mann in the Guardian:
In conclusion, while we cannot say climate change “caused” Hurricane Harvey (that is an ill-posed question), we can say is that it exacerbated several characteristics of the storm in a way that greatly increased the risk of damage and loss of life. Climate change worsened the impact of Hurricane Harvey.
And here’s noted climate writer Dave Roberts at Vox:
The storms, the challenges of emergency response, the consequences of poor adaptation — they all predate climate change. But climate change is steadily making them worse.
2) “Did climate change cause Harvey?” is a malformed question
Climate change does not cause things, because climate change is not a causal agent.
Finally, here’s a guy from MIT quoted in the Washington Post:
Yet the climate influence is still something we need to consider, said Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane theorist at MIT.
“My feeling is, when there’s a hurricane, there’s an occasion to talk about the subject,” he said. “But attributing a particular event to anything, whether it’s climate change or anything else, is a badly posed question, really.”
Scientists like Emanuel prefer to speak about climate-related factors that can worsen hurricanes, like Harvey, in specific ways — and about the ways in which certain attributes of Harvey seem consistent with what to expect, more generally, in a warming climate, even if they can’t be causally attributed to it.
All three of these very well informed gentlemen are united in their dislike of questions about whether or not climate change “caused” Harvey and the pain it’s wreaking. According to them, the question itself is “badly posed”, “ill-posed”, and “malformed”. (Props to Roberts, the professional writer of the group, for picking a word that makes this common sense inquiry sound like some kind of birth defect.)
Of course, all three of them are correct in strict academic terms. Climate is complicated, weather is complicated, and hurricane season long predated steam engines. Delve into this stuff long enough, build a career out of understanding it, and a question as basic as “Did climate change cause Harvey?” can seem insultingly dumb, something worthy of disdain. It’s like asking a librarian where books come from, or a doctor how to keep people alive.
But the internet is not a lecture hall, and most of the audience isn’t going to stick around for question time. Accuracy versus accessibility is the great unanswerable question of science communication. Like fate and free will or nature and nurture, there’s no right answer, no way to isolate the variables. In cases like this, however, I’d err real fucking hard on the side of accessibility.
Harvey is going to be a story for the rest of 2017 and well into 2018. There’s going to be big negotiations in Congress about aid accompanied by endless stories about flood insurance, reckless development, and (this being Houston) the oil and gas industries. After that, it’s going to join Katrina and Sandy as the go-to examples of the monstrous storms that will increasingly become normal storms as the world continues to warm.
Harvey and climate are already linked, there’s no way around it. TV isn’t going to tell people, and your opponents in the Oil Forever camp aren’t going to display any nuance. This isn’t a debate or a seminar, it’s a shouting match.
So however distasteful and not-even-wrong it may be, the question, “Did climate change cause Harvey?” is one to which a lot of people (many of them voters) want a simple answer. Give them a “Yes”, preferably in the banner headline. Then give the details.
