Climate Change is Climbing Mount Dora (6)
A wake-up call on the wind
Part 6 of 6 (conclusion)
After making landfall, Hurricane Harvey didn’t get far inland before it stalled and downgraded to a tropical storm. Where catastrophic wind was most feared upon its approach, it turned out that rain — a deluge-defining volume of it — was the true menace, setting a new record for rain in a single event in the continental United States — 51.88 inches at Cedar Bayou, Texas. That surpasses rainfall totals of all the other monster storms to hit the Texas coast in the past — Amelia (1978), Claudette (1970) and Allison (2001). It was strange new territory for weather, causing the National Weather Service on Aug. 27 to Tweet a statement that has become defining of our new life in the Anthropocene: “This event is unprecedented & all impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced. Follow orders from officials to ensure safety.”
The storm slowly pulled back into the Gulf and then made a second landfall in Louisiana on Aug 29. Some 27 trillion gallons of rain falls on Texas and Louisiana in six days. 33 Texas counties were put under federal disaster declaration. Houston — the nations’ fourth-largest city — was flooded, 94,000 homes in Texas are damaged or destroyed (29,000 homes destroyed in Houston alone), and 120,000 residents of Beaumont went without drinking water.
Hurricane Irma — the most powerful Atlantic storm ever recorded — mauled Caribbean islands and Key West, hammered Fort Myers and then strafed up the state, downgrading fast but in its wake knocking out power for three quarters of the state’s 20 million residents and flooding rivers and lakes and sewer systems everywhere after dumping some 10 trillions gallons of rain. MIami sent 6 million gallons of sewage into Biscayne, Bay, Lake Ockechobee got dangerously close to overflowing, and downtown Jacksonville was flooded. Two and half million homes in Florida sit in flood hazard zones, yet only 41% of those homes were carrying flood insurance.
Hurricane Maria missed the mainland but mauled Puerto Rico just two weeks after the American territory was hit by Irma. The entire island was affected by 155-mph winds, double-digit storm surge and two to three of rain. The Guajataca Dam is close to failing and it is just one of 38 dams on the island of three and half million rated by the Army Corps of Engineers as having a “high hazard potential.”
In all three storms, infrastructure and preparedness were vastly outclassed by the bigger, stronger, wetter systems we must increasingly expect as climate change impacts worsen.
Michael Mann is a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “What used to be, say, a 1,000 year event like Superstorm Sandy or Harvey is now, say, a 30 year event, and will eventually become an event we see every few years if we continue on the course that we’re on. We’ve loaded the dice through climate change, so that these events are appearing far more often.” (Huffington Post)
Big rain events are coming to Florida more frequently. The record for rainfall in a 24-hour period is 38 inches, falling on Yankeetown (straight west of here on the Gulf) during Hurricane Easy in 1950. A 2014 storm dumped 20 inches of rain on Pensacola over two days; a stalled 2012 storm in Pensacola dumped 27 inches in five days. This year, a lingering storm dumped almost 17 inches of rain on Fort Myers over three days. Gainesville had a record amount of rain for June and July of this year — 33 inches.
Sea level rise will make hurricane flood surge impacts much worse and also complicate drainage of flooded fresh-water sources. With nowhere to go, flooding could stop Florida’s growth in its tracks. (And why are we rebuilding Key West knowing how soon all of Monroe County is headed underwater?)
Or maybe instead it will be historic droughts, which are also on the increase in Florida. The problem with climate change is that extremes become the norm. Not six months ago, Florida was the driest state in the country. A four-year drought in Florida from 1998–2002 parched wells, opened up sinkholes and sparked wildfires that burned some 1.5 million acres. In 2000, the annual Florida rainfall of 27 inches was the lowest since 1927. Drought in 2006–2007 resulted in the driest back-to-back calendar years the Sunshine State has experienced.
Let us remember that Texas had a 500-year drought in 2010–2011 only to experience historic flooding the next year, the same year that Hurricane Sandy brought unprecedented flooding to the East Cast. California had a 5-year drought from 2011–2016 that was the driest in 1200 years, ending with its wettest winter in a century.
And for all of these big numbers, what we are experiencing here — rising waters, heating skies, burgeoning extremities of rain and drought — our threats are more financial than mortal. The death toll of Americans in the three hurricanes is around 185; Harvey and Irma combined have an estimated recovery of up to $200 billion. (The cost of rebuilding Puerto Rico hasn’t even been estimated yet.) This doesn’t begin to factor the desperately-needed infrastructure improvements necessary in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico before the next storm.
Across the world from us, widespread flooding and mudslides this summer in Sri Lanka have killed at least 202 and displaced some 600,00 people, and extraordinary monsoons in India and Nepal killed 1,200, destroying vast tracts of farmland and hundreds of thousands of homes.
So our developed country will experience the pain of climate change in its wallet before the inevitable human toll begins to mount.
Climate change will probably bankrupt us before it kills us — a luckier result than what will befall so many other places in our world.
* * *
We live inside the change now; no longer separate and alone, homo sapiens has become just another victim of our greed for dominance. Victor and spoiled world are one. Climate change isn’t coming, it’s here; we live in days that will never be the same — or won’t be at least for many centuries to come.
Why is that fact so hard to grasp, and why is it that so many persist in denying it?
To live in a Central Florida so enrapt with development is strange when you consider that much of its building out will complete about the time Florida’s coasts will be awash and a different kind resident will be moving here en masse in the second great climate change migration to hit Florida. (It looks like the first great climate change migration is beginning from Puerto Rico.)
And whatever narcotic language in the sales literature has been prompting millions more to retire and move to Florida, it’s hard to see them loading up those moving vans when so many are arriving from the other direction because the Sunshine State cooks at Venusian temperatures for a third of its year.
And whatever bad scenarios are brewing for the future, we can be confident that they will get much worse if we refuse to do anything about it now. It’s as if our energy- and water-greedy suburban license is the smiley face of a planetary death wish.
Such a disconnect surely borders on crazy. That’s how novelist Amitav Ghosh describes it in his book-length essay, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Pointing out how silent serious fiction has been climate change, he wonders how we will be judged by the future:
In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they — what can they — do other than to conclude that ours was the time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulated itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.
How can it be that the defining and transformative reality of our time be so marginalized, the goad of partisan rancor and derision? Although there is abundant evidence that climate change contributed to the hurricane season’s worst affects, EPA chief Scott Pruitt said that it was “opportunistic” and “misplaced” for reporters to tie Hurricane Harvey to climate change. Helping the victims of all these hurricanes is good and necessary, but refusing to address the forces which made them so miserable this year and even more dangerous in the future is like trying to talk about flying to the moon without discussing gravity.
If you still need a reality check, read David Wallace-Wells controversial New York Magazine essay, The Unhabitable Earth. Wallace-Wells takes a look at worst-case scenarios of climate change if humanity does little to curb its use of fossil-fuels and the temperature of the earth rises beyond the limit of 2 degrees Celcius set by the Paris Climate Accord. Let’s say its four degrees, or even eight degrees at the high end of the probability curve (we have as much chance at limiting the temperature increase to one degree as failing to and suffering the consequences of eight). The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher. A twenty-second century world that much warmer than our moment would see large swaths of territory too hot for life, failing agriculture resulting in world-wide food crises, rampant plague, air too dense with carbon dioxide to breathe, endless war over vanishing resources and permanent economic collapse. Again, our best efforts to address this crisis has about as much statistical chance of occurring as our inability to do anything. Take a look at how America is facing the crisis of climate change and ask yourself which probability we’re most likely to face. (An annotated version of Walker-Well’s essay showing all the research backing his claims can be viewed here.)
Most of what you read about the impact of climate change focus on the year 2100, but the truly significant impacts roll out from there and will linger in our environment for many centuries to come. For a sense of how that might unfold, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s novel The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from The Future is a gripping read. Told from the perspective of a Chinese historian writing in the year 2393, the narrator laments the impotence of science in political process that led to “the great collapse of 2093.” The future arc of climate-driven history is woven with the failure of nation-states (only China has a central government strong enough to relocate millions and make timely enough strategic infrastructure changes) and ending, in the twenty-fourth century, with half a million human inhabitants living in stilt houses exclusively in the world’s only temperate zone, the North Pole. Oreskes and Conway are science historians, so they are uniquely capable of interpreting present changes in the long view. At 104 pages, this book is a fast and gripping portal to the future and a solid argument for the need to change now.
If you’re interested in finding out more about climate change and its impacts, a few other books are worth mentioning.
- Jedidiah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Harvard University Press, 2015) suggests that we have a hard time making climate change a political issue because invoking the Anthropocene means addressing a policy which is everyone’s fault and no one’s fault about a nature which cannot be returned to a pristine past. Purdy argues that since the Anthropocene collapses the distinction between human nature (politics) and nature, we now have to focus our politics on the human imprint on nature. Environmental regulation since the 1970s has begun to take this into account, but those who fight such regulations invoke an older sense of nature, one in which man was granted dominion and mastery. The next step, Purdy argues, are laws which integrate human work and meaning into an ecological framework. A healthy democracy depends upon democratic self-restraint, the shared sense of sacrifice for a commonweal which includes humankind and nature both.
- In the same vein, Arts of Living On a Damaged Planet: Ghosts & Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) is a collection of essays that look into the strange new landscapes of the Anthropocene, a place alive with ghosts created by modernity — species, nuclear fallout, old perceptions — and monsters, new creations of interspecies and intraspecies socialability. There is an art to these ghosts and monsters, challenging us to unbraid our only-human perceptions — we are not only haunted by our past, we are spooked by the greater world’s possibilities and imaginings. Furthermore, on damaged planet one must expect the weird and unsuspected, and this book is filled with odd new eyes fit for taking in our strange new world.
- Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus The Climate makes a strong case that market fundamentalism — the driver behind our country’s worship of Wall Street, income inequality and the fossil-fuel industry’s NRA-style chokehold on Congress — is the opium America is addicted and the great source of climate change denial. That may be a pretty tall argument for believers in our American economy, but Klein makes a compelling case that without a radical confrontation with these industries and their attempt to destroy the case for climate change in order to protect their destructive engines, we get nothing but more inequality and a drastically worsened climate in the centuries to come. The revolution coming environmental revolution — that coming moment when the impacts of climate change drive political change — will be the force that finally overthrows market fundamentalism.
But we in Florida shouldn’t hold our breath for that moment. Parents of school children in Florida can now legally challenge the teaching of climate science, and the policies of this Republican-dominated state are increasingly divorced from climate reality. And the retirees who vote so solidly Republican content themselves that whatever problems of climate change are coming, they’ll be gone before any of that bites down.
Personally, I’m more than dismayed or outraged about climate change: I’m terrified that the beast we will not name is growing exponentially stronger and wilder, bucking against the fences of denial and do-nothing and about to bust out. And like Ghosh so eloquently put it, when archeologists of a distant age or the aliens who eventually find ruins, they will be amazed how the evidence of this beast will be everywhere except in what we said and did.
If Mount Dora mayor Nick Girone was truly serious in his Earth Day proclamation about protecting our environment for future generations, he needs then to lead the city and its neighbor municipal governments into a substantial and far-reaching commitment to climate change mitigation and sustainability. We have already lost too much time. Our wake-up call began with Andrew in 1992 and then slapped us again with Charley, Jeanne and Francis in 2004. Harvey, Irma, Juan and Maria may be our last call before Frankenstein breaks free of his chains.
Do you remember the small hours of Sept. 11, around 2 a.m. when the winds of Irma were at their height in Mount Dora? A eerie whistling sound as the sky whipped around every house on the block. The darkness total. The fear of losing so much so close. The storm a whispering fragment of the totality which ripped Puerto Rico apart.
When you try to imagine climate change in Mount Dora, start from there.
