On Giving Thanks

Seems a difficult year to practice thankfulness, let alone construct a blog post linking Thanksgiving and climate change, and yet I intend to do both.

I’m using my traditional Thanksgiving post as a starting point, so if you’re a long-time reader (thank you!) some of this will seem familiar, but I’m doing more this time than my traditional slight re-editing. This year has not been much like any year any of us can remember, so why should my holiday posts be?

By the way, I apologize for the lack of image descriptions. WordPress has recently changed how it does things, and I haven’t yet located all the features I normally use. I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

Climate and the Meaning of the Season

“It’s that time of the year again,” warns a cynical-sounding blogger, “when warmists try to link Thanksgiving and climate change.”

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

Nice rhetorical trick, isn’t it? Discrediting us by saying that we’ll even link climate change to Thanksgiving? The truth, of course, is that anything in human life can be linked to climate change, because everything we experience depends on climate somehow. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink, in the wind that may be gentle or catastrophic as occasion allows….Climate is already everywhere, and as it changes, so must everything else.

We “warmists” didn’t make that part up. It’s just physics.

So, yes, I’m writing about Thanksgiving and climate change, as I do every year. But this time I and my laptop face a special challenge—how to write about a holiday at all amid so much anxiety and sadness? There are familiar faces who will be missing from many gatherings on Thursday, some because of caution, some because of tragedy. And we know that any attempt to have a normal Thanksgiving will have tragic consequences.

About half of all Americans do plan to travel for Thanksgiving, a figure that is down from last year but still absurdly high given that we know these gatherings are likely to become super-spreader events. Presumably not all of these travelers are anti-maskers—many have probably taken recent COVID tests in order to assure themselves that they will not bring the virus home. But the inescapable situation is that COVID-19 does not show up on tests until several days after infection, and the contagious period begins before definitive symptoms appear. That means that some percentage of those people heading home with negative test results are actually infected and are likely to become contagious just as they sit down to dinner with medically-vulnerable relatives they don’t otherwise normally see because “hey, it’s Thanksgiving!”

So we’re all in the joyous position of having a choice; we can celebrate a major family holiday more or less alone, or we can risk not only our own health but that of those we love.

Happy Thanksgiving!

But I don’t want to spend today writing all the things I wish weren’t true. Nor do I want to write about how climate change might someday raise the price of turkey feed, nor do I want to offer tips on how to talk about climate change with your cantankerous conservative uncle. Other people, I’m sure, have covered those seasonal topics better than I could.

No, I want to talk about gratitude. I want to tell you about abundance.

What Thanksgiving Isn’t

I want to acknowledge, before we get started, that American Thanksgiving is not a commemoration of the thanksgiving celebrated by the Pilgrims.

The historical proviso matters because an increasing number of people are aware that the happy story of the “first Thanksgiving” is more or less a lie, and it’s a lie that sanitizes and glorifies the relationship between the Pilgrims and the “Indians,” a relationship that was soon betrayed by the Pilgrims and never since made right. So there are those pulling away from the feast of Thanksgiving in much the same spirit that more and more communities are jettisoning Columbus Day. But an important part of the Lie is that the Pilgrims have anything to do with the holiday in the first place.

There is no ceremonial connection—the Pilgrims have never even been mentioned at any Thanksgiving table I’ve ever been at, and that includes several hosted by people outside my family. I rarely hear even any reference to the connection except in educational programming meant for young children. Thanksgiving is about Isn’t It Great We’ve Got a Lot of Food, as well as family, friendship, and either Alice’s Restaurant or football or both. And there is no historical connection, either.

Yes, the Pilgrims had a day of thanksgiving. But days of thanksgiving were relatively common at the time and, like our moments of silence, called for as needed for all sorts of unrelated circumstances. Our modern Thanksgiving Day doesn’t recapitulate their celebration any more than the latest moment of prayerful silence recapitulates any other silent moment.

Photo by 🇨🇭 Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

American Thanksgiving—the annual national holiday—began with a proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. Here is a link to the proclamation text. There is no mention of “Pilgrims and Indians” at all.

My guess is that the “story of the first Thanksgiving” was an attempt to shoehorn a bit of history and patriotism in for the benefit of school children. We should not let some teacher’s regrettable and inaccurate lesson plan dictate to the nation what one of our holidays means.

What Thanksgiving Is

Have you ever thought it strange that we give thanks by eating a lot? If anything, American Thanksgiving sometimes seems more a celebration of greed and gluttony, with a perfunctory discussion of life’s blessings thrown in among the other topics at the table. But gratitude is fundamentally a reaction, not an action–it is very difficult to be grateful as an act of will. The best we can normally do is remind ourselves of what we have to be grateful for, and hope to thereby trigger the feeling.

Surrounding ourselves with an abundance of food is a good way to start.

But what is abundance? It is not merely having a lot of something; “an abundance of dirty dishes” sounds, at best, sarcastic, if not outright ludicrous. And many of us know from sad experience that even a lot of dollars does not count as an abundance if one has big bills coming due.

No, to count as abundance, a thing must be not only desirable but also unlikely to run out—abundance is over-flow, surplus, a notable lack of a certain kind of anxiety.

The Thanksgiving table qualifies. The point isn’t gluttony (though the gluttonous are generally free to indulge), the point is knowing there will be left-overs. It’s having, for one meal at least, the illusion of infinite, inexhaustible richness.

We know it’s an illusion. That’s OK. We get the feeling of inexhaustible goodness anyway. It’s a reminder of how love feels, how being blessed feels—how life itself feels for those who cultivate a grateful heart.

Thanksgiving is an exercise.

Gratitude Within Limits

Of course, there is no such thing as a truly infinite resource; use enough of anything for long enough and eventually you will run out. Even “renewable” resources run out if they are used faster than they can renew. Indeed, we are quickly running out of precious things that once seemed limitless—elephants, for example, or clean water.

Is consumption really the best way to celebrate anything right now?

Yes.

Because the infinite table of Thanksgiving has always been an illusion, and it’s an illusion that can be performed on a very strict budget, as many families know. The holiday is, in fact, proof that the feeling of abundance, of richness, of plenty, does not depend on waste or profligacy—it depends on careful attention to real needs and real limitations. It depends on working within reality.

We need, as a species, to start working within reality. We need to, collectively, use less. But we don’t need to give up abundance.

Thanksgiving Yet to Come

This year, we can still cultivate a grateful heart, but only in the face of want and fear. To varying degrees, there are things we want, need, and do not have. If our bellies are full, our holiday tables are not. That’s real.

The progressive loss of all that makes life possible and beautiful on our planet is also real. Killer hurricanes. Monster fires. Impending extinctions. Famine and the political instability it causes. And, yes, pandemic. They are all symptoms of a problem we understand fairly well by now; the human species is using too much energy, thanks to our harnessing of fossil fuels, and we are destabilizing the planet.

Pulling out of this nose-dive will require tightening our belts and changing our tune, and while the burden can and should be borne mostly by those who can best afford to do so, any transition is unsettling, and we will have to collectively acknowledge limits we are used to ignoring.

But if we can pull this off, if we can stop our slide into planetary entropy, the biosphere will grow. The forests will spread. The animals will multiply. And it is possible, just possible, that our descendants will live to see a more bountiful feast than we ever will.

And that will truly be something to be thankful for.

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Caring One Iota

Introducing, for the first time, Hurricane Iota.

My introductions are belated, of course. The storm has existed for some days, and the people of Central America are unfortunately rather familiar with it by now—it made landfall last night, sweeping across Nicaragua just as Hurricane Eta did a few days ago. In satellite pictures, the storm looks bigger than Nicaragua and Honduras combined.

The “first time” part is not that this is the first introduction, but this is the first Hurricane Iota. If there have ever before been 30 Atlantic tropical cyclones, not all 30 of them were all spotted and named (until recent decades, storms that didn’t make landfall could be missed), and it’s possible this is the first 30^th storm.

Climate change is involved, of course, especially considering that Iota, too, engaged in “rapid intensification,” a technical term that means more or less exactly what it sounds like. The phenomenon used to be fairly rare, but Iota is the ninth Atlantic storm to do it this year so far.

I say “so far” deliberately. The official hurricane season has almost two weeks more to run—and that only refers to when such storms typically form. I’m no meteorologist, but I don’t think this is going to become a typical year any time soon. Do you?

Biography of a Hurricane

I want to make clear how quickly this thing grew and how strong it got. I’m consulting the Wikipedia article, which is still being frequently edited because the storm still exists and the story keeps changing. I don’t usually use Wikipedia as a source, but detailed information on hurricanes on more reputable sites tends not to be archived–their focus tends to be on prediction, not history.

Anyway, check this out:

• November 10, midnight (Nicaraguan time), a tropical wave enters the Eastern Caribbean. The next day, it starts getting organized.
• November 13, 11AM, the system is recognized as a tropical depression (the 31^st of the year).
• November 13, 3 PM, recognized as a tropical storm (the 30^th of the year) meaning wind speeds above 35 MPH. About a day later, rapid intensification begins.
• November 15, midnight, recognized as hurricane status (wind speed above 74 mph).
• November 15, 6 PM, recognized as Category 2 status (wind speed above 96 mph)
• November 16, midnight, recognizes as Category 3 status (wind speed above 111 mph)
• November 16, 12:40 PM, reaches Category 4 (wind speed above 130 mph)
• November, 16, 11 AM, reaches Category 5, with winds of 160 mph.
• November 17, 9:40 PM, as a Category 4, with winds of 155 mph, the eye makes landfall just 15 miles away from where Hurricane Eta had 14 days earlier.
• November 17, noon, as a strong tropical storm over Honduras with sustained wind speeds of 65 mph and gusts up to 90 mph. Tropical-storm force winds (at least 35 mph) extend out from the center 175 miles

A few things to note, here. First, yes, Iota weakened slightly as it made landfall—the eye did not come ashore as a Cat 5, as it seemed for a while it would do. However, the definition of a Cat 5 storm is sustained winds of 157 mph or more, so 155 mph is really not a whole lot less. Second, these are maximum sustained wind speeds—gusts much stronger are possible within the storm. Third, wind speed is only one of a hurricane’s variables, and I have not tracked down information on the others. This is not a complete picture. Fourth, where I write “recognized as,” it’s because I suspect from the way the source article was written that that’s when meteorologists conformed the storm’s wind speed, but the storm could have intensified somewhat earlier. Fifth, noon today is not necessarily when the storm was downgraded, it’s when the most recent report quoted on Wikipedia was issued—it may have been downgraded somewhat earlier. Sixth and finally, I know that “Iota’s not a hurricane anymore” sounds like the storm’s all over, but 65 mph is not much below hurricane status, and the fact that it’s still that strong almost 12 hours after making landfall and passing over mountains—I’m not a meteorologist, so I don’t know how rare that is, but, I dunno, I’m impressed.

The thing you have to understand is that Hurricane Eta passed over some of the same territory with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph just two weeks ago. That means that many of the people who faced Iota last night did so with no roofs on their houses.

Last night, Dan Satterfield, the weatherman I interviewed a while back and whose Facebook page I check out regularly, posted the following:

“Pressure dropped 61 mb in Hurricane Iota in 24 hours. Cat 5 hurricane and will hit Nicaragua tonight. Damage will be catastrophic. Anyone near the ocean will drown.”

Anyone near the ocean will drown. Oh, those poor people.

An Iota of Climate Change

There’s no new news about the relationship between hurricanes and climate change—climate change is making these storms average stronger, slower-moving, faster-growing, and rainier, plus sea-level rise adds several inches to every storm-surge. We know this already. What Iota gives us is a very clear picture of what climate change does to people.

There’s little to no news coming out of the storm-zone yet, but certain things are obvious based on what we knew before the storm hit.

We know huge numbers of people are displaced, evacuated not just from coastal areas but from mountains where the heavy rains make landslides a serious possibility. We know the damage in at least parts of the storm track has been catastrophic, meaning that many of the displaced will not be able to return home for a very long time and will have to live somewhere, somehow, until then. We know these are small countries, small enough that there really won’t be anywhere that wasn’t effected by the storm, although there are areas that are not devastated. That, plus the fact that neither Nicaragua nor Honduras nor El Salvador are wealthy, means that recovery will be difficult. We know that both Nicaragua and Honduras have lost much of their crops, which means a regional food crisis is developing. We know that these are countries already hurting under waves of drought and flood due to climate change—climate is one of the reasons the region has been sending so many desperate refugees to the United States. And we know that the area where Iota came ashore, Miskito, has a large population of Indigenous and Black people (racial politics vary from country to country but descendants of slaves still bear sadly familiar stigma), meaning that once again the burden of climate change falls heaviest on the already vulnerable.

And we know that everybody impacted by Hurricane Iota is also coping with a global pandemic.

Oh, those poor people.

Don’t Blame 2020

It’s become popular to speak of all the woes of 2020 as though the year were somehow cursed, as though the fact that it is 2020 explains all the weird things going on, like an incredibly long Friday the 13^th. Funny, we said the same thing about 2019 and 2018.

Of course, rationally we know no such curses exist. There is nothing magical about this year that makes it weird. Instead, we’re suffering from a number of problems—problems epidemiological, problems meteorological, problems political—that pre-dated this year and will continue after 2020 is over. The really interesting thing, though, is that we’re not looking at bad luck, here, or, at least not only bad luck. For the most part, we’re looking at climate change.

No, COVID-19 is not, strictly speaking, a matter of climate, but it is related, as I’ve discussed before. This ridiculous Atlantic hurricane season is a result of many factors, but climate change is one of them. The catastrophic fire seasons across much of the world over the past year or so also are the result of multiple factors including climate, as were the locust plagues. And the political shift towards nationalism and autocracy seen in many countries in recent years, including the United States, has multiple connections to climate, such as resentment and fear triggered by economic issues caused or worsened by climate and resentment and fear triggered by massive waves of refugees also sent moving by multiple causes including climate (not to mention the panic on the part of oligarchs deeply invested in the fossil fuel industry).

Some of these connections may seem a bit of a stretch. The reader may wonder if I’m perhaps reaching, overstating my case. I am not. I am not trying to argue that climate change is a simple, all-pervasive cause. Instead, I’m suggesting that we may be looking as systemic collapse.

I’ve described before how complex systems that are stressed by loss of energy, become increasingly unstable. I’ve also described how climate change itself is only one symptom of systemic instability caused by energy loss—the withdrawal and use of the energy embedded in fossil fuels. What I’m saying now is that the instability that has been academically obvious for years has now intensified to the point where it is viscerally clear.

The biosphere—including all human societies and the climate—are in what’s technically known as an entropic state. An organism (also a kind of complex system) in an entropic state is sick, aging, or dying. To say that the biosphere is dying is not quite accurate (it will outlive the crisis, though in a much-altered state, and possibly without us), but it’s not quite inaccurate, either. Nor is it a metaphor. Rather, organisms such as ourselves have certain structural similarities as ecosystems, societies, biospheres, and other complex systems, and we all have certain patterns and processes in common—and “dying” is the organism version of the same process the biosphere as a whole is going through now.

I’ve had occasion to watch the process of dying—several pets and several humans. I can tell you that the end stages of entropic states get weird. That’s weird as in strange, as startlingly unfamiliar symptoms develop in those heading out into unknown territory—my cat’s nose shrank, the night before she died. My dog’s breath suddenly smelled of urine. My other dog’s breath turned cold, actually cold. I will not tell you of my sister’s and brother-in-law’s deaths. But there is weirdness in the sense of disconcerting, too. In a way, the unfamiliar symptoms are familiar, we recognize them atavistically, know what they mean, and recoil.

The joking about the weirdness of 2020 suggests something similar to me. It suggests the human recognition and horror of an endgame.

Climate action now.

Waiting for the Hurricane

It’s eight days till the election, meaning that this is the last pre-election post for this blog.

Eight days from today is another Tuesday, of course, so I might be expected to post on election day itself, but honestly I will probably spend next Tuesday hiding under a rock trying not to have anxiety attacks. I’ve decided my reading public will be better served if I put off next week’s post a few days—it’s likely we will not get definitive results for many races, including the presidential race, on election night, and possibly not for several days (or weeks or months) afterwards, but by Wednesday or Thursday there should at least be enough information to know whether another climate politics post is in order, or if I can go on to other topics with a clear conscience.

Author, Joan Maloof has agreed to an interview, I’m excited to announce.

In the meantime, there are some things to say.

Vote Early and….

Does this one need saying again? I’ve said it before here and here and here. But I’m saying it again anyway. If you are an American citizen and have not yet voted, do so. If you need help getting to the polls or figuring out how to do an absentee ballot, or with any other issue, there are groups to help you. Prepare yourself to deal with any trouble you may encounter—come armed with your rights and with the contact information of those willing to help you defend your rights. If your identity or your registration are challenged when you go to vote, demand a provisional ballot—they have to give you one. If you are in line at the polling place before the place is scheduled to close, they have to let you in to vote, no matter how long it takes.

Help your neighbors vote. Help your community members vote. Not only is voting in general important, but in this election it seems likely that left-leaning citizens out-number right-leaning citizens, and that the results of the election will depend on getting as many people as possible to vote. As I’ve said before, a Democrat vote is a climate vote, and vice versa—I look forward to the day when this country has genuine political diversity on this issue, when there is a real conversation between different approaches to the problem, and when voters who disagree on the other issues important to our nation can at least agree on the need for climate action. But that day has not arrived yet.

If you despise everything else the Democrats stand for, hold your nose and vote Democrat just this once because everything else you care about won’t be around much longer if we don’t deal with climate change and fast.

My post last week included links to a bunch of election-related volunteer opportunities. You can see that post and its links again here.

Please help.

Call Your Senators

Frankly, I’m nervous. I worry that this election could be stolen through voter suppression, or possibly even through fraud, or that the long time it is likely to take to count the votes—together with the fact that initial returns are likely to favor Republicans because Democrats are disproportionately using mail-in ballots—may provide an opening for certain people to cast doubt on the results and cause serious trouble. I am worried, in other words, that the Trump campaign is not going to play fair.

Maybe you think I’m being paranoid. Maybe you trust Donald Trump and his supporters and disagree with him only on climate. I’m not going to argue with you here. This blog is non-partizan space, my worries notwithstanding. But taking steps to ensure a smooth transition of power will at least do no harm.

Look, it’s like tornado plans.

Tornadoes are very rare, where I live, and the few we’ve had in the region in my lifetime have mostly been very weak. This isn’t Kansas, Toto. In fact, the only reason that my husband and I discussed our tornado plan, years ago, was that I am paranoid about natural disasters, and kind of obsessed with tornadoes. I mentioned the fact soon after I moved in, and Chris mentioned that the thing to do if there was a tornado would be to retreat to the guest bathroom, since it has no windows, and to bring the dogs and cats in there with us. I agreed. We had our plan. And so, when we were woken in the middle of the night by a tornado warning, we knew what to do and wasted no time.

We’ve followed our plan three times, now, and at least once a tornado did touch down not far away, but our house still hasn’t been hit. Hopefully, it will never be.

But for us to get hit is possible. And if it happens, having a plan and being able to follow it quickly and efficiently could save our lives—and in the meantime having the plan will save us from panicking and creating our own problems, should the warning go off again.

So, with that in mind, today I called my Senators and said (to their staff members) that I want to know what the tornado plan is.

Even if it is highly unlikely that Donald Trump and his team will attempt to steal an election that they do not win fairly, even if the Senators are confident that our democratic (little “d”) systems will work, I want to know that there is a plan in place in case something goes wrong.

I want to know that they are thinking carefully about what to do if the unthinkable happens.

I suggest you call your Senators (call, and speak yourself to staffers, you’ll have more impact than an email message) and ask them what their emergency plan to save American democracy is. Making sure they have a plan now—before the election—can’t hurt, will at least prevent confusion and panic if things start looking bad, and could make a real difference if the worst case scenario does play out.

About that Hurricane

I named this post “waiting for the hurricane” because this quiet time of uncertain preparation does have certain things in common with battening down before a literal storm—and remember, I’ve been talking metaphorically about tornado plans, but two out of the three times we’ve used our literal tornado plan were during Tropical Storm Isaias.

But I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that parts of the Gulf Coast are currently bracing for a very real hurricane—Zeta is re-intensifying to hurricane strength as we speak, and much of the area in and around the Mississippi Delta is under a hurricane warning. Again.

“Zeta” is a Greek letter, not a name, since we’ve had so many named storms this year we’ve run out of names. The use of Greek letters is rare, and this is only the second time it’s happened—a fact that is slightly less stark than it seems, because for the first few decades of naming storms there were no weather satellites, meaning some storms may have been missed. It’s possible there were years with unusually large numbers of storms and we just didn’t know. But we have had satellite tracking for a while, now, so mega-years like this are unusual, and when I was a kid they didn’t happen—I remember that the idea of just getting to near the end of the alphabet sounded strange and apocalyptic.

This is the second Zeta storm we’ve had, and the first one, in 2005, formed in late December. That means we’re running two months behind the previous most-active Atlantic storm season in history, and that’s after we lost a month or so to that plume of African dust, which tamped down storm activity for a while.

If I lived on the Gulf Coast, I’d be pretty interested in securing meaningful climate action about now.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: At Least the Rotation Will Be.

I dreamed last night.

I dreamed that my mother hand rented a lovely house in which to throw a party for the whole family and then some. It was larger than her home, though with a smaller yard, with a creek running right out back. My sister was there, and some girls I went to school with, and a little baby who so wanted to examine the ivy on the wall, so I lefted her up and she grabbed  some ivy at stuffed it in her mouth. I pulled it out again, and when some busy-body told the baby “you must never play with plants, it’s too dangerous, play inside,” I said no, you go ahead and play with plants. You go ahead and grow up to be a geek, like me.

I dreamed.

I dreamed that someone told me my dog, Una, had gotten away and they’d had to leave her at the shopping center. I went outside to look for her, but the park was full of extremely long cows. I looked out the back door and saw that it had begun to rain. I hoped I’d get to see the moment that the creek began to rise. I’ve always loved beginnings.

I dreamed.

The creek expanded to fill its banks brown and muddy, and it kept on coming. I wondered if we would be flooded. I looked around, thinking how to prepare, then realized the creek was indeed flooding in, seeping slowly under the doors. I ran around picking up small objects that might float, cleaning up trash, trying to warn the others at the party, get them to help, but no one could hear me. No one was listening.

I dreamed.

Because no one was listening, I could no longer speak. I’d lost the self-confidence to even try to make myself heard. The party continued around me and I stood at the sink, whimpering a little, hoping someone would notice and care, but no one did, and I wasn’t even sure anymore if I wanted them to. They’d yell at me for whimpering, for being so pathetic, so needy. I’ve always been such a bother to everyone.

I dreamed.

I dreamed that the recollection of my dog gave me back my voice, though not much else. My dog, Una, was out in that storm somewhere, perhaps lost. I had to find her, and I had to drive, because she was so very far away, and the storm was so violent. I had no car. I’d come with my mother. I asked if I could drive hers, but she said I could not, something about it being a rental and the insurance. Could I ask my dad? Sudden;y I wasn’t even sure I could drive, cars had become so complicated, all manual transmissions, all weird, convoluted controls. I needed a car, I needed to go save my dog, but no one would help me, and no one would hear me about the flood slowly seeping across the living room floor.

I awoke.

I awoke and tried to remind myself I had no reason to be so anxious, I didn’t need to go find Una, she wasn’t missing. She was dead. She died almost a year ago. And my sister died just over a year ago. And while the party wasn’t exactly happening, the tornado warning that had woken me was real.

Isaias had arrived.

The “I” Storm

Photo by Valentin Müller on Unsplash

For those who either don’t know or who are reading this post long after the fact and have forgotten, Isaias is the name of a tropical cyclone that made landfall last night as a Category 1 hurricane, tracked overland, weakened to a strong tropical storm, and moved more or less right over top of me–the eye passed just to our west, moving up the Chesapeake Bay and making a second landfall near where my in-laws live, and then hitting my mother right…about….now.

Of course, these storms are pretty big, so the entire experience lasts eight hours or so, no matter where the eye happens to be.

The name, Isaias, is Spanish, and it got attached to this storm in recognition that Spanish speakers get his by tropical cyclones, too. American English speakers fall all over it, of course, not because we find it difficult to pronounce (“ees-ah-EE-ahs”) but because we find it difficult and intimidating to read. The same thing happens to my last name, which is also easy to pronounce yet trips everybody up (“uh-LAN-thus”). Anyway, my husband started calling it the I-Storm. It’s a good epithet, for a storm that has an eye.

What We Experienced

We’re all alright now, and the sun is shining, but things were pretty hairy there, for a while. We got all our hatches battened down last night and went to bed, knowing the storm would move in as we slept. I expected to wake to the sound of rain. We did not. Instead we woke around five-thirty to the tone of the tornado warning of my husband’s pager (he’s a firefighter). The day had not yet dawned, and the air was utterly still, utterly silent, in a way that you’d think would be comforting at such times but isn’t.

The warning was for the southern part of our county, though, not us. I persuaded our second cat to come inside

Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash

while Chris checked the radar on his phone, and we went back to sleep. The wind started to pick up.

When the tornado warning woke us up the second time, day had come. We were busy discussing whether this one a  threat to us when Chris’ mother called to tell us to take shelter. We obeyed her and gathered both dogs, both cats (did I mention one of our cats hates the dogs?) and my laptop into the guest bathroom and huddled there listening in to the county’s emergency response communications as a tornado touched down in a nearby town, setting off electrical fires. We later learned that was the fourth confirmed tornado in our region from Isaias. There would be two more, to our north.

When the warning expired at eight, we left the bathroom and went about our morning. Small branches broke off our trees and rattled on the roof. Martha  meowed to go outside and I explained to her why she should not. She meowed again and again. Percy curled up in a safe little nest under a table. He’d been panting from fear in the bathroom. Reilly lay on the floor looking worried. He doesn’t like odd noises. Kizzy slept. Kizzy could sleep through a hurricane. Chris turned on the local weather report–broadcasting in crisis-mode, of course–so he could stay abreast of the latest developments, while I puttered around the kitchen, frustrated to the depths of my geeky soul that the reception kept cutting out whenever they started explaining something sciency.

As the eye came up even with us and the maps on TV showed the storm clouds clearing off, the wind picked up, launching a series of gusts that leaned our trees over harder than I’ve ever seen them. Bigger-sounding branches fell nearby, and distant trees made odd noises. For the first time since we’d left the bathroom, I got scared. The weather people had told us to take this storm seriously, that although it would hit us as only a tropical storm, it would not be like the tropical storms we were used to–they normally pass us to our east, but this one passing to our west would put us on the “dirty side” and would be a whole different ball-game. The swarm of tornadoes we got was certainly new for us, but it was predicted, but these late big gusts were a surprise–I don’t know the numbers on those gusts, but I can tell you that nether Irene nor Sandy did anything comparable in our neck of the woods. Apparently, nearby Ocean City was getting some heavy winds, too, sustaining heavy damage. The weather people admitted surprise–apparently it was something called a “sting jet” that doesn’t usually happen in tropical systems.

Go figure.

By early afternoon though, the wind had fallen off to a gentle bluster, and the sun had come out. It’s a gorgeous day, now.

What the Weather People Said

A few weeks ago, I wrote, among other things, that it’s important to notice the experts we rely on–and to notice them as individuals. I wrote about huddling in the bathroom during a tornado warning, anxiously watching for updates by an on-air meteorologist, and later not remembering who that was. That seemed wrong to me. Accordingly, this time I paid attention.

While huddling in the bathroom we were not watching a person, merely the work of one or more persons, as warning boxes appeared and disappeared on the online map. However, afterwards, watching TV, those were people, people who looked distinctly worried, people standing closer to the path of the eye than we were, people whose families may have been huddled in a guest bathroom at that moment, for all I know. Of course, they were all very professional about it.

Of course, one of them was Dan Satterfield, whom I have interviewed, and noticing a person I have interacted with, however briefly, comes naturally, but I also payed attention to his colleagues on-air and enjoyed noticing them work as a team–the complexity they all had to be keeping track of, monitoring various streams of information while simultaneously performing live on TV, was impressive (lots of weather teams do the same, of course; it’s still impressive). All of them had that focused, high-energy manner of people on deck in a storm real or metaphorical, and I imagine they were all having a great deal of fun, the sort of fun you don’t really notice until after the fact, in retrospect, when you know that nobody died on your watch after all.

(Isaias did kill at least one person in the Carolinas and another in New York, but I have not yet heard whether there were any fatalities in WBOC’s listening area)

Just before we finally lost patience with the terrible reception–a byproduct of the storm, of course–they said that something about Isaias was weird besides its name. I could not hear what the weird thing was. Maybe it was the sting jet. Maybe it was something else, or the sting jet and something else together. I keep checking social media, hoping for some elaboration there, but there has been nothing. I suspect they’re all at home now, asleep.

It’s been a long, difficult day.

Climate Change?

Of course I’m not just telling you about my day. This here is a climate story. I am not yet aware of any particular climate connection for Isaias, some way that it is better than your average tropical cyclone for telling the climate story–although the aforementioned “weirdness” may turn out to be relevant.

All tropical cyclones are pretty good climate stories, but I’ve told those stories already, here, here, here, and here.

Mr. Satterfield said, in our interview, that “climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” Some of our climate expectations involve tropical cyclones, and today we got one. It’s worth noticing.

But I was also very struck, and not for the first time, by the urge to watch reality unfold on television. Yes, there was a practical element to wanting to watch the coverage, and yes, watching the team explain things would have been fun had I gotten better reception, but there is also a sense of being more connected, more in control, if one is getting the latest news on a thing. There is even some element whereby reality gets realer if seen on TV.

How much of reality gets on TV?

Mr. Satterfield mentioned climate change on social media relative to Isaias–someone had asked about the storm surge, and he responded by saying it wouldn’t be bad, but worse than it otherwise would have been without climate change. He’s good at calling a spade a spade, when the subject of digging comes up. But otherwise I haven’t seen the topic come up much of late. although it’s clearly relevant to both storms and to COVID-19.

What I’d like to see is a BIG climate march, the kind we’ve had before, the kind that gets LOTS of media attention, the kind that reminds us and our elected leaders that we care. Why isn’t this happening? Why are big climate marches no longer being organized in the US? For years there have been only small, local events that don’t get the coverage, or bigger, dramatic events that involve activists getting arrested–and therefore only draw those people comfortable getting arrested. Why? We need to get the revolution back on television.

Because as easy as it is to mock the televising impulse, and as genuinely questionable it sometimes is, societal self-reflection is a legitimate function of television. It’s part of how we interpret the world to ourselves.

Think of how it actually feels to watch, say, televised storm coverage?

It’s practically useful, of course. Climate change is an emergency, and just as in any emergency it’s helpful to have someone on TV explaining the scope of the problem and how and when to respond. But it’s also comforting to be told you’re not alone–it’s not just the weather people and the reporters, it’s the people they tell us about, the other people out there also getting wet, also getting blown around, also cowering in their guest bathrooms. It’s comforting to be told yes, you’re right, this is big. It’s comforting to be told you’re not a fool to be afraid.

You’re not a fool to want to take action, and there are other people taking this seriously, too.

We need to get the revolution back on television, because sometimes I feel like the water is rising, something or someone important is missing and needs help, and no one is listening to me.

 

The Real Plague Problem

I’m one of those people who reads randomly when I’m bored. That is, I don’t go looking for a good book, I just go looking for a book, and I read a few pages from the middle and then go on my way. Lately, my favored book of randomness has been In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made, by Norman F. Cantor. I read it through, beginning to end, some years ago, so my recent random reading is simply reacquainting me with material I already knew.

Only this time, I’m reading it in the middle of a modern pandemic.

I can’t say that I recommend the book. Despite its history on the New York Times bestseller list, it’s not well-written; all too often, it’s hard to tell what point the author is trying to make. For example, I can’t tell whether, in chapter eight, he is seriously advancing the idea that the black death was caused by cosmic dust or merely reporting the quackery as historically interesting. Such uncertainty makes the book hard to trust.

And yet.

Consequences in the 14th Century

Photo by Kuma Kum on Unsplash

The overall theme of Wake of the Plague is that the Black Death had a huge and mostly (not entirely) negative effect on European society, but not the one that most of us think it did.

Most casual discussions (and some scholarly treatments) of that era focus on sweeping statements of generalized cause and effect, such as the idea that the vast biomedical disaster created a gloomy, fear-based culture obsessed with death. For the most part, Dr. Cantor rejects such generalizations, pointing out that the large-scale cultural shifts at the time were mostly underway before the Black Death happened. A few wide-spread reactions occurred, such as a great deal of anti-Semitic violence, but most of the changes were individual or economic, not societal and cultural.

For example, one of the people who died was a scholar whose work anticipated the scientific revolution in certain ways. Had he lived several decades longer, it’s possible that revolution could have come several centuries earlier. Likewise, the deaths of several members of the nobility reshuffled the political landscape in ways that had long-term consequences.

What I found especially intriguing was the claim that the economic repercussions of the plague were largely delayed for a generation (at least in Great Britain, where Dr. Cantor’s focus lay). The initial loss of part of the work-force was largely absorbed because unemployment had been high before the plague–but afterwards there was no “give” left in the system, so that subsequent disease outbreaks, crop failures, and social convulsions all become much more serious than they would have been otherwise.

There were also plague-triggered changes that were simply very slow to play out. Apparently, the gentry–a social class between the peasants ad the nobility–had a serious problem with widows. Prior to the plague outbreak, most men would lose a wife to death in childbirth and then remarry several times. As a result, there weren’t very many widows, and even fewer of them had any real connection to the dead man’s male heirs. Inheritance law therefore forced widows out of the family but gave them a generous severance package. During plague outbreaks, however, male mortality either equaled or exceeded female mortality producing lots of widows–sometimes a father, son, and grandson would all die of the plague together, leaving three widows who left the family taking huge chunks of its income with them. Decades of either paying off widows or paying lawyers to try to avoid paying widows destroyed many family fortunes either directly or by leaving them unable to cope with later challenges.

Several themes emerge:

1. The plague did not change “society;” it killed people. The historical impact of those deaths was individual and unpredictable.

2. Right after the plague was over, the survivors would have said “Wow, that was terrible, but not much has changed.” They wouldn’t have known that in a way the plague was not over, that it would continue to remake society for decades.

3. The biggest impact of the plague was that it impaired society’s ability to deal with other problems, such as crop failures and war.

Is any of this sounding familiar yet?

Consequences in the 21st Century

There are a lot of differences between the Black Death and COVID-19. We face a much lower mortality rate, but our society is much more vulnerable to disruption. We have a much better chance of finding effective treatments soon, but infection–and news about the infection–travels much more quickly. Our experts understand the disease much more clearly, but misinformation is widespread as well.

But certain dynamics can be expected to remain the same.

Whatever we fear or hope COVID-19 will do to society probably isn’t doing to happen. We’ll get a vaccine, hopefully combined with effective public health policies in the United States and other hold-out countries, and the pandemic will simmer down to occasional and promptly dealt-with local outbreaks. Many of us will walk around saying “see? Nothing’s changed. It WAS a hoax!” And yet everything will be subtly and gradually different–forever.

The worst thing will not be the number of people who died but the people who died, and what might have happened if they had not.

The other worst thing is and will remain our increased vulnerability to other problems–which is why I’m talking about all this in a climate change blog.

Texas just got hit by the season’s first hurricane. Rescue and relief efforts have been complicated by the fact that Texas is also a COVID-19 hot-spot. This will not be our season’s last hurricane, and the fact that parts of the Atlantic are ridiculously hot right now does not bode well–it’s not that we’ll necessarily get a lot of hurricanes, it’s that those we do get will be worse. All this hot water is not a coincidence; it’s a clear and present symptom of climate change, and it is dangerous. Suppose we get a monster this year, like Sandy or Harvey or Katrina. Suppose it slams into a city simultaneously experiencing a big COVID-19 flare-up. Where will the casualties of the storm go? How will people socially-distance in evacuee shelters?

We’re also in the middle of a big heat wave. Heat kills more people than all other kinds of natural disasters combined, plus it exacerbates whatever human rights problems and violence happen to be going on at the time. All this hot air isn’t a coincidence, either, it, too, is a sign and symptom of climate change, and it, too, is being complicated by COVID-19.

Look, I don’t want to sensationalize any of this. It’s the real world, not a Michael Bay movie.

Excerpt from xkcd, by Randal Munroe https://xkcd.com/748/

My point is not that we’re facing some dramatic attack of all four horsemen of the Apocalypse, my point is that we’ve got to remember that none of our issues is happening in isolation. It’s not part of the reason we’ve got to deal with climate change is that it’s one of the things that’s going to make the wake of COVID worse.

 

 

But It’s May!

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

So, there’s a tropical storm out in the Atlantic.

Or, at least there was one recently; the storm named Arthur (not to be confused with other storms named Arthur in recent years). Although Arthur itself was not especially destructive and never achieved hurricane status, it’s remarkable in that hurricane season won’t actually start for another week and a half. It’s May, a time of year when the Atlantic Ocean is supposedly too cold still to feed this kind of storm.

So, this here is a slam-dunk bit of evidence of climate change, right?

Well, it is and it isn’t.

Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season

(Yes, I titled this section with the name of a Jimmy Buffet song. You can go hear the song here)

Six years ago, I wrote a post on hurricanes and climate change that did a good job of explaining certain basics. Otherwise unattributed quotes come from that post.

Defining Terms

“Hurricane” technically refers to only one subset of a whole category of storms that share the same structure.

“Tropical cyclone” is the generic term that covers tropical storms, hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones. All these storms have a distinct eye and draw their energy from the evaporation of water, rather than from temperature differences between adjacent air masses as extra-tropical cyclones do.

“Tropical storm” refers to a tropical cyclone with sustained winds of anywhere from 39 MPH to 74 MPH. Once a storm intensifies to 75 MPH or beyond, it is called a typhoon in the Northwest Pacific, a cyclone in the South Pacific or the Indian Ocean, and a hurricane everywhere else. I have not found any explanation for this diversity of names for the same kind of storm. Perhaps it is a relic from a time before we knew they were all the same.

So what we normally call the hurricane season should be called the tropical cyclone season–after all, Arthur wasn’t a hurricane, but its formation outside of the season still attracts attention.

Each storm basin has its own season. In the North Atlantic, the season officially runs from June 1st to November 30th, but tropical cyclones outside of those dates in other parts of the world aren’t necessarily remarkable.

Introducing Arthur

Photo by Shashank Sahay on Unsplash

On May 16th, 2020, a large, multi-day rainstorm in the Florida Strait was recognized as a tropical depression, meaning it had an eye and drew its energy  from the evaporation of water. It was thus the first tropical cyclone of the 2020 North Atlantic season. A few hours later, its sustained winds topped 39 MPH, making it a tropical storm. It was given the name Arthur–every tropical storm found in the North Atlantic gets a name from an alphabetized list of alternating male and female names, so the first storm of this year would have been named Arthur no matter when it occurred. Each list gets re-used every six years (indeed, I remember being rained on by the last Arthur), although the names of particularly notable storms are retired. There will never be another Katrina, for example.

This year’s Arthur moved north as its winds intensified to around 50 mph. It did not make landfall but brushed the Outer Banks before heading further out to sea and then, oddly, turning south towards Bermuda. On May 19th, the storm’s designation was changed to “post-tropical cyclone,” as it was no longer gaining strength from evaporating water. However, a storm does not need to be tropical or dangerous, and Arthur’s story is not necessarily over yet, as of this writing.

Unseasonable Storms

Arthur is not the first North Atlantic tropical cyclone to occur in May. In fact, tropical cyclones can form in the Atlantic any month of the year–and have. Hurricane season is not a law of physics but rather a rule of thumb; meteorologists, government officials, tourist agents, and anyone else who needs to think about the likelihood of hurricanes know it’s best to keep an eye out from June through the end of November. The occasional unseasonal storm doesn’t change the pattern, especially since out-of-season storms are usually weak and rarely make landfall.

But this is the sixth year in a row that the first named storm has occurred before June 1st.

2016 was particularly odd, as it ha two pre-season named storms, the first an actual January hurricane. But over the past 17 years, nine have had at least one pre-season North Atlantic tropical cyclone.

We’re at the point where meteorologists are starting to talk seriously about extending the season, though the change hasn’t been formally proposed, yet. The arguments for and against are interesting in several different ways.

The argument for is fairly clear; if tropical cyclones often form in May, then shouldn’t the season start in May?

The arguments against are several:

• We don’t know yet that May storms are actually typical. We could have a few unusual years in a row by chance, in which case we could next have a decade or so of late first storms. In that case, an earlier start to the official season will be both silly and confusing.
• It’s possible that May storms are typical, and have always been typical, we just didn’t notice most of them until we started tracking storms using satellites. The early storms we see these days tend to be weak and of short duration, and they don’t often make landfall, meaning that there could have been lots of similar May and even April storms in the past that nobody knew about.  The point of having a hurricane season has never been to include all months when tropical cyclones can happen–nobody is proposing extending the season to include January and December. The point is to include the months when these storms are likely to become problems. Maybe May storms aren’t usually problems.
• If we changed the hurricane season, someone might think climate change is real.

More on that last point shortly.

Climate Politics?

In an article about Tropical Storm Arthur and other early storms, the Florida Sun Sentinel recently quoted a meteorologist as saying he could understand not wanting to change the season “because you’d suddenly get all these existential political arguments about oh they’re just doing that because of climate change or something.”

A Closer Look at Cons

At first glance, that quote about not changing hurricane season dates really does sound climate-denial-ish, and in fact I don’t know that it isn’t meant that way. I can believe there are those who don’t want to change the season because they don’t want to appear to believe in climate change. But I don’t know that this meteorologist meant it that way–and that’s why I’m not including his name here. You can find his name in two seconds by clicking on the link to the article, but it’s possible the article takes his words out of context.

Climate change is real, but it’s difficult to demonstrate that fact using hurricane data alone.

Tropical cyclone records are being studied, but the problem is the data are “noisy.” That is, there are so many variations that are not related to the greenhouse effect that it’s hard to spot the variations that are….Some of the noise in tropical cyclone data is the natural variability in storminess from year to year. Normally scientists can tune out such noise by looking at a large enough dataset. The basic procedure is to let random variations cancel themselves out–years with a lot of hurricanes are balanced by years with very few, if you look at enough years. What variation doesn’t get cancelled out is actually the climate changing.

But with tropical cyclones that standard procedure doesn’t work very well because there are problems with the data:

• We don’t have good records of tropical cyclones before the Industrial Revolution. Scientists only started realizing that some large storms are spirals around 1820. Modern weather forecasting based on networks of weather stations didn’t begin until the 1860’s and most of the technology used to monitor hurricanes was only invented in the 20th century.  It’s hard to do a before-and-after comparison if you have no “before” shot.
• The United States has been conducting aerial reconnaissance on hurricanes for decades, but since similar flights into typhoons have stopped, the data on storms in different parts of the world are not directly comparable.  That makes it hard to really get a global picture.
• A lot of research on tropical cyclones is done by satellite, especially in the Pacific, but satellites are a relatively new technology so, again, we don’t have a good picture of how storms change over time.
• Which information we get about which storm is a little random. For example, getting a measurement of a storm’s highest winds at landfall depends on getting the right instrumentation into the right part of the storm at the right time. For obvious reasons, that doesn’t always happen.
• The conventions on how researchers analyze data and how they make estimates can change, subtly but definitely changing the numbers they record.

Scientists can and do work around these limitations, but they can’t make the limitations vanish.

And while it seems like a no-brainer that a warmer world will have more tropical cyclones, hot water is not the only requirement for storm formation; certain atmospheric conditions are also necessary, and some models show the frequency of these conditions–and thus the frequency of tropical cyclones–holding steady or even decreasing.

So while climate change is real, it’s far from clear that increased pre-season storm activity is related–or even happening at all. Whatever’s happening with early tropical storms might have nothing to do with climate change and much more to do with figuring out which rules-of-thumb are useful for disaster preparedness. And it’s easy to imagine even scientists who fully support climate action being irritated by having their work misinterpreted by climate activists.

But….

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

But regardless of what that one un-named meteorologist meant when quoted by the Sun-Sentinel, some of the articles I’ve been finding on early tropical cyclones seem a bit disingenuous, being focused on the idea that the links between climate change and tropical cyclones is unclear and anyway these storms are usually quite weak and barely tropical in structure at all.

“Weak” and “barely tropical” don’t actually mean much, for one thing.

Weak, in a tropical cyclone, generally means it doesn’t have very high maximum sustained wind speeds. Arthur’s winds, for example, never exceeded 74 MPH, so it never counted as a hurricane. But wind speed is not as important as we might assume; most of the death and destruction in these storms is caused by flooding, not by wind. So the fact that pre-season storms rarely develop windspeeds over 74 MPH doesn’t tell us much. I want to know how big they are, how much rain they carry, and how slowly they move–all information not provided by most reports. Even tropical characteristics are not necessary for a storm to be dangerous. Nor’easters, which are non-tropical cyclones, can be as destructive as hurricanes because they can cause as much flooding, and their more moderate winds can cover a very large area. So I don’t know what “barely tropical” means, but it’s not comforting.

Finally, the connection between tropical cyclones and climate change is no longer as mysterious as it seemed when I wrote my posts on the subject back in 2014. Yes, the data of the past are still noisy, but new research methods are starting to give us a much clearer picture, and the picture isn’t pretty. No, we still don’t know whether early-season storms are, in general, a sign of climate change, but Arthur particularly developed in unusually warm water. That is, the storm didn’t occur in typical-May conditions that we just didn’t know could produce tropical cyclones, nor was it the result of unusual atmospheric conditions that might have occurred irrespective of water temperatures. We had a tropical storm in May because ocean temperatures more closely resembled those of June.

It behooves us to think carefully, to not jump to conclusions, to not assume that a storm in May is a sign of the Apocalypse. But it also behooves us not to ignore the fact that climate change is making the ocean warmer–and it seems that whenever an unusual tropical cyclone occurs, unusually warm water is below it.

Considering Damages

The fires in California are all over the news these days. The death toll keeps rising as bodies are found–two hundred people are missing, now. Generally speaking, wildfire is a climate change story, but while I want to cover current events, this story is too new, and there isn’t yet anything to say about it that I have not said about other fires before.

But if, as I suspect, the severity of this week’s fires are due in some part to climate change, then that lays the blood of the dead on the hands of climate deniers (not skeptics, there’s a difference), certain industrialists, and certain political leaders who have, decade after decade, refused to act. Same with the death and destruction of recent hurricanes, some of which have been unambiguously linked to climate change.

So, why not sue?

And, indeed, some people are suing, with varying degrees of success.

Suing for Climate

I first heard about a climate change lawsuit through social media some years ago, but since I didn’t hear a peep about the matter by any other means, I wasn’t sure it was real. Turns out, it was not only real, but what appeared on Facebook was the tip of the iceberg. There isn’t just one climate lawsuit, but many, all across the world.

If you’re interested in details, there’s actually an online database where you can look them all up. Click here to check it out.

The US has more of these suits than anywhere else in the world, and it’s somewhat easier to get information on these cases, at least for an American like me. There are two main approaches–suing fossil fuel companies and suing governments.

Suing Companies

Fossil fuel companies are being sued, not just for producing fossil fuels, but also for actively obstructing climate action, as some did by spreading misinformation and fostering public doubt about the reality of climate change.

Curiously, in the coverage I’ve read, such obstruction is generally framed as a failure to warn the public. For example, one article quotes a law professor as follows:

“The industry has profited from the manufacture of fossil fuels but has not had to absorb the economic costs of the consequences,” Koh said. “The industry had the science 30 years ago and knew what was going to happen but made no warning so that preemptive steps could have been taken.

“The taxpayers have been bearing the cost for what they should have been warned of 30 years ago,” Koh added. “The companies are now being called to account for their conduct and the damages from that conduct.”

It’s important to recognize such framing is itself misleading. Climate change, and the basic mechanics of how it works and why it’s a problem, were public knowledge 30 years go. The reason I know that is I was 11 and I remember being well-informed about it. Anything a geeky but otherwise unremarkable 11-year-old knows about is not being kept secret by Exxon, or anybody else.

The truth is that the public is culpable for climate change, as a decisive majority has spent decades now in active denial of warnings that were readily available for any interested person behind. But whatever innate resistance the citizenry may have had to climate action was actively ginned up by companies who knew better and attempted to protect their business interests at the expense of everybody else.

That’s a more nuanced, but arguably more nefarious offense.

Hopefully, suits based on calling out that nefariousness will work, because suits against energy companies for causing climate change itself are not working well. Several have been dismissed already.

It’s not that anyone has argued in court that climate change isn’t real, isn’t caused by humans, or isn’t important. Instead, these suits are failing because air pollution is already addressed by the Clean Air Act, which (for reasons I don’t personally understand) means that the issue must be handled by Congress and not by the courts. It’s also difficult to pin a particular plaintiff’s woes on an individual company. Some judges have asserted that because the problem is so big that it clearly needs Federal, even international leadership, that local or regional courts have no place in the solution.

Leaving the rest of us stuck when Federal leadership fails.

But the point is that yes, there are cities suing companies over specific climate-related damages.

Suing the Government

The lawsuit I first heard about was probably the Juliana Case, in which a group of 21 children and young adults (it’s sometimes called the “children’s case”) are suing the Federal government for not protecting their right to a livable planet. There are also similar suits against at least nine states, although some of these have been dismissed.

The Federal government has been trying very hard to get the Juliana Case dismissed before it is even heard. So far, no such attempt has been successful. The process has stretched on for some three years, now. The fact that it is still going is good news, but it’s far from clear whether the young people will win, or even if they will ever get to trial.

Winning Suits for Climate

So far, I’m not sure if any of these cases have actually won in court, at least not in the US. I haven’t heard of any. What happens if and when they do?

If the Juliana Case wins, the courts could order the Federal government to cut emissions. The situation could be analogous to school integration, which also proceeded, at times, on point of court order.

If the suits against companies win, plaintiffs could get money to use for climate change adaptation (such as cities building sea walls). Perhaps more importantly, the financial losses–and threats of financial losses–could force energy companies to get serious about transitioning to climate-sane energy sources.

The problem has been that there really aren’t any immediate negative consequences for anyone who chooses to put their narrow self-interest first. Environmentalism has lacked teeth. If the electorate refuses to hold anyone accountable for destroying our planet around us, it’s possible the courts can do something.

Course, that depends on who the judges are.

Update on Hurricanes

Some years ago, I wrote that although global warming seems like it should make hurricanes worse, we can’t really say that it has. Until just a few decades ago, if a hurricane happened not to pass over human observers or equipment, we might not know it existed. It’s not that we have no data before that, it’s just not a complete picture. How can we compare “before” and “after” when we don’t have a full “before”? There are other complications, too.

Of course, as I pointed out, all that applies only if “worse” is taken to mean more frequent or with higher wind-speeds. Since the most dangerous part of a hurricane is always its storm-surge, which is unambiguously worsened by sea-level rise, another answer to the question is that yes, global warming does make hurricanes worse and is going to keep doing so as long as the seas keep rising.

In any case, I didn’t expect any of that to change any time soon–but it might have just done so.

The problem of inadequate “before” data is still there, but a team from Stony Brook University has just modeled Hurricane Florence as it would have been without anthropogenic climate change–essentially, they used the models used to forecast hurricane behavior, but altered the model so as to simulate an un-warmed world. Because the same computer system was used to forecast both the real-world hurricane and the counterfactual one, the reliability of the system can be checked simply by comparing the real-world forecast with the actual behavior of Hurricane Florence–the forecast was pretty good, as it turned out.

So, all of you who were under Hurricane Florence? It’s official. Those of you who saw the heaviest rainfall–you saw 50% more of it because of climate change. And if you live on the coast, the storm was about 50 miles wider when it made landfall than it would have been, so at least some of you were hit by a storm surge that would otherwise have passed you by.

Now, when I say “it’s official,” I don’t actually know whether there is any controversy around this approach. I don’t have an inside view of either climatology or meteorology, though I do have friends I may be able to ask. So we may have to wait a while to see how this is received, but so far it seems legit to me.

While we’re discussing new hurricane research, it seems there are two more variables to how “bad” a hurricane can be, and climate change looks to be making them both worse.

One is the speed at which storms travel. The slower a hurricane is moving, the longer it takes to pass over your house and the more hurricane you get. That was part of the problem with Harvey, which simply stayed put over Houston and rained for way too long. A study just published in the journal, Nature suggests that storms are, on average, getting slower, apparently because climate change is causing weakening of the air currents that move hurricanes along.

The other variable is how fast storms intensify. We’re used to tropical systems strengthening gradually over a period of days, so that if a tropical storm (wind speed no greater than 74 mph) is pointed at you and about a day away, you can go ahead and prepare for a tropical storm, or possibly a category 1 hurricane. But occasionally a storm will undergo “rapid intensification” and you can go to bed prepared for that tropical storm and wake up to find a cat 4 bearing down on you. Scary, no?

And while nobody is actually sure yet how rapid intensification works, it does seem to be happening more and more often. A recent computer simulation shows that climate change does indeed result in more of the most severe hurricanes (categories 4 and 5) and does so specifically by making rapid intensification more frequent.

So, there you have it, folks. While I’m sure more research needs to be done (doesn’t it always?) and the picture will get clearer and more sure as we learn more, climate change is making hurricanes worse. That means worse in the future and it means worse already.

So when I say we all need to vote for climate-sane candidates willing to re-instate Paris? This is why.

A Deafening Silence

Ok, so apparently this past weekend there was a major climate march “all across the nation.” The nation, in this case, being the United States. I heard about it on the news, for once, but not ahead of time.

None of my friends said anything about it, nothing showed up on social media, none of my spammy political action alerts alerted me, my own researches in the spring about what events were being planned, nothing. An online search yields very little in the way of announcements, either–had I done such a search a few weeks ago, it looks like I would have found much, either. I might have missed this one even if I’d been being a lot more assertive about looking for it than I was.

What is going on?

Why are organizers of these things not getting the word out? Do they want the media and our elected officials to underestimate the number of people who care about climate? I recognize that there is some legitimate controversy about how much good political demonstrations do, but come on, people, if you’re going to have a march, have a march!

In other news, I saw a fishing pier on the bay several inches deep in water today. I overheard a man say the flooding around his house–which has pushed up into the ditches but does not threaten his home directly–is not a problem, it’s “only” high tide. I rode a bus through a parking lot filled with salt water.

The hurricane is not due until later this week.

Let’s Get Personal

The news is full of record-breaking heat-waves, torrential rains, mandatory evacuations because of wildfire, and the remnants of Hurricane Beryl just hit Dominica–which wouldn’t be so bad, since the storm had weakened considerably, except a lot of people there are still living in houses without real roofs since Hurricane Maria last year. All pretty normal, these days. But instead of the usual big-picture posts I usually make on these subjects (such as this one and this one and this one), I’d like to talk for a bit about someone I actually know.

I haven’t asked his permission to write about this, so I’ll keep his identity strictly under wraps–but he’s a real person, not  composite or a hypothetical character.

He’s a farmer. He has a very large farm which he typically puts into corn and soybeans, and then a cover crop in the winter. The corn and soybeans mostly become animal feed. He participates in a number of conservation programs, though he does not use organic methods. He usually makes a pretty good living for himself.

This year will likely be an exception.

In the spring, he got his corn planted, but then it all washed away in a series of torrential rains. So, he re-planted his corn, and started planting his soybeans. Then a serious drought developed and his crops are dying all over again. And, because of a technicality, much of what he has lost is not going to be eligible for crop insurance. Planting costs money and takes time (a lot of time–it’s a big farm), but he can’t not plant, despite expecting a total loss now on all his crops, because otherwise he won’t be eligible for the cover crop program. So he expects to lose money this year, and there’s not a whole lot he can do about it.

Since he normally makes a good living, one bad year is not going to break him. He’ll be ok. But the situation is a giant headache, and of course there is always the risk that multiple forms of bad luck could happen at once. He’s vulnerable right now, and that sort of vulnerability is never fun.

The spring floods were pretty definitely climate change-related, but otherwise I have no idea if this year has been a statistical anomaly relative to the historical average for his region. And I don’t intend to try to figure that out because it’s not my point.

My point is that, regardless of cause, this is what the economic repercussions of frequent extreme weather looks like–one problem following on another before you’ve quite caught up. And climate change does mean that years like this can be expected to happen more frequently. How many bust years can one farmer handle in a row? I don’t know.

One farmer having a bad year is a problem for his (or her) family and friends, but neither floods nor droughts happen to just one person at a time. Whole regions of increased crop failure stresses the crop insurance system and the food distribution system. In this case, we might see the price of chicken go up, since the birds have less available feed this year. The United States is wealthy enough that we can absorb the economic cost collectively, and those of us who are not friends with farmers will likely not notice the difference, but the cost is still real.

Given enough such costs, often enough, our absorptive capacity will eventually be compromised.

This is climate change.