A HURRICANE SEASON AIMED DIRECTLY AT THE EYE OF OUR DENIAL

Tornadoes are the only weather emergencies I remember from my days as a wee lad in Minnesota. Sure, there were blizzards, but we didn’t see them as emergencies; they were just part of winter. Tornadoes never did much to raise our anxiety levels. The city used to sound a siren if a tornado had been spotted. It meant we were supposed to hightail it to the southwest corner of the basement for maximum protection. Most of us, however, went out on our front steps instead. We waved to neighbors under a foreboding sky, and tried to catch a glimpse of a funnel cloud that sounded like a freight train. None of us ever saw a darn thing, except a few dark clouds and a little rain. There were no evacuations. FEMA never showed up.

Those flashbacks to a genteel, stoic relationship with weather seemed as quaint as they were ancient last weekend, as many of us not in Florida worried about those who were. Houston’s Harvey was Irma’s opening act. Burnt deeply into our psyches were images of stunned Texans airlifted from their roofs, tightly clasping all the prized possessions they could squeeze into a 13-gallon garbage bag. As Irma headed for Miami and the Keys, she was said to be bigger and stronger than Harvey, the nastiest hurricane to ever sweep the Atlantic.

The thing about a natural disaster in Florida is that it has empathic legs. Almost everyone knows and cares about somebody in Florida. We all either have people down there or are close to someone who does. That means somewhere in those news story statistics – 2.4 million evacuations, 6 million without power – are the faces of actual people, folks we care and worry about. As we apprehend reports of 170 mph winds and 15-foot storm surges, we confront, in a very real sense, the fragility of life and the insecurity of shelter, not just for those we know in Florida, but for all of us.

The inconvenient truth is that our world is nowhere near as safe as many of us thought it was. And it keeps growing less secure every day. It’s not just hurricanes and flooding. California just experienced the hottest summer on record. As Irma made landfall in Florida, at least 81 major fires raged across 1.5 million acres in the west, from Colorado to California and north to Washington. If there is any good to come from these late, turbulent days of summer it is that our heightened anxiety and insecurity will chip away at our collective denial of the inescapable truth that climate change is destroying our planet.

No, the warming earth is not responsible for hurricanes, fires and other destructive weather events. But, say virtually every scientist, climate change significantly ups the ante. It makes everything worse, more destructive. Warm air carries more water than cool air. That means hurricanes now carry more water from oceans and then dump it on land. Kenneth Kunkel of the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies said extreme rainstorms are up more than a third since the early 1980s. The increase has dovetailed with the gradual warming of the water. The same is true of the fires. Obviously we had fire eons before we ever combined the words “climate” and “change”. The warming of the earth’s surface makes those fires worse and harder to control.

The cable news buildup to Irma was, as always, filled with inanities, like a reporter using a hurricane simulator to show viewers what was coming. Yet, the prize for pure insipidness goes to Scott Pruitt, the guy in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. His department has removed mentions of climate change from its website. Asked by a CNN anchor to comment on the intensity of two back-to-back monster hurricanes and the need to deal with global warming, Pruitt said discussing climate change right now is “very, very, insensitive to the people of Florida.”

Well, Pruitt’s fellow Republican, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado, begs to differ: “This is the time that the president and the EPA and whoever makes decisions needs to talk about climate change,” he told the Miami Herald. “If this isn’t climate change, I don’t know what is. This is a truly, truly poster child for what is to come.” Science is on the mayor’s side. According to Zillow, climate scientists predict that one of eight Florida homes will be under water by 2100.

Days after Harvey devastated the Houston area, Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, sounded optimistic about being able to use tragic weather events to break the wall of denial. “The most pernicious and dangerous myth we’ve bought into when it comes to climate change is not the myth that it isn’t real or humans aren’t responsible,” she wrote in an email to the New York Times. “It’s the myth that it doesn’t matter to me. And that is exactly the myth that Harvey shatters.”

Sociologists have a term for the “dangerous myth” Hayhoe described. It’s called “pluralistic ignorance”. It happens when members of a group adopt a norm, belief, or habit because they mistakenly believe other members of the group share it. Far too many of us, for far too long, have turned a blind eye toward climate change because it seemed that so many others were doing the same thing.

Enough is enough. How many hurricanes on steroids, how many floods, how many fires, how many more inches of global sea level rise, how many evacuations, how many deaths will it take to make us shake off our pluralistic ignorance and save what is left of our planet? Whatever we do, let’s not let the answer to that question blow in the winds of bigger and bigger hurricanes. We need to act now.