https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-first-victims-of-climate-deniers-are-their-own-kids
[links in online article]
The First Victims of Climate Deniers Are Their Own Kids
Stop talking about the children and grandchildren paying the price of
wrecking the planet. Here is the peril facing five states and the men
who have betrayed their own families.
Clive Irving
Jan.12.2019 9:38 PM ET
Warnings about the imminent perils of climate change always include the
trope that our children and grandchildren will pay the price of our
neglect, indifference or denial.
Isn’t it obvious? But, once uttered, the charge tends to glide away
without becoming assigned in a way that lands on anyone’s conscience.
The familiar narrative unspools through many alarming details of the
coming apocalypse until concluding with variations on the same phrase:
“Climate change is real and the effects are terrifying.”
For some reason the personal responsibility involved has been deflected
by the generality of the charge—“our children and grandchildren” defines
a collective casualty without names attached.
Since the world embraced the industrial revolution there has never been
a graver, more merciless case of get rich now and screw the
consequences. What we confront is one of the most consequential of human
failings and one of the most familiar—the inability of one generation to
accept responsibility for the well-being of the next.
Right now the deniers (mostly serving the fossil fuel interests) are
winning, as Donald Trump dismantles regulations. Until 2018 carbon
dioxide emissions—a significant factor in global warming—had been
steadily falling in the U.S. for 13 years. But last year they suddenly
bumped back up 3.4 percent—industrial emissions were actually up by 5.7
percent.
So let’s make it personal. Here are five states where leading
politicians are climate change deniers and each of these men has
children, in some cases grandchildren. Their states are already
experiencing some of the serious early effects of changing climate. (The
predictive climate data that follows is drawn from Environmental
Protection Agency annual state impact reports, unless otherwise stated,
and storm damage details from contemporary news coverage.)
Jim Inhofe
This accounting has to start with Oklahoma. Eighty-four-year-old Senator
Jim Inhofe long ago earned the title of Extreme Denier. He has
constantly hounded and denounced climate science from the chair of the
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works since 2003. In 2012 he
published his fundamental text, The Greatest Hoax: How the global
warming conspiracy threatens your future.
“God’s still up there” he ranted, and “the arrogance of people to think
that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the
climate is to me outrageous.”
Here is the future to be faced by Inhofe’s three surviving children:
Environmentalists active in Tulsa, the state’s second largest city, have
learned not to use the term climate change. Instead the accepted
euphemism is “extreme weather”—heeding a warning from Inhofe that it is
unacceptable on factual grounds to say that the climate is changing in
permanent and unpredictable ways… although the belief that the Earth is
flat is rare.
One of the greatest threats facing Oklahoma is water stress. The
combination of a growing population and longer, more severe droughts is
exacerbating already-strained water resources: every river and stream is
vulnerable, with water tables falling after prolonged droughts.
The High Plains Aquifer, which provides most of the region’s water, has
sunk by more than 150 feet in level. Overall precipitation is expected
to decrease by 6-10 per cent by 2100. One result will be that the types
of plants that can survive will begin to change. The risk of wild fires
in forests will increase.
Oklahoma is also a sitting duck in Tornado Alley, and increasingly
unstable weather will produce more and stronger tornadoes. Thanks to an
extensive program of fracking for oil (supported by Inhofe) the state is
now more prone to earthquakes than California.
Ted Cruz & Lamar Smith
We now move to Texas where from a cluster of deniers two stand out:
Senator Ted Cruz and Lamar Smith, who has just retired after serving in
the House since 1987 and who played a prominent role as head of the
House Science Committee.
Cruz quickly recovered from being labeled “Lying Ted” by Trump during
the 2016 presidential campaign, and from Trump’s bizarre idea that his
father was involved in assassinating President Kennedy—two things, you
might suppose, that would make it hard to be civil in Trump’s company.
Cruz is now a loyal Trumper and in full support of Trump’s withdrawal
from the Paris agreement on climate change: “The scientific evidence
doesn’t support global warming,” he falsely claims.
As for Smith, he was heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry and used
his position to give a platform to deniers who attempted to cut NASA’s
earth science budget. He attacked climate scientists and re-tweeted
Breitbart News stories denying climate change which was, he said, “not
science but exaggerations, personal agendas and questionable predictions.”
Here is the future as it will be bequeathed to Cruz’s two children and
Smith’s two children:
Texas is already experiencing two consequences of global
warming—increased intensity of hurricane rainfall and significantly
increased summer heat.
The clearest warning of increased hurricane intensity came with Harvey
in 2017—the hurricane’s behavior conformed to scientists’ predictions of
the future pattern where a storm traveling north in the Gulf of Mexico
draws new energy from rising sea temperatures, powering up the storm
with more moisture.
When Harvey hit the Texan coast at San Jose Island it was a Category 4
and dropped unprecedented amounts of rain over Texas. Fifty counties
came under a state of emergency. The storm had effects well beyond
Texas: the state’s major oil refineries are on or close to the Gulf
coast. The forced closure of refineries created shortages in the
nation’s fuel supply.
Like much of southern Texas, Houston sits on a flood plain near the
Gulf. Many newer housing developments were engulfed by storm
rains—nearly 50,000 homes were hit, with 1,000 completely destroyed and
more 17,000 sustaining major damage. The hurricane season is likely to
repeat these effects as the storms become more frequent.
Average temperature increases in the last 20 years range from 0.5
degrees in the northeast to 1.5 degrees in the southwest. Texas
currently averages more than 6o dangerous heat days a year. By 2050 it
will see 115 such days. Summer heat is up 3.3 percent since 1970. Texas
also faces the worst threat from widespread drought of any state, with
an increase in severity of 75 per cent by 2050, as well as a severe
increase in the number of forest fires.
Flood surges on the coast are producing an increase in mosquito-borne
diseases like malaria and dengue fever.
Jim Jordan
In Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan stands out as an aggressive and brittle
right-wing nutter, spearheading attacks on the Mueller investigation and
on Planned Parenthood. He was the first person in Congress to sign the
so-called “No Climate Tax Pledge”—sponsored by the Koch
brothers—committing to block any legislation on climate change that
included an increase in government spending, and voted to prevent the
Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases.
He is doing his best to ensure that his four children will, if they
remain in Ohio, inherit a state with a climate bearing little relation
to its present condition:
Most of the state has warmed by at least one degree in the last century.
Ice cover on the Great Lakes is forming later and melting sooner. In
2011 a confluence of heavy rain and melting snow caused a flood so great
that the lower Ohio River was closed to navigation.
The climate is likely to swing from spring deluges to sustained summer
droughts. By the end of the century Ohio’s climate will be similar to
Arkansas’ present climate in the summer and Virginia’s in the winter. By
the end of the century temperatures are expected to rise in the winter
by as much as 7–12 degrees and in the summer by 6–14 degrees. This is
equal to the amount of warming that took place during the 12,000 years
since glaciers disappeared. Half of Ohio’s land is agricultural and,
because there will be more extremely hot days, corn harvests will suffer.
In northeast Ohio forests that provide habitat for rare species are
changing because of heat shock—temperatures are changing too fast for
plants to adapt. People can move location but biospheres cannot.
Increased levels of ozone appearing downwind of coal-powered plants are
stunting tree growth.
Mitch McConnell & Rand Paul
In Kentucky the two senators, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, act much as
you might expect in a coal-producing state, though their utterances are
as different as their personalities. McConnell, for whom the idea of
explicit moral commitment is as attractive as the prospect of an
intimate dinner with Nancy Pelosi, makes a point of saying he is not a
scientist (we get that) but that for everybody who thinks the planet is
warming he can find somebody who thinks it isn’t.
Paul spouts the familiar mantra that scientific opinion on climate
change is not conclusive and opposes “onerous regulations.” He attacked
a National Science Foundation grant to assist meteorologists understand
climate change because he said it was supporting propaganda, not science.
The three children of each of these robustly myopic men should take note
of the following:
The state’s average rainfall is increasing and likely to reduce crop
yields and threaten aquatic ecosystems. Floods may be more frequent but
droughts may also be longer—Kentucky competes for water with Ohio and
Tennessee.
Very hot days will be more frequent. Droughts affect the amount of
electricity produced by Kentucky’s hydroelectric dams—a drought in 2007
cut power production by more than 30 percent, which forced a switch to
fossil fuel-burning plants to match demand.
Western parts of Kentucky are expected to have between 15 and 30 more
days with temperatures above 90 degrees by the end of the century,
severely reducing crop yields of corn and soybeans. Dairy herds will be
severely affected by lack of grazing. Increased ozone levels will be
dangerous to public health.
Rick Scott
Finally to the Sunshine State, Florida, and to the new senator and
former governor, Rick Scott. He also deploys “I’m not a scientist” as he
simultaneously makes sure that the terms “climate change” and “global
warming” do not pass his lips. Over his period as governor he cut $700m
from the water management program, defunded bipartisan conservation
programs and undermined the enforcement of air, water and climate
protections.
His two children must already have felt the future.
Florida is the state most exposed to the earliest impacts of climate
change – rising sea levels and amped up hurricanes.
The immediate effect of a rise in sea surface temperatures in the Gulf,
up in some places by as much as 3.6 degrees, is to re-charge the energy
of hurricanes as they near the coastlines.
In October Hurricane Michael became one of the most intense storms ever
to make landfall in the U.S.: briefly touching a Category 5 and then, at
Category 4 with 155 mph winds eviscerating the Panhandle coast,
completely wiping out Mexico Beach and badly damaging Panama City. At
least 35 people were killed.
A University of Miami climate researcher, Brian McNoldy, said that
Michael “saw our worst fears realized, of rapid intensification just
before landfall on a part of the coastline that has never experienced a
Category 4 hurricane.” The storm had a minimum central pressure of
919mb—third lowest on record for a U.S. hurricane.
The sea level around south Florida has so palpably risen that tidal sea
water now bubbles up from Miami storm drains and floods streets. The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, predicts that sea
levels in Miami will rise by as much as three feet by 2060. The state’s
urban populations are concentrated at the coasts, many around either the
beaches or, in the east, along the Intracoastal Waterway—both
susceptible to storm surges. Palm Beach, home of plutocrats (including
Donald Trump), is exposed as a barrier island. Inland ecosystems like
the Everglades are vulnerable to salt water incursions.
Infrastructure—highways, power grids and emergency resources—is exposed
to storm surges.
According to the Miami Herald, by 2045 nearly 64,000 homes in southern
Florida will face flooding every other week. That number could be a
million by the end of the century. Summer temperatures are expected to
be 9 degrees above the current levels—rising above 95 degrees for up to
90 days a year, producing intolerable heat indexes for a population that
includes many elderly retirees.
And so to the homecoming. What exactly do these guys tell the kids? How
do they subvert the delivery of un-mediated knowledge? What role do the
mothers play—do they live in the same corrupted bubble as the fathers?
And, most importantly, how long do these guys think they have before
they have to concede that all along their first loyalty has been to the
special interests that bought them, not the interests of their own families?
Tell the kids now, in the hope that they can shame the fathers. In every
state where senators and congressmen are deniers, the kids, if properly
informed, should raise hell, otherwise they will likely inherit hell.