I had a post ready about Civil War statues, but that may have to wait awhile. As a Katrina survivor, I feel the need to say something about Hurricane Harvey.
Our hearts and prayers go out to the people affected by Harvey. A total of fifty inches of rain are expected to fall in Houston this week -- an almost incomprehensible amount of rainfall. And Houston is a much bigger city than New Orleans is, meaning Harvey has a potential to do much more damage than Katrina did. Southeast Louisiana, the first landing point for Katrina, has about two to three million people living in it. Coastal Mississippi, which was also hammered by Katrina, had maybe another million. All told, including inland areas of Mississippi such as Hattiesburg and Jackson, Katrina probably directly impacted about four to five million people.
Texas is much larger. Houston and its immediate area has at least 5 million people. Add all the people living between Galveston and Corpus Christi and we are looking at 10 million souls, or at least double the affected population of Katrina. So, even if Harvey is only half as destructive on a mile-by-mile basis, it can still cause the same amount of damage and loss of life.
And so we offer prayers, good wishes, and our funds to support this disaster. I will be giving to the Red Cross, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Houston-Galveston for the recovery. And if any Texans flee the hurricane all the way to Jackson, Mississippi, I can assure them personally that they will get the finest medical care available.
Besides offering immediate help, now is a good time, while Harvey continues to pour rain, to think about climate change. Climate scientists have always warned that a warmer planet will mean a higher frequency of extreme weather events, and Harvey certainly qualifies as extreme weather.
I am not arguing, nor can it be argued, that Harvey is definitely a result of global warming. Global warming increases the probability of bad weather, but it cannot be directly blamed for any specific weather event.
If this seems confusing, think about it this way. High speed is generally associated with car accidents. This is because the faster you drive, the less time you have to react to an event in front of you, such as another car darting out into your lane. If drivers were to suddenly decide to increase their driving speed by 20%, one would expect a sudden increase in accidents. It would not be true that every accident in this case would be caused by high speed driving. But higher speeds would make for more accidents. It would be difficult to blame any one accident on high speed, but the overall accidident spike could be.
Same with Harvey. In a warming climate, an individual storm like Harvey is not definitely a product of global warming, but global warming will make such storms much more likely. Hurricanes are caused in part by warm ocean temperatures. Climate change is going to cause warmer ocean temperatures for a greater percentage of the year, and ocean water will be warm enough to sustain storms further north than it has in the past. And, warmer air can carry more water than cooler air, so storms in the future will produce more rain.
So the odds should favor more storms with more rain, often landing farther north than we are used to.
And there is one more thing to consider: growing population. In the last half-century, Americans have been moving towards the coasts. According to NOAA, 39% of Americans live in a county along the coast, a number that has increased by 40% since 1970. The trend is expected to increase, with the coastal population growing by another 8% by 2020.
This means that, at a time when climate change will be generating more hurricanes, more people are moving to vulnerable areas. By ignoring both climate change and infrastructure improvements to help cities cope with bad weather, we are setting ourselves up for more Harveys, more often.
We continue to move to the coasts and visit resort towns on the coasts. We continue to drain swamps and cut trees for golf courses and water parks near the beach without asking ourselves what we are setting ourselves up for. We won't raise roads, build sea walls, install pumps, or restrict building to areas we can protect from bad weather.
In politics, are ignoring the very existence of climate change. In Florida, Governor Rick Scott has tried to limit all discussion of climate change by government employees. The words "climate change" and "global warming" are strongly discouraged; employees were advised to use terms like "sea level rise" and "weather events" instead.
Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor who took office right after Katrina, dismissed climate science as "a Trojan horse" -- that is, as a false narrative to hide a more destructive liberal agenda.
Haley Barbour, who was governor of Mississippi during Katrina, said in 2013 of climate change that "there are two sides to every issue." That is Exxon's position. It should not be a politician's position.
While we watch Harvey bury Texas with rain and ask ourselves what we can do, let's remind ourselves that one thing we can do is demand that our politicians take seriously the idea that climate change might have something to do with it, and that rather than repeatedly spend billions on recovery and relief -- Katrina's bill was $120 billion -- we would prefer to spend that kind of money on preventative measures, limiting our risk in the future. This would save us far more.
And it would prevent deaths, too. If anyone cares about prevention anymore.