Climate change is on its way to becoming a far worse public health crisis than any of those other problems. Already, it has aggravated droughts, famines and deadly heat waves. In the United States, global warming seems to be contributing to the spread of Lyme disease.
Now we have Harvey. It has brought yet another flood that’s being described as unprecedented. It is terrorizing thousands of Texans and submerged large parts of the nation’s fourth-largest city, Houston.
The immediate priorities, of course, are protection and rescue, and many Texans are rising to the moment. Houston has a certain friendly swagger, a mix of old Texas and new, and it’s evident this week. Residents are checking up on neighbors and saving people they’d never met before. The stories are inspiring.
They’re inspiring because they involve people coming together to protect one another. And how can people come together to protect one another from future storms and floods? The answer starts with getting real about climate change, which is the main reason storms are doing more damage than in the past.
Obviously, some extreme weather events are unrelated to climate change. But a growing number appear to be related, including many involving torrential rain, thanks to the warmer seas and air.
“The heaviest rainfall events have become heavier and more frequent, and the amount of rain falling on the heaviest rain days has also increased,” as the National Climate Assessment, a federal report, found. “The mechanism driving these changes,” the report explained, is hotter air stemming from “human-caused warming.”
Heavier rain can then interact with higher sea levels to increase flooding, as seems to have happened with Harvey. In Houston’s particular case, a lack of zoning laws has led to an explosion of building, which further worsens flooding. The city added 24 percent more pavement between 1996 and 2011, according to Samuel Brody of Texas A&M, and Houston wasn’t exactly light on pavement in 1996. Pavement, unlike soil, fails to absorb water.
Add up the evidence, and it overwhelmingly suggests that human activity has helped create the ferocity of Harvey. That message may be hard to hear — harder to hear, certainly, than stories of human kindness that is now mitigating the storm’s toll. But it’s the truth.
Beyond Harvey, the potential damage from climate change is terrifying. Disease, famine and flooding of biblical proportions are within the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, stories of potential misery have not been enough to stir this country to action. They haven’t led to a Manhattan Project for alternative energy or a national effort to reduce carbon emissions.
So when we are faced with actual misery that stems in part from climate change, we should be honest about it.
What’s happening in Texas is heartbreaking, and yet it will be a more frequent part of modern life unless we do something about it. That, ultimately, is the most compassionate message about Harvey.
