Thursday, November 01, 2012

Sumamrizing Sandy: It's Climate Change, Stupid!

ht*

Of course, this one single event is not making people conclude it is a result of climate change.  But, the fact this fits in the patterns that climate change scientists have been practically warning us about--the extreme weather phenomena all across the world, of which Sandy is merely the latest.
An unscientific survey of the social networking literature on Sandy reveals an illuminating tweet (you read that correctly) from Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. On Oct. 29, Foley thumbed thusly: “Would this kind of storm happen without climate change? Yes. Fueled by many factors. Is storm stronger because of climate change? Yes.” Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund (and former deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek), offers a baseball analogy: “We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”
Exactly.

While we cannot simply and casually link Sandy with Climate Change as a the cause, we ought to recognize the patterns and wonder:
As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm fits the general pattern in North America, and indeed around the world, toward more extreme weather, a pattern that, increasingly, can be attributed to climate change.
You know, that old saying, if it walks like a duck, quacks like one, ...

So, what are we going to do?
It is, at this point, impossible to say what it will take for American politics to catch up to the reality of North American climate change. More super-storms, more heat waves, more multi-billion-dollar “weather-related loss events”? The one thing that can be said is that, whether or not our elected officials choose to acknowledge the obvious, we can expect, “with a high degree of confidence,” that all of these are coming.
The neatest thing is this: the market--the one that the GOP considers as the best way to look at anything--is already preparing for a new world affected by climate change.  
A couple of weeks ago, Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, issued a study titled “Severe Weather in North America.” According to the press release that accompanied the report, “Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” The number of what Munich Re refers to as “weather-related loss events,” and what the rest of us would probably call weather-related disasters, has quintupled over the last three decades. While many factors have contributed to this trend, including an increase in the number of people living in flood-prone areas, the report identified global warming as one of the major culprits: “Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity.”
Munich Re’s report was aimed at the firm’s clients—other insurance companies—and does not make compelling reading for a general audience. But its appearance just two weeks ahead of Hurricane Sandy seems to lend it a peculiarly grisly relevance
So, whether or not our political leaders grow up to responsible adulthood and talk about this, well, the corporations people funding their campaigns might just about start forcing them to.  And it is vital that government act before catastrophes hit us because:
[There's] evidence that politicians don't get credit for spending money preparing adequately for a potential disaster—just for spending to alleviate disasters' effects. That dynamic sets up some "perverse incentives," according to Stanford professor Neil Malhotra, who co-authored a 2009 study with Loyola Marymount professor Andrew Healy on the politics of natural disasters. "The government might under-invest in preparedness measures and infrastructure development in exchange for paying for disaster relief, since there are no electoral rewards for prevention," says Malhotra. "Since 1988, the amount of money the U.S. spends on disaster relief has increased 13 times while the amount spending on disaster preparedness has been flat."
The worst part is that preventative spending, Malhotra says, reinforces the old Ben Franklin saying that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." It really is more effective to spend money on getting ready for a natural disaster than trying to mitigate its effects after the fact. "We estimated that $1 in preparedness spending is worth $15 in relief payments in preventing future disasters," Malhotra says.
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job"

* Quite a few wesbites I routinely check with had this image.  Looks like it has already made the rounds, and am doing my part to spread it more :)

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