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 :)

Keep calm and die: Hurricane Sandy is god's plan to kill people

Hurricane Sandy is bound to bring a lot of misery. (Yes, I am intentionally channeling this!)  Along with it, within hours, we will read about, and watch, stories of survivors who will refer to how god saved them, or their homes, or their dogs, or all of the above.

Even as we commiserate with them and take in all the destruction of life and property, the rationalists and atheists amongst us will wonder at the contradiction: if they were saved by god, couldn't that god not have caused all the tragedy in the first place?  And what about the dead and injured who were not saved by god?  Were they not in god's plans?  Were they the infidels?  Satan worshippers?

The religious conveniently backtrack from these troubling questions.  "It is all in god's plans" will be their bottom-line.  A hurricane or a rape is god's way of testing the strength of those who believe in him.  Or, as I remember the line from one of the English essays we read in the early high school years, "god's will hath no why."

To which I have only one response: bullshit.

It is bullshit that we saw in the recent controversial remark about rape and pregnancy.  The Indiana Senate candidate said “if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” (I use the uppercase G because that is how the politician would have used it.)

To true believers, this consistent with their beliefs.  If good things happen courtesy of god, then bad things also happen courtesy of god.  A rape is, therefore, in god's plans.  A pregnancy that results is also in god's plans.

As Heather Mac Donald wrote in noting the politician's consistent theology, it is all thanks to god because:

I mean, if he can perform such Iron Age miracles as ventriloquizing through a burning bush , he can sure as heck prevent a rape if he chose to do so.  His will has no option but to be done

The Indiana politician (the name matters to me less--they are all the same!) was being brutally frank about his hardcore religious faith, unlike most of the rest who are a lot more capable at hiding their true beliefs while mouthing some bromide in the public.

This latest thorny religious issue is not new; it has been one hell of a long theological struggle defending and explaining god amidst all the misery and injustice that envelops us.

Sure enough, this kind of thing has made theologians and annotators very anxious: we have two thousand years of awkward and justifying commentary, in both the Judaic and Christian traditions. The Protestant and Catholic churches struggled for centuries with the implications of God’s foreknowledge of sin and suffering. You can try to wriggle out of these implications by arguing that we humans must have freedom to do good and evil or we would just be automata, remotely controlled by God. But this returns us to Mourdock’s dilemma. Because if God knows in advance what we will do, he knows that we will misuse our freedom, as he surely knew that Adam and Eve would. As Pierre Bayle, the seventeenth-century skeptic, sardonically puts it in his “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” divine foreknowledge of this kind is a bit like a mother who lets her daughter go to a ball, knowing in advance that she will be violated. What mother would do that? Why would God, Bayle says, bestow a gift that he knows in advance will be abused?

The Judaic and Christian traditions are not alone--it was pretty much the story in the Hindu tradition in which I was raised. 

[Religiously] speaking, there are only three possible responses: you can continue to believe in a God who knows in advance the number of our days; you can sharply limit your conception of God’s power, by positing a deity who does not know in advance what we will do, or who cannot control what we will do; or you can scrap the whole idea of divinity. The problem with the first position is that most believers, as Richard Mourdock did not do, run away from the dread implications of their own beliefs; and the problem with the second position is that it is not clear why such a limited deity would be worth worshipping. So cut Richard Mourdock some slack. He’s more honest than most of his evangelical peers; and his naïve honesty at least helpfully illuminates a horrid abyss.

I like that usage: "naïve honesty."

I would rather that more and more people scrapped the whole idea of divinity. 

Oh, how I miss Christopher Hitchens in this context!  I suppose killing Hitchens with cancer was god's plan too, eh!