Extreme Storms Like Harvey and Climate Change: 'This Is the New Reality'

Published on

Monday, August 28, 2017

by

Common Dreams

"This is the new reality. And the challenge is how we address it. How rapidly we're going to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy."

by

Andrea Germanos, staff writer

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Shardea Harrison looks on at her 3 week old baby Sarai Harrison being held by Dean Mize as he and Jason Legnon used his airboat to rescue them from their home after the area was inundated with flooding from Hurricane Harvey on August 28, 2017 in Houston, Texas.  (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

As Hurricane Harvey continues to batter Texas—and as the death toll from monsoon flooding in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh surpasses 1,200—experts are putting a spotlight on how climate change is linked to the "unprecedented" storm's devastation.

Trying to attribute Harvey to climate change "is an ill-posed question," argues Michael E. Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. "While we cannot say climate change 'caused' Hurricane Harvey," writes Mann at the Guardian, "we can say is that it exacerbated several characteristics of the storm in a way that greatly increased the risk of damage and loss of life."

One way, he explains, is because of sea level rise, which contributed to a higher storm surge. In addition, warmer than average sea surface temperatures led to more moisture in the air. "That large amount of moisture," writes Mann, "creates the potential for much greater rainfalls and greater flooding. The combination of coastal flooding and heavy rainfall is responsible for the devastating flooding that Houston is experiencing."

Indeed, meteorologist Jeff Masters notes:

Here we are, in the midst of a mega-disaster on the scale only surpassed by Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina in recent decades, from a hurricane hazard we've never seen on such a large and destructive scale—torrential rain. The damages from Harvey will undoubtedly run into the tens of billions of dollars, making Harvey's rains the most destructive ever experienced from a hurricane.

In addition, Mann writes, "Harvey was able to feed upon" warmer waters deeper within the Gulf "when it intensified at near record pace as it neared the coast." Another potential link to climate change is how the storm is stalling near the coast, allowing it to continue to wreak havoc, in a pattern "associated with a greatly expanded subtropical high pressure system over much of the U.S. at the moment, with the jet stream pushed well to the north."

Climate journalist David Roberts also explores how climate change is "a huge part of the story" of Harvey, and explains why "without mitigation, adaptation [to climate change] is a cruel joke."

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or mitigation, he writes,

generates benefits that are unavoidably egalitarian (distributed across the globe, to everyone who lives in the atmosphere) and progressive (the poor are most vulnerable, so they benefit first and most from harm prevention).

Adaption, in contrast, like erecting higher sea walls, is necessarily local and "regressive (wealthy people and places will adapt first, best, and most)."

Putting adaptation in the context of Harvey's "mind-boggling rainfall amounts," he writes: