Yes, Climate Change Causes Natural Disasters

Every time the country sees an extreme weather event – once we get our fix of disaster porn, of course – some important questions emerge. Did global warming cause this catastrophe? Will we see more natural disasters as a result of climate change?

I’d like to know whether we can talk about global warming before a natural disaster for once.

Yes, human-created climate change produced Hurricane Sandy, the late October mega-storm that caused weeks-long power outages and $60 billion of damage along the east coast. And if we don’t do something – perhaps even if we do – we can expect to see more hurricanes, droughts, and forest fires in the coming years. For now, one thing is certain. Today’s media, in an effort to provide some semblance of false balance under the politicization of global warming, will continue a nebulous climate narrative, much to the country’s peril.

In terms of causality, we can think about the relationship between global warming and natural disasters like we think about relationship between smoking and lung cancer. One is a risk factor for the other. Lifelong smokers have about 50/50 chance of contracting lung cancer by age 70. Today, we would say – free of controversy – that smoking causes lung cancer.

Likewise, global warming is a risk factor for disasters like Hurricane Sandy. Hurricanes best germinate in warm ocean waters near 80 degrees Fahrenheit. For the past few decades, humans have burned fossil fuels, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Because we have warmed the planet so much – 0.8 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution – extreme weather events have enough moisture in the air to thrive at unprecedented levels (19 named storms in both 2010 and 2011). Like smoking, the weather/disaster relationship may be slightly more difficult to understand than pure cause and effect, but I think society is capable of embracing this reality.

To be sure, a small group of scientists still doubt that humans are the ones warming the planet, but this cadre is becoming increasingly irrelevant. According to the Better Future Project, 97% of climate scientists who actively publish in the field contend that climate change is human caused.

Now, even if you doubt the direct causal relationship between global warming and Hurricane Sandy, one climate trend is all but certain: land ice is melting and sea levels are rising. Higher sea levels magnified Sandy’s concentrated damage along the coastline. According to Climate Central’s Mike Lemonick, “The global sea level is now about 8 inches higher, on average, than it was in 1900, in connection with global warming. That means the storm tides from Sandy are that much higher than they would have been if the identical storm had come along back then.”

But in the week prior to Sandy, not one major newspaper covered the scientifically established causal link between climate change and extreme weather. What we did get: It’s going to be a whopper! Get your batteries! Watch out for “Frankenstorm” (which technically should have been called Frankenstorm’s monster). Basically all the hyper-sensationalized bluster we’ve come to expect from horserace political journalism, tailored disaster-style. Absent from this conversation – until after the storm, at least – was that carbon pollution produces larger storms with more flooding. And that maybe, just maybe, human engendered weather conditions provided the perfect environment for a super storm.

That narrative, also known as the truth, is less sexy than coverage of a sensationalized chance catastrophe, rushing anxiety, and eventual macabre disaster porn. Not to mention, climate change is so inexplicably politicized that the media feels the need to provide false balance. Some scientists say this. Some scientists say that. But as long as we keep talking about these mega-storms as arbitrary, one-off acts of God, we’ll never get to their root cause – us.

“Whether or not Hurricane Sandy resulted from climate change, there is no doubt that the threat of increasingly intense storms should spur Washington to make the issue a top priority,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a recent press release. Bloomberg, through his last ditch endorsement of President Obama in the days before the election, called out climate change’s remarkable absence from 2012 campaign politics.

As power returns to New England, who knows whether America’s lawmakers can be jostled into finding Bloomberg’s grail. Either way, one thing is certain: the next storm is right around the corner.