Renewable Revolution

 


The National Weather Service has called Hurricane Harvey “unprecedented” with impacts “beyond anything experienced.” Experts expect several more days of extreme rainfall in the area this week, which could compound the impacts of an already deadly and destructive storm. (Here’s a great list of ways to help the region, if you’re so inclined.) Unfortunately, this climate-fueled extreme weather event provides, along with plenty of internet hoaxes, scams and one Very Good Boy, an opportunity for deniers to use the past as supposed proof that climate change isn’t driving extreme weather.

Case in point: Judith Curry’s blog post on Harvey. She mostly praises the models that accurately predicted Harvey’s path but towards the end trots out the most overblown statistic in meteorology, implying that because we’ve haven’t seen many Category 4 and 5 storms recently, “Anyone blaming Harvey on global warming doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”

It seems to us that this is like saying that because auto accidents happen all the time, drunk drivers must be blameless for their crashes. 

Curry’s claim that Harvey wasn’t caused by climate change is completely unexplained and unsupported by her otherwise lengthy post. So it figures that Curry’s post is exactly what Michael Bastasch picked up for his latest Daily Caller piece. Because Bastasch didn’t bother to actually do much of any reporting and instead just copy and pasted from Michael Mann’s statement on Facebook, the piece mostly consists of evidence of warming’s influence on hurricanes.

On the side of reason and real news, Mann  expanded his Facebook statement for an op-ed in the Guardian, which declares in its headline that “It's a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly.” The basic physics, as Mann explains, are undeniable:

1) Warm air can hold more moisture. More moisture in the air means more rainfall- in this case as much as 30 percent, according to Kevin Trenberth. More rain means more flooding.

2) Hurricanes are driven by warm water. Hurricane Harvey fed on Gulf waters that were 2.7-7.2°F above average.

3) Storm surge is a major contributor to flooding, and as sea levels rise storm surge worsens. Harvey’s storm surge was half a foot higher than it would have been without climate change, Mann estimates.


Despite the emphatic yet lackluster pushback from Curry and the deniers, the connection between climate change and Harvey is clear and Mann and the rest are right to point that out.