Water Will Keep Rising; It’s Time To Care

Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like; It’s time to open our eyes and prepare for the world that’s coming.

Eric Holthaus, August 28, 2017 (Politico Magazine)

“In all of U.S. history, there’s never been a storm like Hurricane Harvey…[but we] knew this would happen, decades ago…and we didn’t care. Now is the time to say it as loudly as possible…Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously…Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years, but Harvey is in a class by itself…So much rain has fallen already that the National Weather Service had to add additional colors to its maps to account for the extreme totals…

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Harvey is now the benchmark disaster of record in the United States…[and] gives us an opportunity for an inflection point as a society…[W]hat happens next is critically important for all of us…One recent study showed that by mid-century, up to 450 million people worldwide will be exposed to a doubling of flood frequency. This isn’t just a Houston problem…A warmer atmosphere enhances evaporation rates and increases the carrying capacity of rainstorms. Harvey drew its energy from a warmer-than-usual Gulf of Mexico, which will only grow warmer in the decades to come…Adapting to a future in which a millennium-scale flood can wipe out a major city is much harder than preventing that flood in the first place…

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…[T]he built world we have right now wasn’t constructed with climate change in mind. By continuing to pretend that we can engineer our way out of the worsening flooding problem with bigger dams, more levees and higher-powered pumping equipment, we’re fooling ourselves into a more dangerous future…If we don’t talk about the climate context of Harvey, we won’t be able to prevent future disasters and get to work on that better future…” click here for more

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