Harvey and Irma have hit US soil within a timespan of two weeks: one is a superstorm whose torrential rainfall forced the National Weather Service to add two new colors to its maps, another is the hurricane said to be one of the strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic and one that forced one of the largest evacuations in US history. But when President Trump visited Florida today to assess the damage, not only did he ignore questions about climate change, he also remarked, “We've had bigger storms.”
While scientists can not blame individual hurricanes on climate change (there is always a host of factors at work, like an illness rarely has one individual cause), certain patterns are clear: Hurricanes get their energy from warm ocean waters, and the temperatures of our oceans have been steadily rising. Sea levels have been rising around the world, which makes storm surges much more dangerous. Plus, keeping Houston’s record-breaking 50-inch rainfall in mind, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, which results in more rain.
The abstractness of climate change might be hard to grasp, but the unbridled development in Houston and Texas is anything but. Texas's unregulated growth has left the state vulnerable to flooding, while Florida’s population has more than doubled between 1980 and today, destroying natural defense systems. Houston’s oil industry has brought wealth to the state, which might be the reason that officials like former Harris County (which includes Houston) head Mike Talbott has blamed local climate researchers for having an “anti-development agenda.” In the meanwhile, luxury condo’s and hotels keep sprouting up on Miami Beach, as if money could buy immunity to any storm (or the beach erosion that exposes the city). In short, the word “natural disaster” doesn’t entirely cover how it is human beings have decided to put more and more people in harm's way.
Hurricane Irma has only left Florida, but to many Texans, the memory of President Trump’s reaction to Harvey (and perhaps, Melania’s “hurricane stilettos”) is still fresh. Not only did Trump not mention climate change at any point, but when he first visited the disaster-stricken state, he didn’t even address Harvey’s victims. While many media outlets have picked up his failure in optics, we shouldn’t forget that his failures to our climate are much bigger: he withdrew from the Paris accord, he signed an executive order to reverse flood-protection measures ten days before Harvey made landfall, and, starting right after his inauguration, his administration wiped mentions of climate change off of government websites completely.
While we seem to have gotten used to the word “unprecedented” to describe our current political climate, meteorologists are still happily applying the same term to hurricanes. The problem is, these extreme weather events are going to be less and less "unprecedented" as our earth heats up, and if the government continues to deny how climate change is making these disasters more likely, it means that our cities will be rebuilt according to the same, and vulnerable, model, again (why protect now against what is merely a “500-year-flood”?) No matter what answers science can come up with, climate change itself is real and happening. If anything, Harvey and Irma are a challenge to our imagination: how much are we willing to see that the world we've been living in for the past few weeks is the world we're going to be living in for a very long time?