Hurricanes, floods and wildfires – but Washington won't talk global warming

America is seeing record-breaking extreme weather, yet the US political class is paralysed in climate change negligence
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Firefighters in Smithville, Texas

In 2007, then New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin pondered the possibility that thanks to the vast geographical expanse of the United States, "there is almost never a shared sense of meteorological misery." This, he noted cautiously, might help explain why global warming had not become a front-burner political issue, unlike geographically tighter places like Europe where elected leaders were tackling the problem with more vim.

But recent record-breaking "meteorological misery" from coast to coast is making it clear that severe weather may well be the new normal. Weather is getting more extreme and this, scientists tell us, has a lot to do with climate change. Meanwhile, inside the Beltway and among mainstream media, there's virtually no public debate about the likelihood we're already paying the high price of climate change.

To be sure, we can't definitively pin any single weather event to climate change. Weather is about near-term changes in the atmosphere; climate is about long-term changes to the atmosphere over time and the larger interrelations of ocean, ice and land. As Nasa puts it, "When we talk about climate change, we talk about changes in long-term averages of daily weather." As such, weather is like climate's rambunctious little brother who's always in your face.

For decades, climate scientists have been writing an increasingly precise script for climate change and now nature has snatched the lead role with abandon. One recent report from the US Climate Change Science Programme, "Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate" (pdf), summarised weather extremes this way:


Sound familiar? It does for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). Last month, Noaa noted the US had already endured nine distinct disasters, each totalling $1bn or more in economic losses, tying the wretched record from 2008. They calculated losses for 2011 at more than $35bn – and this was before Hurricane Irene. Jane Lubchenco, the head of Noaa, connected the dots during a speech in Denver: "With climate change, we are loading the dice in favor of these more severe weather events." Others from the scientific community have highlighted the relationship between weather and climate. Climatologist Heidi Cullen argues in her book The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet:

"Climate and global warming need to be built into our daily weather forecasts because by connecting climate and weather we can begin to work on our long-term memory and relate it to what's outside our window today. If climate is impersonal statistics, weather is personal experience. We need to reconnect them."

The news media carry much of the burden to make this reconnection. Yet, after the Copenhagen climate change conference in 2009, the amount of US media coverage of climate change has plunged to pre-Inconvenient Truth levels, consistently hovering below levels of coverage from other parts of the world. At the same time, Nielsen's recent Global Online Environment and Sustainability Survey found that concern in the US over climate change has dwindled considerably since 2007, dropping 14 percentage points. Less than half of those surveyed in the US (48%) consider climate change a source of concern. Anxiety over extreme weather patterns – and those patterns' ties to climate change – led to significantly higher concern about climate change in other places like Latin America (90%), the Middle East/Africa (80%) and Asia Pacific (72%).

Many mainstream US journalists are working hard to make sure climate change is reported with the urgency it deserves (Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post comes to mind). This is a challenge when politicians in DC – Barack Obama included – are pegging it low on their priority boards. But by accepting the over-hyped dichotomy between jobs and the environment, journalists too often portray a willingness to take meaningful action on climate change as political suicide.

Elected officials have a built-in political incentive to ignore climate disruption. Viewing climate change as an issue facing future generations, if that – rather than already with us – allows politicians to do what they do best: focus on their short-term political interests while hemming and hawing over long-term, seemingly intractable problems. When you add election-year Republican dynamics and stir, you have yourself a full-throttle political thicket where frontrunner presidential candidate Governor Rick Perry of Texas can wave off global warming as an "unproven" theory even as extreme weather ravages his home state.

Journalists have too easily slid into the well-worn ruts of culture-war coverage. As if on wedge-issue cue, Perry recently ploughed through a panoply of denialist verbiage:


It's easy for journalists to cover the chaotic claims of prominent politicians. A challenge more befitting of the profession is to demonstrate how climate change connects to extreme weather, national security and the economy. More reporters covering those consequential issues need to place climate change into their journalistic quivers, so they can bring climate into conversation with the other vital issues of our time, rather than relegating it to the climate change ghetto in the media's culture war zone.

As Republican candidates rehearse Exxon-esque talking points, journalists need to ask them where their weather and climate change thresholds lie. Someone should ask Perry, "At what specific threshold would you begin to 'believe' in global warming?" Would he reconsider his position if Texas were thrashed by an Old Testament-style concoction of droughts and tornadoes on an even more regular basis? How regular would this thrashing have to be? More than 97% of active climate scientists are in consensus that humans are contributing significantly to climate change. What percentage does he require to eliminate doubt? 99%? 109%?

Same goes for Obama. How many deaths and billions in economic damage from extreme weather would it take for him to take action to mitigate climate change and, for example, put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline? If New York were transmogrified into the Okefenokee swamp, would that be enough? How about if southern California were turned into a desertified deadzone?


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