Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – After his historic meltdown of a presidential campaign announcement with notorious internet troll Elon Musk on a glitchy “Twitter Spaces,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis went on to have a conversation with former congressman Trey Gowdy, a kooky climate change denialist, on Fox “News” Wednesday night. In response to Gowdy’s question about whether he thought climate change was implicated in Florida’s hurricanes, DeSantis said, “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.” He said that hurricanes are a fact of life in Florida and have not become more frequent. So reports John Bowden at The Independent.
"I've always rejected the politicization of the weather" — asked on Fox News for his view on climate change, Ron DeSantis denies that it's a problem pic.twitter.com/MDjVi6TkTC
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 25, 2023
Like many American politicians, DeSantis just does not understand the issues in human-caused climate change. First, it is climate that is at issue, not “the weather.” Climate is a long-term pattern. The weather is a one-off. It is shocking that someone who has governed Florida for years should be so ignorant in this matter, although since we prostitute our politicians in the United States he could just be repeating what his Big Oil pimps have instructed him to say.
DeSantis’ quip about the hurricanes not being more frequent is beside the point. In fact, there has been an increase in the frequency of Atlantic basin hurricanes since 1970, but climate scientists do not attribute it to human emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. On the contrary, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the scientists’ models “project future decreases in Atlantic tropical storm frequency in response to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.” (My emphasis).
The problem is not more hurricanes. It is the intensity and destructiveness of what hurricanes the oceans do generate.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds that rainfall rates of tropical storms will increase because of human-generated greenhouse gases. Hotter oceans generate more water vapor in the air above them. If we drive the average surface temperature of the earth up by just 3.6 degrees F. (2 degrees C.) above pre-industrial levels, there will be an extra 10-15% of rain within 62 miles of the storm. More rainfall means great likelihood of flooding.
Tropical storms will under those conditions also be as much as 10% more intense.
There will also be an increase in the proportion of hurricanes and cyclones that reach category 4 and 5. Right now they are about 9% of tropical storms, but they will be a much bigger percentage as we burn more and more gasoline, fossil gas and coal. That, Mr. DeSantis, is bad.
A category 4 hurricane has wind speeds of 130-156 miles per hour, enough to damage most homes and to snap most trees in half. A category 5 hurricane is defined as one that has wind speeds of 157 miles per hour and higher. It will flatten most framed houses, destroying roofs and walls, and mow down trees and electricity poles.
Category 5 is as high as the Saffir-Simpson scale goes, but some climate scientists think we need to add a category 6 and a category 7. For instance, Hurricane Dorian crashed into the Bahamas in 2019 with “sustained winds of 185 mph and gusts up to 220 mph,” which Jeff Masters at the Scientific American thought merited a “6.” Masters added, “Only one hurricane in world history would rank as a category 7: Hurricane Patricia of 2015, which peaked with 215-mph sustained winds off the Pacific coast of Mexico.”
Moreover, the impact of increased wind speeds is not serial, it is exponential. A 150-mile-an-hour wind is on paper 20% stronger than a 125-mile-an-hour wind. In the real world, the 150-mile-an-hour wind is 73% more destructive.
A similar principle is at work in automobile collisions, which is why speeding is so unwise, as this site points out: “The laws of physics determine that the force of impact increases with the square of the increase in speed. So, if you double the speed of a car, you increase its force of impact four times. If you triple the speed, the impact is nine times as great.”
So the increase in the proportion of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes (and above) that the IPCC finds we will encounter in a 2C world is truly alarming.
Moreover, quite apart from megastorms, Florida faces sea level rise because driving our cars and heating our homes and businesses is causing surface ice to melt at the poles. Higher seas feed into bigger storm surges when tempests make landfall, so the two issues are related.
The threat is not the politicization of weather. Where human actions are turning the climate into Frankenstein’s monster, those actions should be the subject of politics. These actions are torts for which reparations can be demanded, as even the Roberts Supreme Court has admitted. Torts are always political. DeSantis wants glibly to sidestep this issue. As for the history of slavery, which most practicing historians teach as a matter of course, now that he wants to politicize.
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