Adonis Diaries

Damage is seen in a neighborhood in the Breezy Point area of Queens in New York after fire destroyed about 80 homes as a result of Hurricane Sandy.

“Never has a hurricane been more aptly, if tragically, named than Sandy, the superstorm that flooded New York City and battered much of the East Coast.

At press time, the storm had killed at least 43  people and (climbing steadily to over 90) and caused an estimated $32 billion in damages (climbing to 50 on the economy) to buildings and infrastructure—figures expected to increase in the coming days as emergency personnel pick through the wreckage—and left 8 million homes without electricity.

And so it has been with America’s response to climate change.

For more than 20 years, scientists and others have been warning that global warming, if left unaddressed, would bring a catastrophic increase in extreme weather—summers like that of 2012, when the United States endured the hottest July on record and the worst drought in 50 years, mega-storms like the one now punishing the East Coast.

Hurricanes are fueled by hot ocean surface temperatures.

The Atlantic Ocean is about 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than usual this fall, and  as Katharine Hayhoe of the University of Texas has noted , about 15% of this extra heat is directly due to global warming. The flooding unleashed by Sandy is especially destructive, Kayhoe adds, because global warming has caused sea levels in the New York region to rise by one foot over the past century.

But scientists’ warnings have been by and large ignored—at least within the corridors of power in Washington.

As in the myth of Cassandra, today it remains unclear whether even the latest catastrophe—the devastation of America’s greatest city, its center of commerce, finance and, tellingly, the news media—will cause the nation to wake up and take serious action.

There are signs of hope?

Speaking Tuesday in Minneapolis, former president  Bill Clinton called out  Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for ridiculing the idea of fighting climate change, thereby becoming the first political heavyweight to explicitly link Sandy with climate change.

Slowing the rise of the oceans, as candidate Barack Obama pledged to do in 2008, but which Romney mocked in his address to this year’s Republican national convention, sounds like a pretty good idea in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Clinton said, adding, “In my part of America, we would like it if someone could have done that yesterday.”

New York governor Andrew Cuomo , in a press briefing Tuesday morning, did not raise the climate connection himself but did affirm it. “We have a 100-year flood every two years now,” Cuomo said he told president Obama by telephone. “Anyone who thinks that there is not a dramatic shift in weather patterns is denying reality,” Cuomo added.

Obama himself has not linked Sandy with climate change, thereby continuing the climate silence that has characterized both his and Governor Romney’s presidential campaigns. Climate change went completely unmentioned in all three of the Romney-Obama debates, as well as in the debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Congressman Paul Ryan.

This was historic: it marked the first time since 1984 that climate change was not discussed in any of the campaign debates. And when Obama was finally questioned about the omission last week in an interview with MTV, what was his response? Obama said he was “surprised” that climate change hadn’t come up in the debates—as if he himself had nothing to do with that result.

After all, Obama’s only the president of the United States. Yet somehow Obama found plenty of time in the debates to brag about the record amount of oil drilling and pipeline laying his administration has presided over.

Note: More on the lack of climate change in the debates https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/presidential-debates-silent-on-climate-change-a-first-since-1988/