Severe storms that began last week in Texas and Oklahoma have killed at least 23 people, and the damage is so extensive that Texas Governor Greg Abbott has declared nearly 40 counties disaster areas. In Houston, many highways turned into waterways, and more than a thousand cars were submerged under water. President Obama has pledged federal assistance to help the state recover, but cleanup efforts were stalled Thursday as thunderstorms continued. Some of the worst flooding happened in the small town of Wimberley, between San Antonio and Austin, where the Blanco River rose 28 feet in just an hour, cresting at 40 feet—more than triple its flood stage of 13 feet.
Katharine Hayhoe talking:
this is our severe weather season, so this is the time of year when we typically do get severe weather patterns like we’re seeing this month. But they are relentless. We are seeing these lines of storms pass through with only a day or two or three in between them. We had one last night, we’re expecting another tomorrow. These storms are getting an extra shot of adrenalin from El Niño. We haven’t had an El Niño year for quite some time. But we also know that, as humans, we have altered the background conditions of our atmosphere, through putting all of this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so every weather event that happens has some component of climate change in it. And in the case of heavy rainfall, we know that what climate change is doing is increasing the amount of water vapor that’s sitting there in the atmosphere for these storms to pick up and dump on us.
Forrest Wilder talking:
The Blanco River, on a normal day, it’s a pretty small river. It’s shallow. It’s a very beautiful, calm, serene kind of place. It is prone to flash flooding. We’ve seen that, you know, many, many times. But this was just orders of magnitude more extreme than anything that is on the historical record or that anybody alive has ever witnessed. Basically, we had supersaturated soil conditions from all the rainfall that we’re getting. And then, on top of that, we had, in the watershed, you know, 10 inches in some places. And what that did is it just generated just a massive amount of water flowing into the river in a very short time span, and it just rolled downriver and took out hundreds of homes. And, of course, there was a loss of life. There’s still people that are missing. There are folks trapped in their homes, trapped on top of their homes, people in the water. This was unlike really anything that anyone has seen, and it happened so fast that it was very difficult to see it coming or to be prepared for it, frankly.
Texas lawmakers doing basically nothing. We’re just completing our legislative session, in which there were a handful of climate-related bills that were filed, some that are pretty benign, you know, things like requiring state agencies to add to their preparedness plans taking a look at extreme weather, taking a look at climate change. That bill was unable to get passed. In fact, it was voted down overwhelmingly by the Republican majority. Basically, we have a situation—continue to have a situation in Texas where our political leadership doesn’t believe in climate change, or at least not human-caused climate change. And so, there’s just a situation of inaction at the political level. I think it’s a little bit different if you’re talking about ordinary people, who are starting to make some connections between these extreme weather events and climate change. But there’s a disconnect between people’s understanding and experience and what’s happening in our Capitol.
Texas senator and Republican presidential hopeful, Ted Cruz. He voted against a federal disaster relief bill in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast, calling it, quote, “symptomatic of a larger problem in Washington—an addiction to spending money we do not have.” But on Wednesday, he called for federal relief in the wake of the floods and storms in Texas. Ted Cruz has also disputed the scientific research about climate change.
Katharine Hayhoe talking:
when we hear people saying things like these quotes, it’s natural to assume, “Oh, they have a problem with the science. So what we need to do is we need to explain the science more clearly. Maybe we need some colored figures. Maybe we need a primer or some type of basic explanation of the science that we’ve known for almost 200 years.” But here’s the thing. What the social science tells us is they don’t really object to the science. What they really object to—and if you listen carefully to Jeb Bush, he alluded to this—what they really object to are the solutions, because, by definition, climate change is a tragedy of the commons. That means that we don’t, as individuals, have enough incentive to solve it ourselves. We require—it requires some type of large-scale action, like putting a price on carbon, which in turn requires government intervention. But you can’t really say, politically, “Oh, sure it’s a real problem. Of course it is. But I don’t want to do anything about it.” That’s very politically unacceptable. It’s a lot easier to say it isn’t a real problem than to say, “It is, but I don’t like any of the solutions that have been proposed.”
whenever we talk to people, I think the first thing to do is to bond over our shared values and connect those pre-existing shared values to the issue of climate change. So often, as you just heard in the quotes, people think, “Oh, well, you can only care about climate change if you’re a hardcore liberal, or if you’re a green tree hugger, you know, or if you’re this list of certain things, and if you’re not any of those things, you can’t care about climate change.” So the first thing I always do is I try to connect the dots between something that people already care about, whether it’s national security, our water resources, the safety of our family and our community, or our health. I mean, we can connect the dots between almost anything that anybody cares about and climate change.
talking about values, talking about what is already in people’s heart, there’s no greater value for many people than the values that come from our faith. So, for example, for Christians, we believe that God created the world, that God gave the world to people to care for every living thing. That comes from Genesis. And then, if we go over to the New Testament, we know that God wants us to love and care for other people. The greatest commandment is to love God and then love your neighbor as yourself. We’re constantly told to care for the poor and the needy and the disadvantaged and those who don’t have the resources we do. So, that is the value that we can connect directly to climate change, because the people who are being most impacted by climate change are the people who don’t have the resources to adapt.
This is a pattern that we’re seeing around the world. Back in 2003, there was a heat wave in Europe that, when all was done and told, was responsible for over 70,000 deaths that would not have occurred otherwise. So, we are seeing heat waves that have always occurred naturally. Heat waves are part of life on this planet. We are seeing these heat waves getting more frequent and getting stronger because of climate change. The way I think of it is, we always had a chance of rolling a double six, that extreme heat wave, on our climate dice. But what climate change is doing is it’s going in, and it’s replacing a few other numbers with sixes, so our chances of rolling those double sixes are going up, and climate change is even replacing some of those sixes with sevens, so our heat waves are getting stronger, too. So, again, what climate change is doing is it’s taking a natural pattern, a natural event, and it’s giving it that extra little bump of steroid, so to speak, just like a baseball player. So those heat waves are getting stronger, and they’re getting more frequent.
Forrest Wilder talking:
one of the sort of startling things about all this flooding is we were just in a very bad drought for about six years or so, by some measures the most extreme drought that we’ve had in a very long time, a drought of record in places. For example, in 2011, we had a statewide average of about 14 inches of rainfall. In Austin, which is about in the middle of the state in terms of geography and in average rainfall, you know, we usually get about 33 inches. There were several million acres of ranchland and rural areas that burned. We had urban wildfires here in Austin that we’d never really had before. We had a state park that burned down. We had reservoirs that were—that ran dry. We had communities that ran out of water. We had very large agricultural losses, I think something on the order of $5 billion, $6 billion. It was basically—again, I think Texas is prone to drought. Texas is prone to flooding. But this drought was extraordinary. The heat, for example, again, in 2011, was off the charts. We had—here in Austin, we had 90 days of 100-plus—over 100 degrees Fahrenheit weather. And so, I think what we saw was, going from this extreme drought to extreme flooding kind of in a matter of about six years, some of the extremes that we know that we can expect under various climate change scenarios. So, it was kind of a—it was an object lesson for many of us about what we may be facing in the future under climate change.
— source democracynow.org
Katharine Hayhoe, atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is also the founder and CEO of ATMOS Research, an organization created to bridge the gap between scientists and industry and government. She is co-author of the book, A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. In 2014, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in America.
Forrest Wilder, associate editor at The Texas Observer, originally from the town Wimberley, one of the towns worst hit flooding this week.