Believing the evidence of your own eyes (and lungs)
Derrick Z. Jackson for the Environmental Health News
The year is only half done and the United States has already been enveloped by acrid orange skies in the East, battered by winter rains and floods in California, seared by record winter temperatures in the South, soaked by a record 26-inch April deluge in Fort Lauderdale, and broiled by record spring heat in the Pacific Northwest, Texas, and Puerto Rico.
The onslaught has led to another round of
media headlines and press releases from environmental and public health groups
asking whether the nation is at a tipping point of urgency to fight climate
change.
A Los Angeles Times headline for reader
letters on the floods said, “California rains are a wake-up call for climate
upheaval to come.” Many other media outlets
and advocacy groups, from Al Jazeera to
the American Lung Association,
speculated as to whether the recent smoke plumes may also be such a “wake-up
call.”
A Vox headline on the
orange skies from Canadian wildfires said, “Wildfire smoke reminded people
about climate change. How soon will they forget?” A Washington Post story
carried the headline: “How the
Canadian wildfire smoke could shift Americans’ views on climate.” A
Philadelphia Inquirer column carried the
headline, “America sleepwalks through a climate crisis. Will this smoke alarm
wake us up?”
So far, no alarm bell has been loud enough
to stop the sleepwalking. Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Superstorm Sandy in
2012, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in
2017, and Hurricane Irma in
2021 were all accompanied by the same question. After the 2021 “heat dome” that
saw Portland, Oregon hit 116 degrees and Seattle soar to 106, a Los Angeles
Times headline said: “Northwest heat wave swamped the vulnerable, was a harsh
climate wake-up call.”
The usual and eventual response to such
things was summed up in an Associated Press story five years
after Superstorm Sandy. The headline was “5 years after Superstorm Sandy, the
lessons haven’t sunk in.” It was about most plans for climate security in the
New York City area being unrealized.
A harsh new normal
Whether we wake up or not, a harsh climate
is the new normal. To date in 2023, the United States has already
suffered nine climate and weather disasters resulting
in at least a billion dollars of damage, according to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That fits with the last five years, which have seen an annual average of 18 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. That is a six-fold increase over the three such events a year during the 1980s, in adjusted dollars.
Since 1980, hurricanes, severe storms, floods, and wildfires from billion-dollar events have cost the nation more than $2.5 trillion in damage and taken 16,000 lives. A quarter of the damages have come in just the last five years, causing major home insurers to astronomically raise rates in states seeing frequent severe weather and climate events, such as California, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Colorado.
Allstate and State Farm have announced they will not issue any
new homeowner policies in California.
This of course is not the entire picture as
there are countless storms under $1 billion that still ravage communities and
drain state budgets. “It is important to keep in mind that these estimates do
not reflect the total cost of U.S. weather and climate disasters, only those
associated with events more than $1 billion in damages,” NOAA says. “That means
they are a conservative estimate of how much extreme weather costs the United
States each year.”
According to one major global property database, nearly 15 million homes, or nearly 1 of every 10, was impacted in 2021 by natural disasters that are worsening with global warming, to the tune of $57 billion in property damage.
Those costs are not yet steep enough. Part of that is that
humans in the U.S. are normalizing the new
normal, simply adapting to a seemingly incremental warmer environment rather
than leap to action against an existential threat.
A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences found that temperatures initially considered remarkable are
unremarkable about five years later. The normalization effect is so strong that
the study concluded: “It may be unlikely that rising temperatures alone will be
sufficient to produce widespread support for mitigation policies.”
The study’s lead author, Frances Moore of
the University of California Davis, said in a press release, “We
saw that extreme temperatures still make people miserable, but they stop
talking about it. This is a true boiling-frog effect (referring to the false
myth that a frog will not feel gradually warming temperatures until it boils to
death). People seem to be getting used to changes they’d prefer to avoid. But
just because they’re not talking about it doesn’t mean it’s not making them
worse off.”
Disinformation dulls urgency
Climate change denial and skepticism is a key feature of the deep political divide in this nation, fueled by long-running and coordinated campaigns of disinformation, often funded by fossil fuel interests.
Most recently, as many cities broke pollution records and New
York City momentarily recorded the worst air quality in
the world from the plumes of smoke flowing down from
Canadian wildfires, climate and pollution deniers blew their own smoke at
the public on right-wing media.
The infamous fossil fuel and tobacco industry shill Steve Milloy falsely claimed on FOX News—which itself glorifies oil and gas and lambasts environmental regulations—that the wildfire smoke posed “no health risk.”
Not-a-scientist Milloy further pontificated, “This doesn’t kill anybody. This
doesn’t make anybody cough. This is not a health event. This has got nothing to do with
climate . . .This is not because of fossil fuels.”
Laughing FOX host Laura Ingraham then gave
Milloy the floor to deny the science of particulate matter to her audience,
which averages 2 million viewers. Milloy promptly said that concern about
particulates was “crazy” and “invented” by the EPA. He said particulate matter
is so “innocuous,” that any attempt to claim otherwise is “total junk science.”
A world of actual scientists can junk that
lie. Fine particulate pollution, known as PM 2.5, kills between 4.2
million and 5.7 million people a year, according to a
range of studies. More life
years are lost around the
globe from PM 2.5, according to the Energy Policy Institute at the University
of Chicago, than from cigarette
smoking or alcohol.
In the U.S., exposure to PM 2.5
prematurely kills at least
100,000 people a year. That is more than gun deaths and fatal car crashes
combined. This is before considering a world with more wildfire smoke.
Emergency room visits for asthma doubled in New York
during the June plume, with most of the
afflicted coming from Black, Latino, and high-poverty neighborhoods.
A 2021 study in Lancet
Planetary Health found that worldwide, 33,500 people
a year die from cardiovascular and respiratory complications due to the fine
particulate matter of acute wildfire smoke.
The study said its findings were so “robust” that policy makers should “manage
vegetation and mitigate climate change as far as possible.”
The findings are an urgent warning as NOAA says climate change is “supercharging” drought conditions, lengthening wildfire seasons. A new study in PNAS found that the area of California’s summer wildfires has grown fivefold over the last half century and could increase by another 50% by 2050.
Nearly all the increase is due to
global warming that is generally drying out the state. Additionally, fires that
engulf communities carry even more risk in
the smoke. Smoke from California’s 2018 Camp Fire contained high
levels of lead and metals from burning buildings.
Lost in the haze: new poll highlights a stunning public
disconnect on climate reality
The overall scientific consensus on global warming cannot get more robust. A decade ago, a review of nearly 12,000 studies conducted between 1991 and 2011 found that 97.2% of them agreed that humans were causing global warming. A 2021 analysis of more than 88,000 studies since 2012 now finds 99.9% agreement.
If only such agreement could escape the lab. The enduring gap in public awareness and understanding received a fresh exclamation point in a new poll this month by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
The survey found that that only 58% of people in
the U.S. believe that “most” scientists agree on global warming and only 20%
know that more than 90% of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate
change is happening.
“Public misunderstanding of the scientific
consensus – which has been found in each of our surveys since 2008 – has
significant consequences,” the survey said. Among those consequences are a
decreased level of concern and support for climate action.
In line with the PNAS “boiling frog” study,
climate harm remains a far-off concern for many people despite the six-fold
increase of disasters in the last five years compared to the 1980s. Only 48% of
respondents believe people in the U.S. are being harmed “right now” by global
warming. More than half of respondents (55%) still say that they have not yet
personally experienced the effects of climate change.
Perhaps even more stunning were perceptions about the future. While about 70% of people in the poll think future generations, the world’s poor, or plant and animal species will be affected by global warming, only 47% think they will personally be affected.
Will this year’s Danger Season build support for action?
If the next six months of 2023 are anything
like the first six, the ability of people to normalize global warming may be
put to its most severe test yet. The nation is only two months into the
six-month period that the Union of Concerned Scientists calls “Danger Season,”
for the likelihood of climate change-amplified heat waves, severe storms,
wildfires, and hurricanes from May through October.
Even if the remainder of this year is
relatively calm, there is no long-term relief ahead. The World Meteorological
Organization announced this spring that Earth is hurtling
into its hottest five-year
span yet. Petteri Taalas, the
secretary-general of the WMO, said the planet was entering “uncharted
territory.”
That calls for uncharacteristic urgency to turn down the heat. There actually are hopeful signs that it is arising, despite the current indifference sowed by disinformation. The Yale survey found that two-thirds of people disagree that it is too late to do anything about global warming.
A Pew poll last year
found that 69% of respondents thought that the U.S. should take steps toward
being carbon neutral by 2050 and should prioritize renewable energy over
expanding fossil fuel exploration.
The call for action to stop global warming
is growing louder in Latino and Black communities
hit hardest by fossil fuel pollution and living disproportionately on urban
“heat islands” that lack trees and parks.
Climate scientists are not sitting on their
99.9% consensus. They have stepped up efforts to expose fossil fuel
companies for their deceit and assign responsibility to them for their damage
to the planet.
A study this year in the journal Science exposed ExxonMobil for its public skepticism on climate science even as its own scientists accurately predicted what is happening now.
A study led by the Union of Concerned Scientists and published last month in Environmental Research Letters found that the emissions traced to the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and cement companies have play a massive role in altering the atmosphere’s drying power and wildfires.
More than a third
of the forest area burned in the western U.S. and southwestern Canada since
1986—nearly 20 million acres—can be attributed to those emissions.
Also last month, Boston University held a symposium to
strategize on fighting fossil fuel disinformation. Benjamin Sovacool, director of Boston
University’s Institute for Global Sustainability, said,
“Misinformation is pervasive, it’s at a very unique moment in our culture, and
a post-truth society cannot survive.”
Nor can a post-truth planet.
These views do not necessarily represent
those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate or publisher,
Environmental Health Sciences.
This post originally ran on The Union of Concerned Scientists
blog and is republished here with permission.
Derrick Z. Jackson is on the advisory board of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate. He's also a Union of Concerned Scientist Fellow in climate and energy.