Climate Change - Part 2 - Veronique Frizzell

Yesterday I forgot to mention about why people may not evacuate in the face of an incoming hurricane. A couple of reasons crossed my mind:

1. If you live in a huge city like Houston, evacuating in time just might not be possible. Back in 2005 people tried to evacuate for hurricane Rita and the traffic was unbelievable. For a route that normally took maybe an hour and half (probably less) took almost 10 hours to traverse, and that was still within the city limits.

2. Hurricane Michael just came up FAST! Sunday night I was looking at the NHC site and Michael was just a depression or tropical storm and nowhere did the site mentioned that it could become a hurricane. Monday morning I looked at the site again and it was a hurricane, just traversing past Cuba! And yet, we still didn’t know of the gravity of the situation because the hurricane was going to be either a 1 or 2, maybe a 3. But the storm kept getting stronger and stronger until it became too late to leave. Monday it became a hurricane and Wednesday it slammed the Panhandle Florida as a Cat 4 at 155 mph, just below Cat 5 at 157 mph. People were caught off guard. The weather people were surprised at the speed of development.

3. It could be that some companies did not let their employees leave early or at all. There were tales that during hurricane Harvey, some businesses made their employees come in during flooding or face the threat of unemployment. And a similar threat of unemployment cropped up in Florida.

4. Some people don’t have the money to leave town and stay in hotels.

5. Some people had lived through multiple instances of hurricanes and tropical storms and did not think it would get as bad as it did. These people were stunned at the level of destruction: houses floating by, trees snapped in half, blocks of houses razed down to the foundation. You definitely don’t want to be in town when a Cat 4 comes through. The question is: will your place of employment allow you to leave town?

6. And some people will just gravitate toward risky endeavors. They want to live through such an event to tell the tale because they don’t believe it could be that bad. But in the aftermath of hurricane Michael, there were tales after tales of people thinking “I should have left. Will I live through this?” Before the storm blew through, there were some articles of people saying that there were just staying on their boat (I think they live on their boat). If they did stay on their boat, I don’t see how they survived this. There’s no way: boats were being thrown around and smashed ashore.

Again, with two consecutive years of really bad weather around the world and these devastating storms, fires, droughts and flooding, it is hard to understand why some folks don’t believe in the possibility of climate change.

I seem to recall that as a kid growing up, whenever there was a threat of a hurricane, the category was usually either 1 or 2, which was scary enough, and rarely a 3. I don’t recall a 4 or 5. Now, Cat 3’s and 4’s are coming up pretty regularly while 1’s and 2’s are becoming rarer. As a matter of fact, when hurricane Michael became a Cat 1 while in Georgia, I started to breathe a sigh of relief…but wait, it’s still a dangerous storm! It’s still a hurricane! It’s funny (or not) how relative to a 4, almost a 5, a 1 seems like a minor storm, but it’s not. It’s still a dangerous hurricane.

It’s terrifying to think we’ll see more 4’s and 5’s and still, some people don’t believe in climate change and will fight hard to avoid doing anything about it. I just read a viewpoint that argued that mitigating the effect won’t be as economically ruinous as feared. I would like to believe that is true. Whatever the case may be, I think that if we try to mitigate the damage, we will find a way to turn the effort into something good for the economy, in other words, the economy would thrive while we figure out how to be environmentally green. We at least have a fighting chance when trying to avert this disaster. The other alternative is that most of us will be dead. Dead is dead and you can’t come back from that.