Climate deniers still denying?

So, we’ve had monster tornadoes ravish the Midwest; four or five 500-year flooding events wash over the same Midwest and mid-Atlantic region; serial heat waves, each one toppling old records; droughts reducing the water basins; and of course, the usual fires burning the Pacific west.

Now, hurricane season has come alive.

I think it began with Alaska being hit by a hurricane, or maybe near hurricane, bringing flooding to the coasts. I don’t recall Alaska being pummeled by a hurricane before, so that struck me as unusual. I really didn’t want to delve into the details because we were in the midst of hurricane season ourselves and it was eerily quiet in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. I just didn’t want to see terrible news.

Peak hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico is said to be September 10th. It had been quiet up to that point but after that date, the Atlantic exploded. Fortunately, most of the storms in the early days after September 10th stayed in the midst of the Atlantic.

Then Fiona came along and hit Puerto Rico and then zoomed up the Atlantic to next hit Nova Scotia in Canada. Puerto Rico said that Fiona was worse than Maria of 2017.

Worse than Maria.

Maria was bad. I got the impression that Puerto Rico was kind of wiped out and took years to dig out of the demolition. So, to be worse than Maria…

Nova Scotia got hit bad too. As a matter of fact, I think it is unusual for hurricanes to last all the way through the Northern latitudes – they tend to die in the north. Generally, in order to have a chance for something to develop, the waters need to be at least 80 degrees and I’m under the impression that up far north, the waters don’t get that warm. But this time, Fiona was devastating to Nova Scotia and probably broke some kind of Canadian record.

Immediately, and I mean immediately, after Fiona, Ian comes along and hit Cuba and then ravish Florida as a very high Cat 4 hurricane this week. It was a trifecta of disasters for the western coast of Florida: high storm surge, strong winds (150 to 155 miles per hour), heavy rains contributing to massive flooding. I think it goes on to hit South Carolina as a Cat 1.

Florida got hit bad. Some of the stuff I’m reading leads me to think “how did they survive that?” I saw a video of a house being swept away by either the storm surge or the flooding waters. But the sad thing about that video was that at the 5 second point, you see the door to the house being opened and then closed. The commentators were hoping that whoever lived there was able to get out. A commentator pointed out that at the 45 second mark, the door opens again, when the waters have already risen too high for any kind of escape. The door opened a little bit before the house was swept away. So, the commentators didn’t know what to say about that.

That is just indescribably sad. Horrifying.

I think there are a dwindling number of climate deniers but unfortunately, those few wants to “delay” taking any action. I hope that after seeing this summer series of devastation, that some more deniers realize that there can no longer be any delays.

We cannot have those investors like Vivek Ramaswamy drive the conversation back to profit maximization and shareholder value only. We need to pay attention to other stakeholders, not just the shareholders. As a matter of fact, put the shareholders at the bottom of the prioritization list. Environmental considerations are important. Diversity and inclusion are also important, according to research. Shareholders need to be at the bottom for now.

It is going to get worse before we can mitigate the effects of climate change because whatever we released is already baked in. What we can do is try to mitigate so that at some point in the future, we can begin to turn things around, but that’s far in the future.