Panic and Perspective

Harvey and Irma are not half of your grandmother's Tuesday Bridge club, they are storms, big ones, unusual ones.  Harvey dropped more rain than has ever been dropped on the Texas Gulf region and produced a disastrous flood event that will take years to recover from completely.  Irma is still out in the Atlantic ocean beating the tar out of some small islands, but she's coming and she is the biggest, strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic.  Most of the real bruisers (like Harvey) have formed over the relatively warmer waters of the Caribbean.  Warm water is pretty crucial to forming really nasty storms, whether they are hurricanes or typhoons, because warm water allows the natural convection of air currents to pick up speed and force.  Warm moist air rising up from the surface is the fuel of thunderstorms and hurricanes and tornadoes, every middle school science book tells you that.  The cold waters of the Atlantic ocean are a big wet blanket to the hurricane party and that is a good thing for most of the east coast of the United States.  Most of us remember Hurricane Andrew as a stark reminder of what happens to Florida when a Category 4 or 5 hurricane actually does come barreling off of the ocean... it's not good, and thankfully it's rare, except it might be on the road to becoming less rare.
Climate scientists have been increasingly clear on the fact that fairly small changes in ocean temperature can increase the likelihood of storms like Harvey and Irma.  That's why they get panicky about El Nino and La Nina, the adorably named but actually quite serious trends of ocean temperature.  These differences, really only a matter of a few degrees, can have radical effects on the weather we non-ocean dwelling mammals experience.  This is because the oceans are big, enormous in fact, and because water has a higher specific heat than air, again very basic middle school science stuff.  The enormous mass of these bodies of water and the relative amount of energy they can absorb and also release makes them our best friend and our worst enemies when it comes to climate related consequences.  The effects of climate change at this point are not just about sinking islands and shifting coastlines, they are about worse storms and extreme weather events, they are about losing ecosystems that most of us don't see very much, like coral reefs and cypress swamps, places which breathe life into our world, terrestrial and aquatic alike.
Ask Houston if they feel like that was a hoax by the Chinese.  Ask Miami in a few days, and tell them they should get used to it.  Climate change denial is becoming less about a disagreement between rational possibilities and more about callous disregard for our fellow humans.  Floods like Harvey produced are exponentially more deadly in poorer parts of the world.  In Houston we had people with boats and monster trucks pitching in to help out, we have FEMA mobilizing to help, and J.J. Watt raising millions of dollars in relief and gathering truck loads of supplies.  A week after Harvey, stuff starts to get back to normal in Texas, in Burma or Haiti it takes a lot longer than that.  If it is bad here, it is going to be worse in places where people are poorer and more vulnerable.  The death tolls are not measured in dozens but in hundreds, if not thousands.
I'm no fan of unwanted panic, I worked for a while in the environmental industry that was formed largely as a result of a panic.  For a long time, dating back to Greek and Roman civilization, people made things using this peculiar and useful mineral called asbestos, it forms these fibrous crystal structures that make stuff containing it really durable and also fireproof.  The fibrous nature of asbestos is what makes it so great, and also what made it dangerous (sort of like the ocean's heat sink capacity).  The fibers of asbestos, if you breathe them, don't do good things for your lungs.  They can cause scarring in the lungs, which produces a condition similar to the black lung that coal miners get from breathing in coal dust, and it can also cause cancer, particularly a type of cancer called Mesothelioma, which is basically a death sentence.
In the early 1980s people sort of simultaneously decided to notice that asbestos could have these effects and also that it was in freaking everything.  What ensued was a panic, in which the problems of asbestos containing materials were often made worse, regulations and responses were made on the fly and consequently made very little sense.  A lot of people, including my former employer, got awfully wealthy during this panic and people in general learned to fear asbestos in highly irrational manner.  For a long time, I held on to what I knew from the aftermath of that panic as somehow instructive about the growing evidence that human activity is contributing to climate change.
I was aided and abetted in that delusion by the soothing words of what I now know to be the voice of industries that were directly invested in fossil fuel production and consumption.  In the wake of the asbestos panic, it was found that Johns Manville, a large (to put it mildly) corporation which manufactured all manner of asbestos containing materials had actually suppressed evidence of the harmful effects of asbestos, and thus were found liable and had to pay out huge sums of money to those affected by exposure to asbestos.
It turns out that Exxon Mobile and Koch Industries and such like have pulled and are continuing to attempt to pull such a deception. The level of chicanery is several levels above what Johns Manville did with asbestos though.  Johns Manville simply didn't share all the information they had, the fossil fuel conglomerate has actually gone on the offensive against everyone from the EPA to science itself, trying to convince enough people that climate change isn't happening, or failing that, that it's not that big of a deal.
This time the victims are not just going to be a few thousand steam fitters and ship builders, this time the victims could be anyone who lives within 500 miles of a coast, any coast, you pick.  This time they are going to be all the people who suddenly live in an area where diseases like malaria start happening when they never did before, or who find their formerly productive farms turning into desert.  I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me if you could even make a thin case, you could have a hell of a class action lawsuit.