Real disaster is climate change denial

September brings the Days of Awe, the period between the Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement. For Jews, it is a time of repentance, prayer and charity.

This year the Days of Awe are preceded by a new, secular interlude of anxiety. You don’t have to be Jewish to see it. You don’t have to read the Bible.

Just tune in to CNN. Listen to the warnings from officials around Hurricane Irma. To them this was the End of Days, an unprecedented, apocalyptic disaster.

Watching the wall-to-wall television coverage, I found most particularly striking the talk of Doomsday from the authorities, principally Rick Scott, the governor of Florida.

In the daily tableau for the cameras, there was Scott, sporting a baseball cap emblazoned with “NAVY,” flanked by sombre uniformed officials, issuing the latest threat from the storm that would “devastate the United States.”

Worried that Floridians would refuse to flee, Scott became the voice of God. “Evacuate,” he declared. “Not tonight. Not in an hour. You need to go now.”

With every passing hour, he was one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse: “It (the water) flows in very fast. It is going to be faster ... than you are.”

And then: “Just remember this: Once the storm starts, law enforcement cannot save you.”

The governor’s language was strong because of traditional skepticism of these warnings among weather-weary residents who insist they can survive. During Hurricane Sandy, in the northeast, this ilk thought they could hole up in their homes. Many died.

Sounding the alarm was responsible; the governor tried to save Floridians from themselves. But as the waters recede, it’s now time to ask: Who can save them from the governor?

After all, it is antediluvians such as Scott who brazenly deny climate change. “Global warming” is so anathema to him that he will not utter its name. State employees say he has asked them to do the same.

This isn’t to say that climate change directly caused Irma or her older brother, Harvey. Or that it brought this summer’s scourge of wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes and floods.

But if Scott was Cassandra-in-chief before the storm, where is he after the storm? Why cannot he acknowledge the warming air and water, the melting glaciers, the rising oceans and the increasingly frequent “once-in-100-years” floods and storms? Global warming may not create them, but it intensifies their power and magnifies their size.

Scientists overwhelmingly agree. But Rick Scott — and Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington — are in denial. So is Donald Trump, who has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement.

During Hurricane Irma, Pruitt said that evoking climate change was “insensitive,” as if it were raising incest at a family wedding. This would “politicize” the weather, cried conservatives.

Pruitt, meanwhile, is gleefully dismantling the EPA. Christine Todd Whitman, a former head of the agency (and a Republican), calls his plan to create “a red team of dissenting scientists” to challenge the consensus of thousands of scientists on climate change “a slow-rolling catastrophe in the making.”

She writes in the New York Times that the relationship between burning fossil fuels (which emit carbon dioxide) and the warming atmosphere is “as certain as the link between smoking and cancer.”

But not to Rick Scott, whose densely populated peninsular state is low, flat and washed by the ocean, making it the most vulnerable to climate change in America.

Think about it: Rather than warning about the threat of Hurricane Irma, what if he were to stop development along the state’s beaches? What if he were to make Irma a teachable moment?

Of course not. Scott, Pruitt and other deniers are prisoners to ideology, in thrall to fossil fuel producers who have financed their political careers. They cannot think any other way.

Environmentally, the End of Days is no longer a distant biblical calamity. It’s just beginning. Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History. twitter.com/Andrew_Z_Cohen