Fla.’s year of self-inflicted environmental disasters

In the Appalachian backwater from whence I sprung, fundamentalist preachers talked with dark foreboding about “portents and omens” and the coming apocalypse. None of which I paid much mind; that is, not until 2018 when Florida was visited by a plague of signs and portents and omens and peerreviewed scientific studies telling of a different kind of apocalypse.

And fast coming.

We’ve suffered through a year with tribulations enough to rival the Book of Exodus. Hey Egyptian, I’ll see your frogs, locusts and hailstorms and raise you Burmese pythons, toxic green algae and Hurricane Michael.

Remember the biblical plague (top of the list) of river water turning blood red: “The fish that are in the Nile will die, and the Nile will become foul, and the Egyptians will find difficulty in drinking water from the Nile.” Well, 2018 brought Florida another kind of red tide and thousands of tons of rotting, dead fish washed onto our beaches.

And floods. The bible tells of floods begot by days of rain, but Florida suffers strange, sunny day, rainless floods that the ancients would surely attribute to a curse engineered by supernatural beings. Except this curse, a sign of rising seas and melting icecaps . . . we’ve brought it on ourselves. No need of otherworldly intervention.

The frightening aspect of the environmental disasters afflicting South Florida in 2018 is that most were harbingers of the difficult future that awaits us and our progeny if carbon fuel emissions go unchecked and global warming is allowed to escalate. As they surely will, given the willful ignorance of our elected leaders, who find it politically convenient to pretend that humans can inject 40 billion tons of carbon pollution into the air every year without serious consequences.

Of course, we can take some solace knowing that 2018 was only the fourth hottest year on record, after 2015, 2016 and 2017. It was likely the overheated water that accounted for the transformation of a tropical depression (TD #14) into Hurricane Michael, one of the most violent storms to ever strike the U.S. mainland, in just three days.

It was shocking how fast a piddling, no-account, hardly noticed weather disturbance was suddenly generating 155 mph winds (which may be revised upward) and, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, generated a 15.5-foot storm surge, topped off with 5-foot waves. The hellish scenes and 43 deaths along Port St. Joe, Mexico Beach, Panama City, Highland View, St. George Island and Apalachicola portends what comes of global warming.

“The real exclamation point from Michael,” wrote Kim Cobb, director of the global change program at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, “is the same one that came with its close relatives Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Maria and Florence — all supercharged by manmade climate change to some degree.”

Professor Cobb, writing in the Washington Post, worried that along with stronger, wetter hurricanes, “We are exceptionally ill-prepared for the climate threats that are unfolding today, let alone those of the next decades. Rising seas caused by warming and rising oceans and melting ice are already bringing low-lying coastlines under threat from so-called “blue sky flooding.”

Cobb was writing about the nation’s future, but it sounded very much like a chronicle of Florida climate travails in 2018. She might have added, as she listed the modern version of the Plagues of Egypt, the devastating losses of Florida’s coral reefs from a perverse combination of overheated waters, carbon pollution and sewage and waste water runoff. All curses of the manmade kind.

This summer Florida suffered a 100-mile infestation of red tide along the Florida Gulf Coast, a toxic alga that scientists think is exacerbated by warm waters, storm churn and agricultural nutrients polluting the water. Meanwhile, Florida’s inland estuaries, fed by the grotesquely polluted Lake Okeechobee, were again choked with a stinking, toxic scum of vibrant green cyanobacteria. The red and green algae attacks combined to cause a marine life massacre of biblical proportions on both coasts. Industrial earth-moving equipment was brought in to scoop up the carpet of fish carcasses covering our famous beaches. Tourists were appalled. Seaside businesses were ruined.

After the year Florida has suffered, the rest of the nation might see us as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Our 2018, is their future. Droughtstricken California, however, might challenge our canary status after 7,560 wildfires burned through 1,671,187 acres of state forest land.

California’s travails, however, did not include invasive killer serpents. In October, the Miami Herald delivered the frightening news that Burmese pythons, the voracious predators (all of them descended from discarded pets of idiot owners) wiping out entire species of native mammals in the Florida Everglades, have undergone a kind of accelerated evolution over the last couple decades that allows them to survive cooler climates. Oh God, as the climate north of here warms to unnatural temperatures, the range of these monstrous snakes expands exponentially.

All things considered,

I’d rather deal with a swarm of biblical locusts than an invasion of 18-foot-long transmogrified pythons. Ancient Egyptians, despite their plagues of frogs, bugs, hailstorms and whatnot, should have been thankful they were spared the environmental calamities that modern man, circa 2018, brought on himself.

Fred Grimm