Annual disaster the new normal

CLIMATE CHANGE IS KILLING US

As four new hurricanes and a super typhoon were being born or slamming into the land our climate change-denying president did three things that seem the stuff of horror movies.

First as Hurricane Florence was about to slam into the Carolinas, the president of the United States was furiously tweeting a denial that 3,000 people really died in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria last year.

How could they have died when he went there personally to throw paper towels at survivors? Then he blamed the Democrats for inflating the number of dead even though the scientific study was conducted by George Washington University's Milken Institute of School of Public Health and had nothing to do with any political party.

The second and more devastating news, which slipped out under the radar, is that his toadystaffed and revamped Environmental Protection Agency (which was created by Richard Nixon) was planning to announce huge rollbacks to Obama-era climate change policies which requires oil and gas companies to monitor and reduce the release of methane into our atmosphere. That means that an estimated 380,000 tons (yes, that's tons) of methane could be spewed into our already fragile environment in the next six years. That's more than the weight of the Empire State building .

Let's be clear here: Science has shown that the force and duration of super storms is now worsened by climate change, and climate change is driven in part by methane and other pollutants.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/ 09/hurricane-florence-rainclimate-change-science/

And third, even as these newest super storms were forming, we found out that President Trump had redirected nearly $10 million from desperately needed FEMA money to fund immigration detention centers where, as The New York Times reported, the number of children held has “exploded to the highest ever recorded.”

We need FEMA more than ever, not less than before.

Global warming is changing the weather, the seas, the earth. Yes, disasters that kill people make news, but quietly the environment is being destroyed in ways that don't make news.

Three years ago I reported that due to climate change, millions of tons of slimy brown sargassum seaweed was devouring beaches from Florida to Texas and the Caribbean. It's still coming. It worsened after the BP oil spill and is worsened by agricultural waste and runoff. Barbados in fact had to declare a national emergency because of it this summer.

It's yet another clear sign that our planet is in trouble and that what were once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic events are now the new normal.

How quickly we've come to accept that total devastation from hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters ARE natural disasters when there's nothing all that natural about them. We must do better.

Or failing that, we can continue to believe that there is no global warming and only 16 people died in Puerto Rico.