In its aftermath, Maria also showcased one of the uglier aspects of our climate blindness. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, and live not far from the mainland on an island millions of Americans have visited personally. And yet when climate disaster struck there, we processed their suffering, perhaps out of psychological self-interest, as foreign and far away. Trump barely mentioned Puerto Rico in the week after Maria, and while that may not surprise, neither did the Sunday talk shows. By the weekend, a few days after the hurricane traversed the island, it was off the front page of The New York Times as well. When Trump’s feud with the heroic mayor of San Juan and his problematic visit to the island—during which he tossed paper towels into a crowd without power or water like T-shirts at a Knicks game—made the hurricane a partisan issue, Americans did begin to focus on the destruction a bit more. But the attention paid remains trivial compared to the humanitarian toll—and when compared to the response to natural disasters that have recently hit the American mainland. “We’re getting some intimations of how the ruling class intends to handle the accumulating disasters of the Anthropocene,” as the cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, of the New School, wrote. “We’re on our own.”
And in the future, all that was once unprecedented becomes quickly routine. Remember Hurricane Sandy? By 2100, floods of that scale are expected as many as seventeen times more often in New York. Katrina-level hurricanes are expected to double in frequency. Looking globally, researchers have found an increase of 25 to 30 percent in Category 4 and 5 hurricanes for just one degree Celsius of global warming. Between just 2006 and 2013, the Philippines were hit by seventy-five natural disasters; over the last four decades in Asia, typhoons have intensified by between 12 and 15 percent, and the proportion of Category 4 and 5 storms has doubled; in some areas, it has tripled. By 2070, Asian megacities could lose as much as $35 trillion in assets due to storms, up from just $3 trillion in 2005.
We are so far from investing in adequate defenses against these storms that we are still building out into their paths—as though we are homesteaders staking claim to land cleared each summer by tornadoes, committing ourselves blindly to generations being punished by natural disaster. In fact, it is worse than that, since paving over stretches of vulnerable coast, as we’ve done most conspicuously in Houston and New Orleans, stops up natural drainage systems with concrete that extends each epic flood. We tell ourselves we are “developing” the land—in some cases, fabricating it from marsh. What we are really building are bridges to our own suffering, since it’s not just those new concrete communities built right into the floodplain that are vulnerable, but all those communities behind them, built on the expectation that the old swampy coastline could protect them. Which does call into question just what we mean, in the age of the Anthropocene, by the phrase “natural disaster.”
Dreamtime weather won’t stop at the shore, but will blanket the life of every human living on the planet, no matter how far from the coast. The warmer the Arctic, the more intense the blizzards in the northern latitudes—that’s what’s given the American Northeast 2010’s “Snowpocalypse,” 2014’s “Snowmageddon,” and 2016’s “Snowzilla.”
The inland effects of climate change are being felt in warmer seasons, too. In April 2011—just one month—758 tornadoes swept the American countryside. The previous April record had been 267, and the most for any previous month in recorded history was 542. The next month, there was another wave, including the tornado that killed 138 people in Joplin, Missouri. What’s called America’s “tornado alley” has moved five hundred miles in just thirty years, and while, technically, scientists aren’t sure that climate change increases tornado formation, the paths of destruction tornadoes leave are getting longer, and they are getting wider; they arise from thunderstorms, which are increasing—the number of days on which they are possible growing as much as 40 percent by 2100, according to one assessment. The United States Geological Survey—not a notably alarmist corner of even the temperamentally conservative federal bureaucracy—recently “war-gamed” an extreme weather scenario they called “ARkStorm”: winter storms strike California, producing flooding in the Central Valley three hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, and more destructive flooding in Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Bay Area up north, altogether forcing evacuation of more than a million Californians; wind speeds reach hurricane levels of 125 miles per hour in parts of the state, and at least 60 miles per hour throughout much of it; landslides cascade down from the Sierra Nevada mountains; and damage, all told, reaches $725 billion, nearly three times the estimate for a massive earthquake in the state, the much-feared “Big One.”
In the past, even the recent past, disasters like these arrived with otherworldly force and incomprehensible moral logic. We could see them coming, on radar and by satellite, but could not interpret them—not legibly, not in ways that really made sense of them in relation to one another. Even atheists and agnostics might find themselves whispering the phrase “act of God” in the aftermath of a hurricane, or wildfire, or tornado, if only to express how inexplicable it felt to endure such suffering with no author behind it, no one to blame for it. Climate change will change this.
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Even as we settle into thinking of natural disasters as a regular feature of our weather, the scope of devastation and horror they bring will not diminish. There are cascade effects here, too: ahead of Hurricane Harvey, the state of Texas cut off Houston’s air-quality monitors, fearing they’d be damaged; immediately afterward, a cloud of “unbearable” smells began drifting out of the city’s petrochemical plants. Ultimately, nearly half a billion gallons of industrial wastewater surged out of a single petrochemical plant into Galveston Bay. All told, that one storm produced more than a hundred “toxic releases,” including 460,000 gallons of gasoline, 52,000 pounds of crude oil, and a massive, quarter-mile-wide discharge of hydrogen chloride, which, when it mixes with moisture, becomes hydrochloric acid, “which can burn, suffocate, and kill.”
Down the coast in New Orleans, the storm hit was less direct, but there the city had already been knocked offline—without a full complement of drain pumps after an August 5 storm. When Katrina had hit New Orleans in 2005, it was not walloping a thriving city—the 2000 population of 480,000 had declined from a peak of over 600,000 in 1960. After the storm, it was as low as 230,000. Houston is a different case. One of the fastest-growing cities in the country in 2017—greater Houston even included the fastest-growing suburb in the country that year—it has more than five times as many residents as New Orleans. It’s a tragic irony that many of those new arrivals who moved into the path of this storm over the last decades were brought there by the oil business, which has worked tirelessly to undermine public understanding of climate change and derail global attempts at reducing carbon emissions. One suspects this is not the last 500-year storm those workers will see before retirement—nor the last to be seen by the hundreds of oil rigs off the coast of Houston, or the thousand more bobbing now elsewhere off the Gulf Coast, until the toll of our emissions becomes so brutally clear that those rigs are finally retired.