Sea Change: the Climate Crisis Comes Home

In Forty Days of Rain (2004), the first volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in Washington trilogy, the event that finally triggers acceptance of the climate crisis, and official action to confront it, was the flooding of Washington, D.C. as the result of--and I am not kidding--Tropical Storm Sandy meeting up with another northern weather system. 

But in 2012, Hurricane Sandy pretty much bypassed Washington to hit hard in New York City and New Jersey.  Storm surge caused massive flooding and sucked away parts of the coastline.  Of the Jersey shore, NBC anchor Brian Williams (who talked about summering there since his childhood) noted that "it's never going to be normal again."

It's still an open question whether the climate crisis awareness is going to recede with this storm's flood waters, but so far it has been more than the usual half dozen stories about whether or not this particular storm can be attributed to climate change. 

This time some official voices had something to say.  Governor Cuomo of New York didn't want to get into the climate crisis debate--he just said that it's time to recognize that we're in a period of "extreme weather events."   Of, as he put it, a storm of the century every two years. 

Mayor Bloomberg of New York was more explicit.  He titled his oped endorsing President Obama "A Vote for a President to Lead on Climate Change."  He began it: "The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast -- in lost lives, lost homes and lost business -- brought the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief."

It makes sense that these state and city leaders would be the first to make these explicit statement about the future, rather than those in Washington.  It is the states and municipalities--particularly on the coasts-- that have already been trying to deal with how they will protect their citizens against the effects of the climate crisis.

Here in Arcata several weeks ago, another official step was taken towards developing plans to deal with the expected rise of the oceans and therefore Humboldt Bay.  The other local governments and their agencies, as well as appropriate state agencies, are all involved.  That's been going on in various states and municipalities for years.

It's also logical that the Bloomberg and Cuomo statements emboldened a certain kind of conservative to add their voices on behalf of climate crisis realism: business people, particularly in insurance industries but also in others that have to deal with these realities in their business plans.  So it shouldn't be too shocking that the headline It's Global Warming, Stupid appears not in Mother Jones but in Business Week.

Particularly Governor Cuomo's statements have followed the pattern I've been predicting for years.  The first calls for action would be about the effects.  Cuomo was explicit in this language--he talked about dealing with effects while we debate the causes.  This makes sense, especially on state and local levels.  But it does suggest the danger of ignoring the causes--which will continue to cause worse and worse effects.

Up until the last year or so, I tried to make the point that in a way the climate crisis was an evolutionary test for humanity: with its genesis in what humans did without understanding its future effects, it tested whether we were now ready to take the next step as an intelligent species by acting to forestall a crisis that we could anticipate and predict but that had not yet happened. We would address this crisis before it could harm and weaken us, and in ways that would strengthen us. This success could take us into a new era, in which many more things might become possible for humanity. To wait would be to risk ultimate failure, and at the least an expenditure of much more in resources, societal strain and especially suffering.

But a year or two ago, I had to concede that humanity was not going to pass that test this time either, as it had failed to do so in the decades before the widely foreseen world wars. The climate crisis effects had already begun and so much more was already in the pipeline for decades to come--it was too late to avoid dire effects (as a brace of books--like McKibben's Eaarth--confirmed.)  The next test then will be confronting both parts of this crisis at the same time: the cause and the effects.  The temptation will be to ignore dealing with the causes--and possibly even making them worse.

We may just be approaching the starting line on admitting the effects.  The other reason that a real sea change in confronting the climate crisis may develop, is another outcome of this storm hitting New York rather than Washington. While New York is not the political capital of the U.S., it is the media capital of at least the U.S.  Moreover, as a telethon on Friday that brought out media and entertainment stars showed, the impact of this storm is perhaps more profound because these media figures not only work in New York, they live in New York and in the region.  Many of them grew up in New York state or New Jersey.  The impact on generations of family, on the geography of their childhoods and their current lives, brings home the climate crisis in ways that it perhaps would not for the politicians of Washington, with their multiple homes and scattered ambitions.