Climate change is a Florida warning - echo editorial

Palm Beach Post editorial echo: Federal climate report should be a call to action for Florida to meet sea level rise threat*

The federal government’s devastating report on climate change holds three especially dramatic messages:

Extremely hot weather is getting more common, and the average annual temperature in the U.S. is expected to rise by 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit in about 30 years. The continental U.S. is already 1.8 degrees warmer than it was 100 years ago.

Climate change has doubled the devastation from wildfires – as witness the just-contained, deadly fires in Northern California, their smoke hanging over San Francisco Bay.

And rising sea levels will force mass migrations -- a nightmare with obvious, massive impact for South Florida. “Sea-level rise might reshape the U.S. population redistribution, with 13.1 million people potentially at risk needing to migrate due to a [rise] of 6 feet... by the year 2100,” the report states.

“This is the most comprehensive assessment of climate science currently available in the world,” Robert Kopp, of Rutgers University, one of the report’s lead authors, told The Atlantic, “and it reaffirms what we’ve already known.”

It affirms, as well, what the editorial boards of The Palm Beach Post, the Miami Herald and South Florida Sun Sentinel, with reporting from WLRN Public Radio, have been saying with one voice for much of this year: Sea-level rise is an existential challenge to our region, and strong action to address it is needed now.

Further, the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, which lauded our work raising awareness about the sea-level rise threat at its summit meeting last month, is mentioned in the report as a leader in “intergovernmental collaborations to address climate change, adaptation, and mitigation in the country.”

On the campaign trail, Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis said he saw no role for a state to play in combating climate change. He was dead wrong. And our region’s leaders have already provided a blueprint.

Hear this, declares this Fourth National Climate Assessment: Human-caused climate change has arrived. “The evidence is real and continues to strengthen.”

This report should be a call to action. With seeming defiance, it was produced by the same federal government headed by President Donald Trump, who has done all he can to kill measures meant to keep the negative effects of climate change in check. Now he rebuffs the report itself.

His administration released the report amid the post-Thanksgiving haze and shopping rush of Black Friday. When it failed to stay buried as the White House had hoped, the president made the kind of dismissal he gives whenever federal agencies draw a conclusion he doesn’t like, be it Russian interference in the 2016 election or the Saudi crown prince’s culpability in the murder of a journalist. “I don’t believe it,” Trump said.

By rejecting the reality of climate change, the president is putting all of America – all the world, really – in unnecessary danger. The same goes for other leading Republicans who maintain that taking steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions – with, say, a carbon tax – will harm our economy (Read: fossil-fuel industries).

If that’s our government’s unshakable position, we’re in trouble. The federal report makes clear that there will be huge economic costs to pay by not trying to halt the accelerating rise of global temperatures.

In the worst-case scenario, the report states, heat-related deaths could cost an average $141 billion per year by the year 2090. Coastal property damage: $118 billion. Inland flooding: $8 billion. Water quality: $5 billion. Damage to coastal reefs: $4 billion. That’s a partial list of the annual cost of doing nothing.

Only a few weeks ago, the United Nations’ science body, reported that we have just 12 years to make massive and unprecedented changes if we are to keep global warming to moderate levels. That report painted a brutal picture of famine, economic tolls and refugee crises if world average temperatures climb 2 degrees Celsius (3.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

When Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords -- the best hope yet of curbing the 2-degree rise -- other nations stepped up with their commitments. So did California and some other states.

Now it’s time for Florida to do the same. Gov.-elect DeSantis has an historic chance to be the first leader of the Sunshine State to take a realistic view of the threats before us – if he chooses to seize it.

For all our sake, we hope he does.

Florida, the state most imperiled by rising seas, can do plenty. First, by helping communities build sea walls, raise roads, improve flood drainage and protect drinking-water supplies. Then, by encouraging alternate energy usage and creating incentives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He could band with other coastal states to press for federal action.

We know that if Andrew Gillum had been elected, he would be bound by promises to act on climate change. The Democrat lost by a fraction of a percentage point, indicating that lots of Floridians want their government to quit ignoring sea-level rise and its causes.

Since his election, DeSantis has said he wants to be his own man. Here is a great way to act on it.

A headline in the Miami New Times was even more caustic! "Five Times Florida Politicians Acted Like Morons on Climate Change": How malicious and dumb is Donald Trump? He not only pulled out of the historic Paris Agreement to fight climate change this week, but he also announced he'll hold a "Pittsburgh, Not Paris" rally to stress that he somehow is fighting for Americans instead of global climate scientists. But climate change will fry Pittsburgh too: By as early as 2030, all of Pennsylvania could be living under serious drought conditions.

*MaineWriter postscript- Donald Trump would probably find more support for constructing a sea wall in southern Florida than he will for the billions of dollars he proposes spending on an evil and anti immigration border wall, in the American southwest.  

Mid Term 2018 - Trump got a spanking: New York Times Frank Bruni

NYTimes opinion! By Frank Bruni echo opinion

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/opinion/midterms-house-majority-trump-wave.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion-columnists&action=click&contentCollection=columnists&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront

(I'm thankful for the access to the opinion page allowed for 2 days Nov 6-7, on The NYTimes website. Thank you.)

Democrats didn’t get everything we wanted. 

But we got what Democrats and the country needs. 
Yes, Trump got a spanking.
(Maybe Stormy Daniels knows how this particular kind of punishment is supposed to work!)

A vital safeguard against Trump's worst impulses in the form of a significant Democratic majority in the House, the exact size of which wasn’t yet clear early Wednesday morning.

Let's take it! I’ll let others quibble over whether it amounts to a big wave, a modest one or a slosh of something wet and reassuring. 

Yet, it's enough for the time being, even if doesn’t make me feel as good about America as I’d like to or as sure about the future as I yearn to.

It won’t humble Trump as thoroughly as he needs humbling. 

(Wrongly!) Trump will dwell on the Republicans’ success in the Senate, where the GOP built on their majority. 

(Wrongly and selfishly!) Trump will brag that he concentrated his own campaign-trail energy on that chamber of Congress and on those races, and he’ll be right. He’ll note — or others in his party will — that Democrats didn’t fare as well in these midterms as Republicans did two years into Barack Obama’s presidency, when they picked up 63 House seats. Now that’s a tsunami.

He’ll find a way to feel validated and vindicated. He always does.

And there were disappointments for Democrats, many of which should cause concern and prompt careful re-examination of their strategy going forward. 

High-profile progressives, including Andrew Gillum in Florida and Beto O’Rourke in Texas, didn’t fulfill the dreams that so many Democrats had for them. 

There may well be a lesson for 2020 in that, and I’m not confident that the party will learn it.

I also worry that House Democrats, flush with the newfound ability to torment a president who has earned it, will go too far, and become the foils against which he thunders profitably as he reaches for a second term.

There are ways to contain and expose him shy of an all-out subpoena-palooza. The answer to a freak-show presidency isn’t a carnival that leaves Americans confused about where the most blinding lights and obnoxious noise are coming from.

But let’s save all of that for other columns. Let’s use this one to rejoice. Trump needed a comeuppance, and the decisive swing of the House into the Democratic column was precisely that. 

You know what else was?

The profiles of the Democrats who made that swing happen.

Many of the candidates for the House who turned red seats blue were women. A record number of them ran for Congress this year, and it seemed likely early Wednesday morning, even before all the counting of ballots was done, that the next Congress would also contain a record number of them: more than the 107 currently there. So a president who has acted and spoken with such vulgar disregard for women will deal with more female lawmakers than any of his predecessors did. That’s a measure of sweet justice.

Donald Trump repeatedly told his supporters, in the days leading up to the 2018,  midterms, that he was essentially on the ballot. Ironically, for once, Trump wasn’t idly boasting.

Americans weighed in on him, and if it wasn’t quite the spanking he had coming, but it certainly wasn’t a hug.

Florida is sinking - political climate deniers treading water

This echo opinion was published in The Week:

Republicans will let Florida drown

Echo opinion by Ryan Cooper

Andrew Gillum won a stunning upset victory in the Democratic primary for the Florida governor's race on August 28th . 

Gillum will face off against Ron DeSantis, an unhinged Trump lickspittle who subtly referred to Gillum (a black man) as a monkey the very next morning. 

It's anybody's guess who will win — Gillum was down by 14 points in the final primary polls — but it's sure to be a heated, bitter race.

But in other Florida news, Bloomberg Businessweek published a large investigation into the water supply system in the state's second-largest city, Miami. In brief, the situation is dire. It's a good demonstration of the partisan stakes in American politics — because Republicans will let Florida drown.

Gillum — though he is an experienced politician, winning his first race in 2003 — ran largely on the cutting-edge suite of lefty policies, including Medicare-for-all, the overhaul of ICE, and strong climate policy. His issues page attacks President Trump and current Gov. Rick Scott (R) for having "failed to take action against climate change, with Florida having the most property at risk in the nation" and suggests a big investment program to protect the Florida environment and transition quickly to clean energy.

That last priority would be perfectly natural not just for a lefty, but for any Florida resident whose head is not cross-threaded onto his spinal column. 

As the Bloomberg article lays out, Miami (and by extension the whole southern Florida coast) is facing an existential emergency whose slow-moving nature only makes it more threatening.

The upper range of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's sea level-rise scenarios would permanently inundate vast swathes of Miami by 2100, and especially its even more exposed neighbor Miami Beach, parts of which already flood every time there is a big "king tide" — and that's leaving aside preliminary studies on the possibility of much greater rise due to a rapid collapse of the ice sheets of Greenland or West Antarctica. 

Sea levels will continue to rise for hundreds of years after that. What's more, it would be nearly impossible to build seawalls around Miami or any of its neighbors, because it is built on highly porous limestone — absent foundations going down hundreds of feet, the water would just come up out of the ground.

That limestone foundation makes for the most immediate threat: groundwater contamination. Rising seas are gradually pushing salt into the aquifer that the cities tap for drinking water, while associated flooding washes toxic materials from contaminated locations and swamped septic tanks into the aquifer as well. All this is also disrupting the region's incredibly elaborate water management system, worsening both problems:


The permeability that makes the aquifer so easily accessible also makes it vulnerable. "It's very easy to contaminate our aquifer," says Rachel Silverstein, executive director of Miami Waterkeeper, a local environmental protection group. And the consequences could be sweeping. "Drinking water supply is always an existential question." [Bloomberg Businessweek]

Meanwhile, every inch of sea level rise increases the vulnerability to hurricanes — which is already high. Hurricane Andrew inflicted catastrophic damage on South Florida in 1992 mainly with high winds, but if Miami gets dead-centered by a strong hurricane pushing a big storm surge (which is certain to happen sooner or later), it would cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage at a minimum.

Just to stave off the worst effects of climate change that are already locked in (the huge inertia of the climate system means the effects of today's emissions won't be felt for decades) is unquestionably going to take massive help from the federal government — as it did to make Florida even remotely habitable in the first place.
Moreover, even if Gillum wins and somehow changes the entire state to 100 percent renewable energy overnight, that will only slightly dent America's greenhouse gas emissions — and won't touch world emissions as a whole, which is mainly about China and India at this point. 

Climate change is an inherently international problem — but a solvable one, because both of those countries will be harmed even worse than the United States if warming spirals out of control and because both countries are already doing something about it.

A national government with even a slight grasp of science and elementary reasoning would conclude the following: Florida (and most other states) needs a crash investment program from the federal government to both transition to zero-emission energy and ruggedize its built environment to withstand climate disasters. Second, the federal government must pursue an international climate bargain as its number one foreign policy priority. For the Miami community, it is quite literally a matter of whether it will be allowed to exist in the future.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party, naturally, are doing the precise opposite of this, withdrawing from the Paris climate accords and (among other things) doing all they can to maximize not just greenhouse emissions, but seemingly even the number of people who die from respiratory diseases caused by filthy coal power pollution. 

Ron DeSantis — who has a 2 percent lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters — has questioned the reality of climate science and signed on a letter of protest against international climate funding.

If the right has anything to do with it, Florida will drown.