Hurricanes, climate change and the warnings that weren’t heeded

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I am heartbroken over the devastation wrought by back-to-back epic Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the former of which shocked the nation by pillaging not only the Florida coast but Carolina mountain communities, and Milton with a scope and ferocity wide enough to cut Florida in half.

But I am apoplectic over the atmospheric carbon pollution that intensified this carnage, with much worse to come, all predicted with clarity more than 50 years ago.

If you watch on YouTube the 1985 Senate committee hearing on climate, two details stand out. First, the testimony of Tennessee Sen. Al Gore Jr. and prominent astrophysicist Carl Sagan that dispassionately lays out exactly what would occur if society did not rise up to eliminate fossil-fueled carbon pollution. The second is that the hearing was conducted by Sen. David Durenberger, a Republican from Minnesota. The hearing was respectful, clear, terrifying in its implications and totally bipartisan. That may have been the last bipartisan agreement on human-induced climate change.

Two groups recognized on the spot an existential crisis for the citizens of the world, all of whom would be dramatically impacted by calamities from rising sea levels to epic storms to altered weather patterns such as we saw in Minnesota last winter, with 60-degree days in January and February. The second group was the global fossil fuel industry and allied petrostates, the richest in the world, who recognized that they would have to eliminate their disastrous byproducts, carbon dioxide and methane, that heat the Earth, alter its weather and acidify its oceans.

What happened? As science historian Naomi Oreskes detailed in her now-15-year-old book, “Merchants of Doubt,” the fossil fuel industry followed the playbook of the cigarette companies that used a few pliable scientists to sow doubt on the scientific consensus that smoking caused cancer. The cigarette industry bought 30 years before anti-cancer warnings and public policies finally curtailed sale of their addictive cancer sticks.

Ditto the fossil fuel industry and its Russian and Middle East petro-dictatorships, who used their vast financial resources to undermine global climate gatherings with false information while politically buying off Republican officials and state parties to stall any climate action.

So do not weep for Florida. Its last two chief executives, Rick Scott, now appallingly a senator, and Ron DeSantis, the current governor, both banned any discussion of climate science in their governments, now paying the piper.

Meanwhile, Minnesotans yet again are asked to pay to mop up the damage in Florida through federal disaster allocations. I do not fault President Joe Biden for his all-hands-on-deck response, as all Americans want to help in a crisis. But I resent needing to do so because Scott, DeSantis and so many others purposely stuck their heads in the sand and oil money in their political pockets while their neighbor the Gulf of Mexico heated to a red-hot bath. So much damage, and no detectable remorse by the Florida anti-science political class, who prosper by sucking tax-and-weather migrants from northern states, many now blown out of their retirement homes and savings.

I do not forgive Rick Scott. I do not forgive Ron DeSantis. And I do not forgive our neighboring state’s U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., among the loudest blowhard climate science deniers. And I do not forgive the MAGA miscreant running for the White House on a platform of free love for fossil-fueled carbon pollution. May they all be defeated at the ballot box.

The climate crisis is upon us in spades, as Durenberger’s hearing told the world it would be if policymakers failed to respond at the level the impending crisis required. The Biden-Harris administration has done a great deal the past four years to jump-start serious action through the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. And under Gov. Tim Walz, Minnesota is a leader among states in moving green energy forward and retiring coal-fired power plants. Much more need be done. But it is not too late for voters to rebel against the hegemony of fossil fuels in an era when we can economically capture the direct energy of the sun and the breath of the wind and the heat of atomic energy for all we need.

So, yes, send money and succor to friends in Florida and the Southeast suffering mightily from these disasters. But please, leave the anti-climate-science rhetoric behind and speak truth to Florida and Republican political power. Weather disasters fueled by the hot seas of carbon pollution are already everywhere apparent. Do not make them worse.

James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the Star Tribune covering education and energy policy.