Hurricane Harvey and the inevitable question of climate change
It’s been more than three days since Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, but the record-shattering deluge it unleashed still isn’t over. Houston, America’s fourth-largest city, and parts of southeastern Texas are being pounded by continuing rains, and the storm has triggered a new emergency in the neighboring state of Louisiana. At least nine deaths related to the storm have been reported, tens of thousands have been driven from their homes, and federal authorities estimate that close to half a million people will seek disaster assistance.
Various U.S. government officials described the impact of Hurricane Harvey with apocalyptic superlatives. “We are seeing catastrophic flooding,” said Louis W. Uccellini, the director of the National Weather Service, who warned that the waters would be slow to recede. His agency’s models showed the Brazos River, which runs southwest of Houston, rising some 59 feet by Tuesday.
“A flood of this magnitude is an 800-year event, and it exceeds the design specification of our levees,” said Fort Bend County Judge Robert Hebert in a statement Monday. William “Brock” Long, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had similar comments: “We have not seen an event like this,” he said on Monday. “You could not draw this forecast up. You could not dream this forecast up.”
Right now, the focus is on ongoing relief and recovery efforts, boosted in part by a heartwarming mobilization of civilian volunteers. But the specter of climate change can’t be ignored. Climate change may not have “caused” Hurricane Harvey, but it seems likely that warming temperatures — the consequence of man-made greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere — exacerbated the storm conditions.
My colleague Chris Mooney outlined a number of ways in which this happens: Warmer temperatures in the ocean created an increase in atmospheric moisture, leading to the massive rainfall currently hitting southeastern Texas; rising sea levels contributed to a stronger storm surge that flooded Houston; a warmer climate makes storms more intense before they make landfall…
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