The Soaring Cost of Climate Change Denial, Delay and Distraction

The death toll from flooding in Valencia, Spain this past week has reached 214. That’s already more than double the fatalities of the Great Flood of Valencia in 1957. The search for bodies continues. Meteorologists report a years’ worth of rain fell in less than 24 hours, all from a pattern called a ‘cold drop’ – gota fria in Spanish. A sag in the jet stream over the Atlantic Ocean drove cold air southward. The collision with warm, moist Mediterranean air generated torrential coastal rains and flash floods.

Spanish forecasters had issued urgent warnings to political leaders, including the newly elected Valencian president, Carlos Mazon. One of his first official acts following his 2023 election had been to shut down an emergency flooding response unit, calling it a ‘superfluous expense.’ Even with the onset of heavy rains, Spanish climate deniers were ridiculing the forecasters’ warnings as ‘alarmist’ on the social media platform ‘X’. That flooding is now ranked as Spain’s worst natural disaster in history.

Two weeks earlier, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, the meteorological ‘bottom’ had dropped out of an initially modest Hurricane called Milton. Strengthening from a tropical storm to a Category Five hurricane in less than 12 hours, Milton’s wind speeds increased from 85 mph to 180 mph. South Florida meteorologist John Morales, with whom I served on a board of the American Meteorological Society, was so stunned by the explosive intensification of Milton that he literally shed tears on air. Sixteen Florida residents would die when the explosive storm made landfall October 9^th as a still potent Category Three hurricane. It was the second such event in Florida this fall in a span of just 13 days.

Hurricane Helene struck Florida’s Gulf coast as an even stronger hurricane on September 26^th, less than two weeks prior to Hurricane Milton. Helene’s peak winds at landfall reached 140 mph. It would prove to be the deadliest hurricane to strike the U.S. mainland since Katrina in 2005. The death toll of Helene now stands at 230.

Unlike Milton, those fatalities were not limited to the state of Florida. Helene would leave a trail of destruction 500 miles long, extending from Florida north into Georgia, the Carolinas and even Tennessee. One videographer would compare the hurricane to a “blender that was just taking everything out of its path.” Atlanta meteorologists reported record 48-hour rainfall. Four months of rain fell in the space of a day in Augusta and more than a foot of rain fell in South Carolina. Search and rescue officials in Asheville, North Carolina described what they encountered as “biblical devastation.” Bridges and highways in Tennessee simply crumbled from the force of floodwaters.

Climate scientists sought to determine whether the quick succession of three deadly weather systems on the margins of the Atlantic Ocean basin was simply a coincidence, or whether they shared a common influence. Two prominent research institutions, staffed by internationally recognized climate scientists, concluded that climate change caused by fossil fuel pollution was implicated in each – that it made the deadly weather patterns in Spain, Florida and the southeastern U.S. more likely and more severe. The U.S. based Climate Central group concluded that climate change had made the observed record or near-record Atlantic water temperatures at least 50 times more likely, and what have been termed the “alarmingly warm” Gulf of Mexico water temperatures at least 200 times more likely. The famed distance swimmer Diana Nyad recently observed that the ocean heat would have made her 2013 record book swim from Florida to Cuba impossible, that “in such hot water, the body heat…would quickly lead to overheating and failure, and danger.” Diana has termed the global ocean heating planetary “blunt force trauma”.

Such abnormal ocean heat raises the potential for destructive hurricanes. The analysis conducted by the international research group World Weather Attribution concluded that the impact of climate change in raising ocean temperatures doubled the likelihood of the torrential Valencia rains, made Hurricane Milton’s rainfall 20 to 30 percent greater and Helene’s rainfall 40 to 70 percent greater than would otherwise be expected.

Scientists noted with some irony that just four months before the arrival of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had deleted mention of climate change from policy statements and announced that addressing climate change would no longer be a priority in the state.

Although climate change may not be acknowledged as a threat by some political leaders, particularly in the southeastern United States, it has been recognized as a pre-eminent threat by the insurance industry, a group that could hardly be dismissed as “tree huggers.” That impact, to a far greater extent than gas prices, is draining pocketbooks and bank accounts. When most of us think of insurance companies, we rarely consider the analysts called actuaries. They’re the people who assess the financial risk of offering insurance policies and determine the cost we pay as premiums.

Studies conducted by such actuaries have concluded that climate change poses an existential threat to the health of their industry. The Boston Consulting Group reported last year that the global cost from 1,000 recent extreme weather events has exceeded one trillion dollars, noting that insurance claims have doubled over the past 30 years. The influential Swiss Re Institute has pointed to two inevitable outcomes: insurance premiums will continue to rapidly outpace inflation, and that major insurers will simply cease to offer policies in high-risk locations. That’s already happening in Florida and California, a trend that is increasingly making home ownership more costly if not even unaffordable.

The medical profession joins the insurance industry in strong criticism of efforts to deny, delay or deflect prompt, meaningful action to put the brakes on climate change. The group Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, for example, publicly opposed Initiative 2117, which seeks to repeal the state’s landmark Climate Commitment Act. The organization bluntly called the initiative a risk to public health. It’s a position aligned with other medical organizations and medical journals that have expressed concern about the health costs of climate change. For example:

• A Harvard consortium concluded that exposure to fossil fuel particulates and gases are responsible for one-fifth of all deaths world-wide.
• A study published in the journal Nature stated that one-third of all heat related deaths can be attributed to climate change.
• Peer-reviewed research in several obstetrics journals demonstrated that heat stress doubles the risk of miscarriages, elevates the hazards of premature births and increases the potential for health challenges in newborns.

Yet the mounting evidence of economic and health impacts has not diminished the enthusiasm of climate deniers. Legislation to address climate change generates immediate and heated opposition. Much of that opposition is generated by disinformation campaigns heavily funded by fossil fuel organizations, as documented by Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes in her landmark book, Merchants of Doubt.

Even as far back as the mid-70s, industry experts such as senior Exxon scientist James Black concluded that “there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” It was not a popular finding in his industry then, and still isn’t for the most part.

Politicians and social media commentators sympathetic to the interests of fossil fuel companies have taken to devising spurious conspiracy claims. Some asserted that Hurricanes Helene and Milton were the result of government geo-engineering utilizing chemtrails or space lasers. Some conspiracy theories have produced credible threats of violence. Armed groups were seen harassing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) crews in Tennessee, and a posted email from a militia group in North Carolina claimed it was “hunting” such workers. Even meteorologists, who work long hours attempting to provide the public with prompt guidance and warnings, are now receiving death threats.

Solid scientific consensus indicates that inaction and opposition will only lead to more serious impacts for coming generations. A University of Bath study of 10,000 young people in 10 countries demonstrated that survey participants found their future “frightening” because of climate change. Forty five percent reported their feelings negatively impact their daily lives.

The swirl of controversy around climate change – both real and imagined – brings to mind the concluding paragraph in James Baldwin’s book, The Great No: “The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”