Op-Ed: Hurricane Ian and the coming climate crash
In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, some have wondered if we could have avoided one of the greatest natural disasters in recent memory.
The answer is still no.
There’s no way of knowing what we would have done had we not lost the eye of Hurricane Irene. The storm was a powerful and violent hurricane, but it wasn’t the first or last time we could have been blindsided by one.
And here is the most important point.
Our response to Hurricane Irene was the last in a long series.
There have been others in the 20th century. And many more in the past 50 years.
The storm of Hurricane Betsy in 1990 was the third and final one in about a 50-year sequence. Hurricane Ernesto in the 1970s was the fourth. And the record fifth was Hurricane Katrina, which struck the United States in 2005.
This sequence means that there have been six disasters of a comparable size, duration and power. And they have not been isolated events.
The fact that we’re only at the tail end of this sequence means that, as scientists have warned for the past century, we are in the middle of a third-or-fourth climate crisis.
In the first of these crises, which began after the industrial revolution and which is often not discussed, the Earth has warmed more than a degree Celsius on average over the past century.
It’s a tiny amount of global warming. But the trend has continued since the end of the 1940s. (It would turn out to be 1.8 degrees Celsius, as reported in a new study.)
On that basis, it’s a disaster.
If you look at the temperature records from the past, each new year has resulted in greater global warming than the previous.
Our current global warming is unprecedented in history.
And it’s a disaster.
The second climate crisis is even more extreme
