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If you are a regular reader of CleanTechnica, you may be familiar with a website by the name of We Don’t Have Time. Its main focus is on global heating, what causes it, and why we don’t have time to waste if we intend to take meaningful action to address it. In other words, you will find posts there that are similar to the ones you find here on a regular basis.

Recently, Weston Wilson wrote a story for We Don’t Have Time entitled Why Climate Disasters Don’t Convince The Deniers. “Recent tragedies in Texas, Pakistan, and Europe are stark reminders of how extreme weather is reshaping human life, and how climate change is increasingly acting as an accelerant. But the connection between climate change and these events is complex, and often misrepresented.” Wilson says.

We know that warmer air holds more moisture. An increase of one degree means the atmosphere can hold 7% more water vapor. That in turn means when it rains, there is a lot more moisture available to make the rain heavier. In much of the world, the air is now close to two degrees Celsius warmer than in pre-industrial times, which means the air may contain 14% more moisture. In Kerr County, Texas, last week, a foot of rain fell in just an hour. That is a deluge of biblical proportions. The flooding that came afterwards was biblical as well.

Climate Change & Attribution

“There is  a challenge,” Wilson wrote. “While we can confidently say that climate change makes these kinds of events more likely and more extreme, it’s difficult to directly attribute individual events, and the resulting deaths, to climate change. To take one example — the destruction of flash flooding depends on complex local factors, like terrain, infrastructure, warnings, and preparedness. The same storm that causes deadly destruction in one place might have far milder consequences elsewhere. And the occurrence of severe storms is known to happen in many places across the historical record. So, how much can we really say climate change is the cause of this particular disaster?”

For an answer, Wilson turned to a recent study by the Grantham Research Institute On Climate Change And The Environment, an instrumentality of the London School of Economics which focused on the heat dome that brought punishingly high temperatures to much of Europe in late June and early July of this year. Typically, attribution studies that attempt to find causal links between extreme events and changes in the climate take years to complete.

By relying on peer reviewed methods perfected by other researchers, the Grantham scholars were able to complete their work in a matter of weeks. They found that of the 2,300 heat related deaths across 12 major European cities, about 1,500, or 65%, were directly linked to climate change. They concluded that human-caused climate change had nearly tripled the death toll. “Such an analysis provides something climate scientists can rarely offer: a high-confidence estimate linking a death toll to global warming, just a couple weeks after the event,” Wilson wrote.

“Understanding climate attribution requires embracing uncertainty, not for a lack of conviction, but as a framework for responsible analysis. Scientists don’t claim that climate change caused a specific storm, heatwave, or flood. Instead, they show how global warming increased the likelihood and severity of that event. Think of it like loading dice. If sixes start coming up more often, the game has changed even if you can’t prove that any one six wouldn’t have occurred naturally,” he explained.

Climate deniers often claim that deaths from natural disasters have gone down, not up, and that rising disaster costs are due simply to there being more buildings, roads, and people, not more extreme weather. Wilson agreed that deaths from natural disasters have declined over the past century, but said that is primarily because of better forecasting, infrastructure, and emergency response. What is important to focus on is that climate change is pushing those technological advances to their limit, he said.

Recent studies have adjusted for the increase in infrastructure and found that climate change is still driving up both the frequency and the severity of the most costly disasters, from hurricanes to wildfires. In other words, the rate of increase in damages goes well beyond what can be explained simply by growth in infrastructure alone.

“The truth is that climate change is not just an environmental issue — it’s a risk multiplier. It increases the odds that heatwaves become deadly, that storms become floods, and that already-vulnerable communities are overwhelmed. What might once have been a manageable hazard becomes a full blown disaster under warmer conditions.” Wilson wrote.

Misfortunes Or Warnings?

“We have a choice: to treat these tragedies as isolated misfortunes, or as warnings from a planet undergoing profound and dangerous change,” said Wilson. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has made his choice. He says floods have always happened in Texas and will continue to happen in the future. “Nothing to see here, people, move along. Nothing to see here, people, move along.” But he did send along a torrent of thoughts and prayers. “Our hearts grieve for this community and surrounding areas,” he wrote on social media. “May God bring comfort to every family affected.”

The Guardian this week wondered openly what it was about Texas that makes it so resistant to recognizing the environment is changing and that human activity is a component of that change. After all, this is the state that led the attack on “woke” financiers who dared to make emissions a part of their investment decisions by suing them. In the lawsuit, Texas and several other MAGA-controlled states made the extraordinary claim that the financial community was guilty of racketeering — yes, you read that right! — because they colluded in a vast left wing conspiracy to harm the fossil fuel industry. The nerve of some people!

Last fall, the Texas legislature came close to taking the tiny, tiny step of funding a new system of sirens to warn people of potential flooding, but in the end, the solons of Texas voted against the proposed legislation because it would cost too much money.

The people in charge of Kerr County, where the worst flooding took place last week, also decided against creating a warning system because it would cost too much money. Apparently spending a few dollars per person was too much. Better people should be trapped in a raging flood, with water being forced down their throats into their lungs as they struggle to breathe than to spend money on such a foolish extravagance. After all, thoughts and prayers are free, so why not go that route instead?

The Guardian characterized this as the “Texas way” — the singular devotion of its political leaders to rugged individualism and their equally passionate disdain for government action. Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said the recurring pattern of environmental disaster followed by scant preparation for future events is not coincidental. “Texas will spend a lot of money recovering from disasters, but they’ll spend very little trying to avoid the next disaster,” said.

In 2008, Hurricane Ike battered the Texan coast near Houston. That led to calls for constructing a hurricane barrier across the mouth of Galveston Bay to protect the city from future storm surges. Seventeen years later, the “Ike Dike” is still being talked about, but is no closer to fruition.

Dessler puts the responsibility for the political intransigence of Texas when it comes to taking rational action to address more frequent disasters powered by a hotter climate on the fossil fuel industry. With its massive campaign contributions, it keeps know-nothings like Greg Abbott and his henchmen in power. “It’s the political power of fossil fuels, and their ability to keep everybody in line,” Dessler says.

“The official platform of the Texas Republican party is explicit. It proposes the abolition of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, supports the reclassification of carbon dioxide as a ‘non-pollutant’, and opposes what it calls environmentalism, or climate change initiatives that obstruct legitimate business interests and private property use,” The Guardian says.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that the fossil fuel companies are the real racketeers, as they promote their conspiracy of silence against responsible climate action. “Texas Republicans are increasingly opposed to the idea that climate change is man-made, and therefore there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Calvin Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “They see climate issues as requiring more taxes, more regulation, more spending — and as a party of small government and deregulation they don’t want to deal with it.”

The parallels to the current failed administration in Washington, DC, are startling. The MAGAlomaniacs are determined to rip the throat out of the renewable energy industry. The ferocity of their blood lust against such “woke” ideas reminds many people of the Taliban. Anything that is not approved by the Heritage Foundation is heresy that must be ripped out root and branch to save America from…what? Responsible government? A sustainable future? Any semblance of climate justice?

Proof

The fossil fuel conspirators have taken a page from the Big Tobacco playbook. That plan questioned the link between smoking and lung cancer, challenging people to prove which cigarette or puff of smoke caused the disease. What specific tobacco plant was responsible? What pack of cigarettes actually resulted in cancer? It is impossible to answer such questions accurately, casting doubt on the whole claim of a connection between smoking and cancer.

The fossil fuel apologists are like the man who snaps his fingers constantly. When asked why, he says it is to keep the elephants away. “But there are no elephants within a thousand miles,” his neighbor says. “That just proves it’s working!”

Paul Simon, the world’s greatest living singer/song writer, wrote a song called Proof for his breakout album Rhythm Of The Saints. Give a listen and see if there isn’t some wisdom in his lyrics, sandwiched in between his exquisite syncopation and alliteration. “Proof is the bottom line for everyone,” Simon says. But one person’s proof is another’s heresy. Think of Galileo and his quest to convince the Church about the order of the natural world.

Maybe the world really is flat and maybe if we sail too far out to sea, our ships will fall off the edge into the abyss. And maybe if we keep snapping our fingers, our planet will not get any hotter and we will all live in peace in one big happy human family. The fossil fuel crowd is determined to test their theories and never, ever consider the possibility they are wrong. Such self indulgent arrogance will spell doom for the human race.