Check this shit out! Unbelievable! We made Irma! Must be a parody!
BY DANIEL STARKEY 09.07.2017 :: 8:00AM EDT @DCSTARKEY
While a good chunk of media have been focused on the catastrophic flooding in Texas, that’s far from the only disaster story this year. The Observer reports than more than 40 million people in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal are already in desperate need of humanitarian aid with another 100 million more across the globe. And Hurricane Irma is currently laying siege to the Caribbean, with Florida and the US coastline next in its sites.
Irma is already the most powerful storm ever recorded in the Atlantic, a fact which Trump greeted with child-like amazement on twitter early this morning. In a few days we’ll no-doubt see the president trek to the devastated areas, promise aid and move on. While that certainly gives the appearance of coordination and efficacy, scientists warn that governments have already failed to protect their people by not addressing climate change sooner.
“Even I, as a climate scientist, am startled to see another potentially devastating storm in this region so shortly after Harvey,” Anders Levermann from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research told the Guardian.
Make no mistake, Irma and Harvey aren’t just big storms. Each, on their own, would have likely been year-defining events for the US. Houston has already faced three instances of so-called 100 or 500-year floods over the past couple years, and Irma is so powerful that contact with much of the Carribean has already been lost, and many instruments designed to measure hurricane wind speeds have completely broken. Islands like St. Barthelemy and Barbuda are facing their first category five storm since records began back in the 1850s.
Whatever happens in the next few days, scientists have been clear and direct — this is a new normal and we should expect things to get much, much worse in the coming years.
Obviously, much like the issue of climate change itself, these storms don’t have a single cause. On their own, humans can’t just conjure something like Irma. Global conditions like El Nino and La Nina have big impacts, as do a myriad of other factors that affect a storm’s total power, but people sure as hell aren’t helping.
MORE:
https://www.geek.com/science/hurricane-irma-is-a-man-made-disaster-1715142/
