The Worst Hurricane Sandy Climate Change Column Has Already Been Written

Image: Mel Evans/AP, via

Hurricane Sandy has hit land, leaving a massive wake of destruction in its path. Atlantic City is wrecked, as is much of the New Jersey-New York coastline. Damage estimates already stand at $20 billion, and here in NYC hundreds of thousands of people are expected to be without power and transit for days. So, as we all check on our family, friends, and neighbors, some of whom have lost their homes, or worse, their lives, it’s great to see that a least one jerkass has already published an asinine attack on climate science. How topical!

Writing in the Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill says that saying climate change may have had an effect on Sandy — massive carbon outputs from the industrialized world — is equal to religious zealots blaming it on gays:

So in relation to Hurricane Sandy, we’ve all had a good old laugh at the American preacher who says the storm is “God’s judgment on gays” and also on President Obama for supporting gay marriage. How backward to treat a storm, a violent whim of nature, as a sentient force that is trying to say something to humankind! And yet, other claims that this storm is speaking to us, shouting at us, in fact, about our wicked or careless behaviour, are treated deadly seriously. So the Washington Post has published a piece by an eco-warrior who believes Sandy is the product of “global weirding” (that’s what greens freaked out by the lack of hard evidence for planetary warming have rechristened “global warming”), who tells us: “A wounded earth is speaking – are you listening?” Another eco-commentator chastises both Obama and Romney for refusing to talk about climate change in the current presidential campaign, and says that through Sandy, “the climate is now speaking to them – and to everyone else.”

First off, let me give you Andrew Revkin’s excellent and thorough post on Sandy and climate change at Dot Earth. He’s done an impressive amount of digging through what experts are writing as well as the annals of research, and basically it’s very difficult to estimate how climate change affected all aspects of Sandy. The root cause of Sandy’s massive size is a collision between a pair of storms, but whether those storms were affected by a lack of Arctic sea ice or warmer air temperatures will be studied for months to come.

But not immediately attributing Sandy’s size to climate change — you know, like you’d expect from good science — does not say anything about whether or not climate change is happening. There’s overwhelming — overwhelming — evidence that climate change is indeed happening (I can’t believe I even have to say that at this point) and that a warming Earth will produce more extreme weather events.

But that nuance goes completely over O’Neill’s head:

After every natural disaster that occurs these days, we do two things. First, we guffaw or shake our heads in stern disapproval at those religious freaks who blame said disaster on mankind’s sin. And second, we nod in vigorous agreement with those eco-experts who blame said disaster on man-made climate change.

The experts don’t blame specific disasters on climate change. Climate change is making weather more extreme, and extreme events more frequent, but to distill that conclusion — based off solid data — to “experts blame every event on climate change” is willfully dumb.

And I’ll concede that environmentalists using flowery language like “the Earth is talking to us” is annoying, because that type of talk distracts from the conclusions of hard climate science, as O’Neill tries to do. Rather than look at anything scientific — greenhouses gases produced by industrial countries, led by the US and China, are warming the Earth — O’Neill sets up a ridiculous dichotomy: Climate “believers” think that the Earth is actively talking to us, while differences between the destruction in Haiti and NYC prove that growth and development protect us from disasters.

But here’s the thing: No one will ever deny that a richer nation with better infrastructure is likely to better survive a disaster, although that’s not guaranteed. By arguing that environmentalists (who aren’t one and the same as climate scientists, by the way) hate growth because it’s killing the planet, O’Neill tries to equate climate science with being anti-growth, which is just about the perfect dog whistle for the Agenda 21 paranoiacs flooding the comment section on his piece.

In other words, trusting hard science is the same as fanciful notions of a vengeful God, as he writes:

And yet, the impulse behind both forms of finger-pointing, behind both the Bible basher’s harebrained claims that deviant people brought this disaster upon mankind and the environmentalist’s insistence that the disaster is actually the fault of industry and pollution, is the same – it’s about doing that very Medieval thing of finding someone or something to blame for scary natural occurrences. Only where Christian zealots blame sinning mankind, green zealots blame industrious mankind.

Aside from the laughable comparison of religion to science — how often are those two things equated? — O’Neill can’t even get his facts straight. No rational person will blame Sandy solely on climate change. It may have been bigger, or stronger, or whatever due to warming weather, but to say that one thing is to blame for such an incredibly complex event hurts my brain. If weather was really that simple, we’d have perfect predictions by now. The only person here looking for something specific to blame for being scared is O’Neill.

Seriously, O’Neill actually published this:

Is it really any more progressive to blame natural disasters on the decadence of the well-off than it is to blame it on the alleged decadence of homosexuals? No amount of pointing at pie charts can disguise the fact that Sandy-exploiting greens are peddling the same medieval prejudices as cranky Christian preachers.

Saying that climate science is anti-growth is already an imbecilic premise, but to dismiss mountains of data as “pie charts” is head-in-the-sand punditry at its finest. To back his point, O’Neill links to a dumbass extreme left-wing blog post that’s also built on a very shaky foundation. The facts are simple: humans have pumped more carbon into the atmosphere as our population and economy have boomed in the last century.

Really, it’s as simple as that. It’s quite a stretch to say that the rich—who consume more individually than the poor, but likely not overall—are responsible for climate change, because we all are. And yes, that industrialization has made our lives easier and healthier than ever, few will deny that. But to imply that people concerned about climate change want to return to the Dark Ages, while also saying that economic growth is a force of pure good, is a blanket statement that isn’t rooted in reality.

Aside from O’Neill’s uninformed attacks on climate change, he misses the same point that the right wing loves to ignore: clean tech offers enormous growth potential. After all, there’s already a plan floating around to power 95 percent of the planet with renewables. Intelligent folks concerned about climate change aren’t concerned with growth, they’re concerned about carbon. It’s a simple point that clowns like O’Neill refuse to acknowledge because they’d no longer have talking points. There are a number of avenues to growth that are climate-friendly. Even China has set aside billions in subsidies for green tech.

If both sides of the aisle were ever able to have a rational discussion about climate change, they’d see that working to solve the climate crisis is a boon for security and the economy. Record droughts and $20 billion storms aren’t doing our wallets any favors, and that’s not to mention climate-induced riots. That’s why equating climate-minded people to religious bigots is so foul; fossil fuel lobbyists already dominate Washington, and circuitously dismissing climate change while ignoring facts only adds to the inertia that continues to slow the greentech boom that’s already in full swing.

To use Sandy as a platform for attacking science while hundreds of thousands are still dealing with the effects of the storm is inexcusably wrongheaded, and worse, it’s just wrong. But that’s exactly how the right has continued to win the environmental information war: by being loud, obtuse, and inflammatory as often as possible.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.