This is the crux of the problem with federal climate change action. Collin Peterson (D-MN), one of the chief architects of the weakening of the ACES climate bill, recently said the following regarding global warming:
"We've just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we've ever had. They're saying to us [that climate change is] going to be a big problem because it's going to be warmer than it usually is; my farmers are going to say that's a good thing since they'll be able to grow more corn."
He said this in spite of the fact that the projected warming would be disastrous for corn pollination, and hence, yield. Worse, he says so in spite of the fact that global warming is going to engender a lot of local flooding in many of the world's farming regions.
Scratch that. Global warming is, right now, already increasing flooding in many areas, as it is projected to do in Peterson's Minnesota, as well as the districts and states of many other staunch opponents of getting this country on the path to carbon neutrality. A taste ...
- 700,000 flee floods in China as they approach the peak of the wet season. Part of China's problem is deforestation, which they're doing a lot of work to combat, but the Himalayan glaciers are melting and then it's going to be dry times - flood, then famine.
- Speaking of the Himalayas, nearly 500,000 Indians are now homeless from recent floods.
- Here in the US, unprecedented flooding in Alaska has started an expensive chain of disaster declarations. The state is so far seeing the most obvious effects of climate change anywhere in the country.
- Oxfam also warns that 50 years of development gains in poor countries could be wiped out completely. Caught between droughts and flooding, hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people could be put in even greater jeopardy.
- And if Oxfam's not Serious enough, the insurance industry has weighed in on climate change, with "the CEO's of 80 (statutory maximum) of the world's largest insurers and reinsurers" meeting in the offices of Lloyd's of London this month to say they don't think it's going to be a picnic:
... The insurance industry representatives called for "international cooperation to reduce CO2 emissions," he said, and they endorsed a "leading role" for the industry in achieving that goal.
... Lloyd's Director of Franchise Performance Rolfe Tolle followed Butt with a ringing endorsement of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC - www.ipcc.ch).
... Tolle went on to describe the effects of higher temperatures - possibly an increase of up to C6° [F 10.8°] - which would impact property in low lying areas and river valleys, as fires, floods and tidal surges cause increasingly heavy losses. He also warned of increasing liability claims, not only against architects, engineers and builders, but also against major industrial firms, who produce pollutants.
Maybe this year Minnesota corn farmers escaped the worst effects of flooding that devastated Midwestern agriculture in several states. But Homo sapiens petroleus is going to become extinct and no one's going to care how virtuous or bipartisan were the people who failed to stop the hard landing we will face in a business-as-usual climate scenario.
We might not need Congress to come around to see sense on this issue, but to try to get them to be as forward thinking as the international insurance industry, we have to get past people who think epic flooding is a joke and a leadership that coddles them.
