It’s hotter. It’s wetter. It’s nastier. Weather from South Carolina and across the world seems to be spinning out of control, and there’s one overriding reason: Climate change.
For anyone who maintains there is no such thing as climate change, it’s time to crawl out from under your rock and face the realities of what’s really going on with the weather where you live.
This week in Charleston, for example, the city again implemented its “Active Flooding Intervention Plan,” which is government-ese for “it’s going to rain really hard during the daytime and you don’t want to be on Charleston’s streets so go home early.” More than 30 roads were closed temporarily due to flooding as up to 4 inches of rain fell in two hours.
Such inclement weather brings a commerce slow-down that will keep costing businesses more over time. When it’s a mess outside, people aren’t shopping, tourists aren’t touristing and dollars are staying stuck in pockets.
This week in the Caribbean came the earliest Category 5 hurricane on record as it spit 160 mph winds after pummeling the Windward Islands and was threatening widespread devastation on Jamaica.
And it wasn’t too long ago that people from the Midwest to Northeast got a taste of what Southerners encounter every summer — bouts of unbearable heat and humidity that threatens life and livelihoods. Their Julys are now coming in June.
Climate deniers aside, there’s no arguing that America has more wildfires, more tornadoes, more heat waves, more unexpected summer and winter storms, and more hail. The list goes on.
Notes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in a recent statement, “Human-caused climate change is warming our ocean globally and in the Atlantic basin, and melting ice on land, leading to sea level rise, which increases the risk of storm surge. Sea level rise represents a clear human influence on the damage potential from a given hurricane.”
Our weather isn’t getting better. If we want to stabilize it, we need to take more proactive measures locally and at the state level to join national and global efforts to reduce carbon emissions and promote green energy.
Just as colonists in 1776 waged a war for independence from Great Britain, it’s time for everyone to get serious about a war against climate change. It’s been 18 years since Al Gore penned An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. Maybe now is the time to start listening and acting responsibly.
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