WASHINGTON — At 11 a.m. Monday, Rick Smith of the National Weather Service in Oklahoma warned the citizens of Moore and the surrounding area that their region — and particularly their schools — were very likely in the path of massive tornadoes.
They were warned but chose to do nothing. They kept their kids in school. They chose not to evacuate their hospitals. It was business as usual.
Perhaps jaded by life in a region labelled “tornado alley,” they chose to go about their daily lives as if nothing were amiss, as if another season of twisters would not affect them, as if weather warnings were bunk.
And then in mid-afternoon, just as the National Weather Office had predicted the day before and again that morning, the first of three tornadoes hit and within minutes turned the town of Moore, population 56,000, into a pile of rubble. The toll: at least 24 dead including nine children (seven of whom were killed at the local elementary school) and more than 240 injured.
On the “enhanced Fujita scale” where a classification of EF-5 is the most powerful, Oklahoma’s three monsters registered in at EF-4. According to the National Severe Storms Laboratory, that’s enough to destroy a city, but not blow it away. EF-5s do that.
Still, with winds of up to 328 km/h, their raw power twisted steel, grabbed cars and trucks off roads and tossed them around like matchsticks. They flattened schools, whole neighbourhoods and a hospital. They turned glass shards, wood splinters and shredded metal into weapons of mass destruction.
Scientists used to say that it’s a iffy business trying to link one weather event to climate change. Overall, intense storms, wildfires and drought are happening with greater frequency. Scientists say you can blame those trends on climate change.
Tornadoes are a little harder to pin the climate change label on. They are caused by a complexity of climate forces not all of which are enhanced by climate change. What’s more, historical data on numbers and size is limited. What scientists are seeing, however, is greater variability in where and when tornadoes hit and their increased intensity. The number of tornadoes grew threefold last year in areas of Canada, for instance, while Oklahoma was relatively spared.
The lack of response to weather warnings in Oklahoma echoes through too many recent disasters in the U.S. Despite several days of warnings prior to last fall’s devastating hurricane Sandy, few Long Island or New Jersey residents bothered to evacuate. Most didn’t even bother to drive their cars to higher ground or protect their windows with sheets of plywood. It was business as usual.
Oklahoma is a state in climate denial. Every election cycle Oklahomans re-elect Republican senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn. They are the lead deniers in Washington and have successfully blocked all climate change legislation. (Inhofe has stated he believes climate change is an invention of Hollywood liberals.) They oppose disaster aid to states (Inhofe dismissed aid to Sandy victims as a “slush fund”) and have blocked increased funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which these days is perhaps one of the busiest agencies in the U.S.
Every week for the last 33, Rhode Island Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has delivered a speech on the senate floor to remind lawmakers of “the damage that carbon pollution is doing to our atmosphere and oceans.” It’s his attempt to “awaken” lawmakers to climate change.
At the very moment tornadoes struck Moore, Okla., Whitehouse was delivering another attack on the Republican deniers.
“Have you noticed the floods and wildfires and droughts and superstorms and tornadoes and blizzards and temperature records?” he asked. Later he added, “When cyclones tear up Oklahoma, and hurricanes swamp Alabama, and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, for billions of dollars to recover.
“And the damage your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas; it hits Rhode Island with floods and storms, and Oregon with acidified seas, and Montana with dying forests. So like it or not, we’re in this together. You drag America with you to your fate.”
Conservatives ripped into him for linking the storm to climate change. Whitehouse issued a statement in which he expressed “regrets” for the timing of his speech.
Why the regrets? What would have been a better moment to make the point that heavy storms, which are getting more frequent because of climate change, mean lives? They also mean money. Huge amounts of it paid to get cities and towns back on their feet.
In the last 12 months, severe weather has cost the U.S. taxpayer more than $100 billion. The total number of severe storm disasters in the United States has been rising steadily since the 1950s, according to FEMA.
The Oklahoma disaster may not be related to climate change, but it’s a reminder of the forces of nature that climate change is unleashing.
So once they have picked up the pieces of their broken lives, will Oklahomans decide to bet on science and send their senatorial deniers packing?
History says no. Disasters may rally Americans to gush with expressions of defiance, of resolve and of resilience. And they send money. But when it comes to avoidance, they don’t like to tinker with the greatest nation on Earth.
Sen. Inhofe said he will not oppose the federal aid U.S. President Barack Obama announced Tuesday for his state.