Tuesday's postcard, and Florida weatherman strikes back
May 21, 2024
Eastern kingbird taking flight above a scabland pond west of Spokane
Miami Heat is more than a basketball team
As is often the case, there wasn’t quite enough space in Sunday’s dispatch to squeeze in a final, salient observation I’d hoped to cover. (Substack—perhaps as a humane gesture for readers—limits the length of individual posts).
Thus, a piece that began by calling out Donald Trump’s shameless pitch to oil company execs—offering to roll back federal regulations in exchange for big oil piping a billion dollars into his 2024 presidential bid—ended with a jab at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (and other Florida Republicans) for trying to re-cast efforts to save the biosphere as an affront in their phony culture war.
Just as DeSantis et al have stoked populist grievance as a cover to pass state laws to suppress “uncomfortable” content on racism and non-heterosexual coupling in school curricula, their focus has now turned to rolling back environmental initiatives to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Or, as the Governor proclaimed on social media just after he signed the new laws: “We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots.”
“Sanity?” “Radical green zealots?” Florida is one of the places where rising sea levels caused by polar melting are already causing “sunny day” floods and threatening thousands of homes. Much of Miami Beach is projected to be under sea water by the end of this century. But, hey, don’t believe your wet shoes and lying eyes—y’all just roll up your pants, head to an air-conditioned bar and celebrate owning the libs.
Meteorologist Steve MacLaughlin in his uncensored rebuke to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on May 18th
Desantis & Co. can easily ignore scientists and out-of-state editorial writers. But I’m guessing they didn’t expect pushback from a weatherman with a large following in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area. On Saturday, Steve MacLaughlin a popular, Emmy-award winning meteorologist at South Florida’s NBC6 station (serving the Ft. Lauderdale/Miami area) had a biting rebuke for the governor.
MacLaughlin took to “X” (formerly Twitter) with a sarcastic introduction that referenced DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” legislation that the governor signed a year ago.
“Don’t Say Climate Change!” MacLaughlin began. ““As Florida is on fire, underwater and unaffordable, our state government is rolling back climate change legislation and language.”
With that he introduced a video he’d recorded in the NBC6 studio in which he said the following:
On Thursday we reported on NBC6 news that the government of Florida was beginning to roll back really important climate change legislation and really important climate change language in spite of the fact that the state of Florida over the last couple of years has seen record heat, record flooding, record rain, record insurance rates, and the corals dying all around the state. The entire world is looking to Florida to lead in climate change and our government is saying that climate change is no longer the priority it once was. Please keep in mind the most powerful climate change solution is the one you already have in the palm of your hands, the right to vote and we will never tell you who to vote for but we will tell you this.
Concurrent with a “Climate in Crisis” documentary that aired on NBC6 a few weeks ago, MacLaughlin was just as blunt: “This is happening,” he warned. “If someone tells you it’s not happening, they are either mistaken, or they are lying to you.”
It helped to underscore his point that, this past weekend, Florida was suffering through a blistering heat wave, with heat index temperatures well above 100 degrees in Key West, and both Miami and Fort Lauderdale setting high temperature records on Sunday.
There is a disconnect here. When NASA’s James Hansen delivered his warning about a warming planet to Congress in 1988 it was received as a forecast that we could hope would prove wrong. But now we can see (if we open our eyes) that the retreating glaciers, growing number and intensity of wildfires, increases in the frequency of devastating storms like Katrina, and the “sunshine floods” in Miami Beach are real. Hansen—arguably the godfather of the “radical green zealots” DeSantis and other MAGA Republicans mock and would like to silence—was dead on.
But we seem numb to it, still.
This is the chart I’d hoped share Sunday, before I ran out of space. It’s from a survey the respected Pew Research Center conducts annually to identify issues of most, and least, importance to Americans of voting age. The latest survey, in January, included more than 5,000 respondents. I’ve inserted a red arrow to show just how low climate change ranks on the list.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but the most troubling indicator is that U.S. adults are still sleep-walking into what, for humanity, is an existential crisis. (Ultimately, the geologic record shows the Earth will do just fine over the long run—the planet has been through worse. But thousands of species (including our own) who rely upon the present and delicate balance of the existing biosphere are headed for tough times, if not extinction.
It’s not a surprise that younger Americans are more concerned about global warming than older Americans. It’s no surprise that respondents who identify as Republicans are less concerned about global warming than those who identify as Democrats. What is eye-opening, though, is the breadth of the divide—the huge gap between self-identified Republicans and Democrats when it comes to the level of concern. The January Pew survey found that 59% of Democrats believe climate change should be a top legislative priority, versus only 12% of Republicans who think it should be.
This alone raises several deeper questions, all of which seem urgent to confront. Staring with: why has this scientifically grounded prognosis turned out to be such a divisive, partisan issue?
to be continued….
—tjc
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