2 days ago
- Politics
- National Observer
Republicans complain about smoke. But they voted for fire
It had to be a joke, right? A group of MAGA lawmakers moaning about 'suffocating Canadian wildfire smoke' in a complaint fired off to Canada's ambassador to the US. Someone at The Beaverton or Walking Eagle News must have been feeling especially snarky.
But, no. Turns out that six of Trump's besties in Congress spent their July 4 weekend coordinating grievances and writing up a joint letter of protest, demanding action from the Canadian government. Their constituents have been 'limited in their ability to go outside … to spend time recreating, enjoying time with family and creating new memories,' the complaint reads.
It makes no mention of the tens of thousands of Canadians forced to evacuate this year or those who have died. The signatories conveniently ignore the fact that smoke from the US side of the border regularly smothers those of us who live north of it.
In fact, the complaint does not mention fires in the US at all, even though more than two million acres have burned so far this year, and Canadian firefighters have deployed to assist their US colleagues, just as US wildland firefighters have been helping in Canada.
Given the MAGA credentials of the complainants, you may not be surprised to hear their complaint blames a 'lack of active forest management' (a nod to Donald Trump's weird conviction that countries like Finland rake their forests to remove fuel), admonishes Canada for not preventing arson and makes no mention of climate change whatsoever.
It most certainly does not mention that the signatories just passed Trump's 'big beautiful bill' that will add an extra seven billion tonnes of fossil fuel pollution to the atmosphere over the next five years, compared to the Biden-era climate targets. The irony is what's suffocating — while MAGA lawmakers rage at the north for spoiling their barbecues, they're voting to supercharge the very crisis they refuse to name.
The sharpest response to the US congresspeople came from Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew. He didn't mince words in his response. He called the GOP lawmakers 'ambulance chasers.'
It had to be a joke, right? A group of MAGA lawmakers moaning about 'suffocating Canadian wildfire smoke' in a complaint fired off to Canada's ambassador to the US. Someone at The Beaverton or Walking Eagle News must have been feeling snarky.
"This is what turns people off politics," Kinew said. "A group of congresspeople trying to trivialize and make hay out of a wildfire season where we've lost lives in our province."
That group of congresspeople included Tom Emmer, the GOP's third-highest ranking member and majority whip in the House of Representatives. You might think he'd have been preoccupied over the long weekend — dealing with the horrendous floods that killed at least 120 people in Texas, sweeping away children at summer camp.
In that situation, too, politicians and officials are contorting themselves to avoid acknowledging the obvious fact that catastrophes are hitting harder and more frequently. Terms like a one-hundred-year flood or one-thousand-year flood have become meaningless (the US has just been rocked by four one-in-1,000-year storms in less than a week).
In Texas, the rain bomb struck at night. In about 45 minutes, the Guadalupe River surged from a stream you could wade across to a torrent two-storeys high. At its crest, more water was churning down the Guadalupe than the average flow rate over Niagara Falls.
Yes, we can say climate change did this
Governments should be ready for "more, bigger, extreme events," said Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M. Ever-bigger floods are 'exactly what the future is going to hold.'
Other climate scientists described the Texas floods as 'precisely' the kind of disaster being supercharged by global heating. 'This kind of record-shattering rain (caused by slow-moving torrential thunderstorms) event is *precisely* that which is increasing the fastest in a warming climate. So it's not a question of whether climate change played a role — it's only a question of how much,' said Daniel Swain.
That last point is a key one. Far too much coverage of fire, flood and extreme weather still operates on the old trope that you can't attribute any particular event to climate change. But, scientists like Dessler emphasize that 'the role of climate change is like steroids for the weather — it injects an extra dose of intensity.'
'We have added a lot of carbon to the atmosphere, and that extra carbon traps energy in the climate system,' Dessler wrote after the tragedies in Texas. 'Because of this extra energy, every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. The only question is how big that influence is.'
'Measuring the exact size takes careful attribution studies, but basic physics already tells us the direction: climate change very likely made this event stronger.'
The first attribution studies have already been published. These rapid response analyses don't have time to undergo peer-review and instead apply peer-reviewed methodologies to the conditions for a specific event. EU-based ClimaMeter has released just such a rapid-response study which concluded that the heavy rain that caused the floods in Texas 'cannot be explained alone by natural variability and points to human-caused climate change as one of the main drivers of the event.'
Davide Faranda of ClimaMeter summarized the organization's findings: The flash flood that tore through Camp Mystic at night, when people were most vulnerable, shows the deadly cost of underestimating this shift. We need to rethink early-warning systems, land-use planning, and emergency preparedness. And above all, we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit future risks.'
The basic pattern is that hotter air can hold more water vapour. And warmer oceans evaporate more water into the atmosphere. The rain bomb in Texas resulted from a tropical storm fuelled by an overheated Gulf of Mexico. The US-based organization Climate Central calculated that these unnatural early-July sea surface temperatures were made 10 to 30 times more likely by climate change.
Fossil-fuels triple heat deaths
As heart-breaking as the US floods have been, the death toll is many times lower than attribution studies are finding for heat waves. The early attribution studies are now rolling in for the heat wave that has been searing Europe. And for the first time, scientists are now taking the step of estimating the number of deaths linked to climate change.
About 1,500 people died because of supercharged heat in just 10 days, across 12 cities, according to the team of scientists led by Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The researchers found that 65 per cent of the estimated heat deaths resulted from the extra heat caused by climate change, 'meaning the death toll was tripled due to the burning of fossil fuels.'
The science is not subtle: fossil fuel pollution is killing people. The question is no longer if climate change is making disasters worse — it's how many lives it's already taken. When scientists can now calculate the number of deaths resulting from human-caused heating, we're witnessing the emergence of a macabre new metric: bodies per barrel.
This isn't hyperbole, it's attribution science. The same methodology that can trace Texas floods to an overheated Gulf of Mexico can now count the bodies piling up from burning fossil fuels.
And while the MAGA lawmakers may be insufferable, the deeper truth is harder to face: that same macabre math applies across the board, and border. The metric isn't confined to one political party or one country. In Canada, politicians continue to propose and celebrate new fossil fuel infrastructure, from LNG export terminals to new pipelines, gas networks to gas-guzzling vehicles. We can pretend to look away from the gruesome side of the ledger, but the bodies keep piling up.
