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 | | President Trump in Kenosha, Wis, on Nov. 2, the last day of the 2020 campaign. Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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Washington is poised for another 180 on climate change. Having covered climate change policy since the George W. Bush administration, though, I’m used to whiplash. |
Mr. Bush withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s first global climate treaty. Then, his successor, Barack Obama, spent his two terms assuring the world that the United States was back, and ultimately helped to forge a new global climate accord in Paris. President Trump followed, pulling out of the Paris agreement and reversing many of Mr. Obama’s environmental protections. Now, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. says he’ll recommit to the Paris accord on Inauguration Day. |
My colleague Lisa Friedman and I have spent the last three and a half years writing a string of what she calls “obituaries for Obama climate rules.” Lisa and I expect to spend much of 2021 covering the rollbacks of the rollbacks. |
There have always been pendulum swings of Washington, of course. But this isn’t just politics as usual. As I wrote this week in an article on Mr. Trump’s climate legacy, his impact on global warming has been profound. |
The same is not necessarily true of the president’s other environmental rollbacks, like his moves to lift protections on air, water or public lands. Most of those can be reinstated fairly quickly and scientists say that the harm to the nation’s air and water can mostly be undone. |
Climate, though, doesn’t work that way. That’s because of the nature of greenhouse gas pollution: It’s cumulative, so the heat-trapping gases emitted as a result of loosened regulations will remain for decades regardless of changes in policy under Mr. Biden. |
Furthermore, Mr. Trump’s presidency came at a dangerous time for climate change. |
“Because global emissions in 2020 are so much higher than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, that means that a year wasted in the Trump administration on not acting on climate has much bigger consequences than a year wasted in Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton’s administration,” said Michael Wara, a climate policy expert at Stanford University. |
That doesn’t mean that the rest of the world won’t welcome the United States back into the Paris Accord, or that Mr. Biden’s plans to reduce emissions will not be effective. |
But it does mean that it will be far more difficult, if not impossible, to stave off the next wave of climate disruption — higher sea levels, worse droughts, more destructive storms — and that it could take many, many years for the United States to rebuild its climate credibility. |
 | | Flooding in Rio Nance, Honduras, on Sunday after Hurricane Eta struck the area. Yoseph Amaya/Getty Images |
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Slower, wetter hurricanes |
The most recent Atlantic hurricane season has brought more storms than any previous season on record. |
And while we don’t know if climate change will bring more or fewer hurricanes in the future, scientists are already recording slower, wetter storms than ever before. Without a rapid, worldwide reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases, we can also expect that future storms may gain strength more quickly after they form, leaving less time for people in their paths to evacuate. |
Experts caution against claiming that climate change has caused any specific storm to produce more local rainfall. “The better way to say it is, we have all this evidence that this is the kind of thing that’s going to happen more often,” said James P. Kossin, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who spoke with me for an article this week on how storms are changing. |
There are many factors that can affect a hurricane’s strength and path. Natural variations including El Niño and La Niña — the multiyear shifts in water temperature in the tropical Pacific that alter temperatures and wind patterns worldwide — can play a role. Global winds can unexpectedly shift a hurricane’s path. |
“In any given year, there’s all these different actors at play,” Dr. Kossin said. “It becomes what we would call highly noisy, but when we take a step back from that noise and look on these longer time scales, we start to see this picture emerge.” |
Those trends are important to pay attention to. If storms continue to move more slowly, they could deluge communities with hours or days of constant rainfall. That in turn could create more severe flooding. |
Dr. Kossin ticked off a list of recent slow-moving hurricanes: Sally. Harvey. Florence. “Think about what’s been happening lately,” he said. “Hurricane Eta, as we speak, is one of these really slow movers. It practically stopped over Nicaragua.” |
If, as researchers predict, storms continue to be stronger, slower, and wetter, they will cause more damage in coastal communities. “These are devastating storms,” Dr. Kossin said. “They drop so much fresh water flooding on people, and that’s where almost all the mortality comes from.” |
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