Storm’s cause submerged

To watch the nonstop cable coverage of the unprecedented damage of Hurricane Harvey on Houston, you might think its cataclysmic fury had no discernible cause. Maybe it’s just bad luck that a 500-year storm struck Houston — the third 500-year storm to strike there in the last three years. You might think that, considering so few reports on predictions by climate scientists since the 1970s that such megastorms were coming, and that when they arrived they would only grow in intensity if we did not control our emissions of CO2. Those scientists were mocked then, and are mocked now.

Catastrophic climate change has been reframed as “political” by the fossil fuel industry and their political and media envoys, which is absurd. Science is about discerning facts through a rigorously disciplined process, and politics is about choosing how best to deal with the issues facts describe — unless politics and media have become so distorted by corporate money and corruption that its primary function is to lie and obfuscate for its benefactors. Meanwhile, real people’s lives are being destroyed while little is said about why or what they can do to stop it from getting worse.

Bill Miller

Spokane