On Hurricane Harvey and Science

Hurricane Harvey is bearing down on my hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas (time lapse webcam of downtown until the power goes out). Landfall may not happen directly over the city, but my parents, my brother, one of my best friends, and many, many other friends and acquaintances in Corpus Christi as well as throughout the southern half of Texas are in harm's way right now. Many people have questioned why more folks didn’t evacuate, but the reality is that even the places Corpus Christi residents would evacuate to are endangered by this huge, drenching, slow-moving behemoth of a storm; San Antonio needs to be able to focus its emergency personnel on keeping its residents safe from flooding rains, not sheltering refugees from the same flooding rains. The mandatory evacuations were ordered only for people in real danger from storm surge flooding for a reason.

Would I feel better if my family and friends were in, say, Dallas or Oklahoma City, away from the projected edges of the storm? Of course. I’m sure everyone with relatives and friends on the Texas and Louisiana coasts feels the same way. But even then, they would only be marginally more comfortable and slightly safer because most would likely be in shelters such as schools and sports arenas. Envisioning my septuagenarian parents at AT&T Stadium on cots isn’t a pleasant thought (though I’m sure our relatives in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area wouldn’t allow that to happen, you get my point). The truth is that our infrastructure still can’t handle such an influx of refugees, now 12 years on from Katrina and the lessons supposedly learned from that horrendous hurricane season…which wouldn’t have been as bad had we learned from Andrew, which made landfall 25 years ago yesterday.

Our inability to learn from disasters is only made worse by decades of denial about the affects of human activity on our environment. In the past 15 years, much of the Gulf Coast has experienced flooding at levels and frequencies not seen in hundreds, if not thousands, of years, due to a combination of factors: intense development of land nature had used for drainage and natural dams/channels; use of fill to stabilize swamps and wetlands for development; and increased heat in the atmosphere caused by 400ppm+ levels of carbon dioxide that allows more moisture to accumulate, leading to heavier and more prolonged rain events. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico are hotter this year than average, an entirely predictable event based on the interconnectedness of all Earth’s cycles. People rebuild homes and businesses in the same places with little to no additional protections added after catastrophic natural events as if it can’t happen twice in the same place and insurance companies continue to provide coverage, albeit at much higher premiums. Worse, others are stuck where they live by economic and racial disparity which leaves them in grave danger when storms arise, much as the inhabitants of New Orleans’ 9th Ward had nowhere else to go when the neglected levees broke during Katrina. Any loss of life, any devastation that happens as a result of Harvey is much more the result of human failure to learn and to act on that education than the “act of God” that is Hurricane Harvey.

Events like Harvey, the increasingly devastating monsoon seasons in tropical Asian countries, and even the polar vortex phenomena that I lived through twice in Pennsylvania recently should prompt us to take a long, hard look at how we shape the future. This is why I think it’s so important for everyone to learn how to think scientifically, particularly how to evaluate information for legitimacy. This means that we need to know how information is gathered, how it is compared and measured against other information, and who is doing the collection and the comparisons. It means we need to understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory in scientific terms. It means we need to provide the means for scientists to investigate—funding for weather satellites is endangered in years to come!—climate change and its effects so we can respond to the increasing dangers a warming world will create. Frankly, it means we have to stop the nonsense of climate change denial at every level and get on with the business of fixing what we can; the longer we wait, the less we can change.

We have been gifted by God with the intelligence to fix the messes we have made. God has given us collectively all the wisdom and ability we need to be our own salvation if we take seriously our call to be stewards of creation. Hurricane Harvey will do his damage. What we learn from and change as a result of that damage will be a true test of human character. I hope we don’t fail this test the way we failed Andrew, Katrina, Ike, Sandy…