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To the editor:
The Texas floods are utterly devastating. They are a tragic example of magical thinking. Here's why. On March 24, 2020, President Donald Trump announced to the world that COVID-19 would magically disappear by Easter of that year. It did not disappear. Since his unfounded wizard-like proclamation, more than 1.2 million American citizens have died from Covid-19, and hundreds more perish every week.
Back to the cataclysmic flooding in the hill country of Texas. Trump and his entourage, including our Gov. Ron DeSantis, don't believe in climate change. It's a hoax. Believing that, these politicians are dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Weather Service and almost all funding to study the effects of climate change on the planet. They believe, in their view, that if we stop studying it and stop talking about it, climate change will go the way of COVID-19. It will simply disappear.
It will not. Climate change is not impacted by opinions any more than gravity is. If you leap from a tall bridge, I guarantee you will not fall upward. No matter how hard you want to think it, will it or ignore it, you will tumble toward earth and die. If you think differently, then I encourage you to jump.
That's why magical thinking is dangerous. It allows those in a position of power the ability to will away issues they don't want to confront. Climate change doesn't care about your personal or their "opinions" at all. One of the scientifically predicted impacts of climate change is that, with more moisture in the atmosphere, the rainfall will not increase, but that it will rain harder and for shorter durations. The Texas floods are a perfect example of this phenomenon.
Within a matter of three hours or less, as the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry collided with a mid-level trough, up to 11 inches of rain fell into the upper headwaters of the Guadalupe River. The result was that the river went from 2 feet to 29 feet in a matter of hours. Trump and his crew had already slashed funding for the Weather Service because they didn't want to hear any more talk about climate change. There was little to no warning given.
As Floridians standing on the front lines of climate change, this kind of thinking is reckless and deadly. Trump recently cut the NOAA off from being able to use the U.S. Department of Defense's weather satellites, thereby hampering their long-range forecasting of major Atlantic hurricanes just as peak season is getting underway. The NOAA has been using the data for 40 years, and that use ends on July 31. So, when our own rivers rise and hundreds of people are killed due to lack of information, don't blame climate change. Blame those who think it will magically disappear by Easter. It won't.
Charles Sobczak
Sanibel