The odor of mendacity
TFW the carbon chickens come home to roost
The weatherman was crying.
I’ve since learned his name is John Morales, that he’s a Florida meteorologist who’s been on the air for almost 30 years, and his work during the 2017 hurricane season is credited with saving lives… but last night watching CNN, all I knew was … that the weatherman was crying.
That is, as he was attempting to complete a sentence … his voice broke, the words caught in his throat, his face distorted (in that way all of us know), and then he had to apologize before going on.
All the man was trying to say was, “[Milton] has dropped 50 millibars in the last 10 hours.” And he couldn’t get it out. “I apologize. This is just horrific,” he added, before calmly, soberly informing us that a Category Five hurricane was bearing down on Tampa Bay.
He kept going. Something-something about “maximum sustained winds of 160 mph”—shocking enough, but it was the gestures, the look of horror and grief on his face that really broke through.
Especially the grief. Especially for me, one of the millions in the path of Hurricane Helene, still grieving all the storm has taken from us…
The weatherman feared things would get worse before they got better. “The seas are just so incredibly, incredibly [hot]—record hot … and I don’t need to tell you what’s driving that—global warming, climate change, leading to this and becoming an increasing threat…”
And there they were. The words we’re not in the South allowed to say. The words John Morales, in effect, defied Florida law to say.
Climate change.
Today, I noticed every single news report about Helene or Milton also prominently noted the role of climate change in brewing these killer storms.
Better late than never?
Ten days ago, waiting for service in a long line of storm-tossed people at Lowe’s, I saw a tiny woman with fading red hair just blow up at a bearded young man who towered over her. “The HELL it isn’t climate change,” she shouted, so loudly that people nearby started edging away, fearing a fight.
No confrontation ensued. The man hung his head, grinned in the sheepish fashion of one corrected by an elder, and starting talking to someone else. But I can’t stop thinking about her.
She spoke up. Maybe it’s time for all of us who know better to do that. To speak up.
You see, conversations about climate change tend to be conducted in lowered tones around these parts, the “free speech absolutists” having rendered discourse on the issue so toxic that the conflict-averse among us just duck our heads and keep our “unpopular ideas” on the down low.
But what precisely has that polite silence gotten us? A situation where it’s easier for some folks to believe “Democrats seeded the storm up into the mountains,” as I heard a man say on a radio call-in show…
than to believe what the scientific community and the plain evidence of eyes and senses have been trying to tell them for decades now.
TL;dr? I can give it to you in a tweet:
The planet is warming. The warming is upsetting the water cycle. The imbalance will stimulate fires and droughts in some places—and much more powerful hurricanes in others. We’re polluting at levels that exceed the carrying capacity of the planet. Unless we reverse course, people will die.
We didn’t listen. Or listened to charlatans and fools. And with Helene, time ran out; our carbon chickens came home to roost.
How did we get here? To a place where we’re captive to fantasies, false claims, and the logic of toddlers? Big Daddy knows how we got here…
… by lying to ourselves and to each other.
I remember when Southern politicians went all in for climate denial. In around 2011 or 2012, the backlash to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth metastasized into something uglier. North Carolina banned all mention of climate factors in state planning processes. Sea levels had been projected to rise 39 inches over the century in a report by the Coastal Resources Commission; obviously, the legislature didn’t like that report.
Anyway, with North Carolina and Florida leading the way, dominoes started falling all over the South and then all over the nation. (Columbia Law School’s Climate Denial Tracker gives a year by year snapshot of this craven record.) We’re talking laws banning the words “global warming” and “climate change.” Laws mandating the teaching of “alternative facts”—oops sorry Kelly Anne Conway, theories. Even laws prohibiting the use of public funds to address climate change?! And we’re not talking in the past—this legislative activity is all from 2024.
This sorry record was not enough for our political class. On September 25, torn between demands by the former president that they shut down the government and the need to get back home to campaign, Congress passed a stopgap spending bill to fund the government until the end of the year. Congressional Republicans got billions in supplemental disaster aid stripped from FEMA’s budget, ostensibly to secure their support, and still supplied every single no vote against the bill.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson hails from a hurricane-prone state, but apparently not even the storm that brought the weatherman to tears could induce the current GOP to put serving the public’s needs above presidential politics. He’s refusing calls to bring Congress back to approve more funds.
So, GOP pols with dirty hands in this business have had to be, let’s say, creative in assigning fault for their failures—it being much easier, one imagines, for Majorie Taylor Greene to tweet about migrants and weather machines than to level with the folks in Augusta and Valdosta about why she’s playing politics with their lives.
I’m not sure how much longer this mendacity will serve. Last year, Yale’s 2023 Climate Opinion Map showed that 72% of Americans, believe “global warming is happening”—that’s got to be some kind of record.
Of course, for some of us—victims of every hurricane from Katrina through Milton—it’s already too late. But the rest of us, those who know better, can make like John Morales and share what we know.
Also. We can share the voices we trust. For me, out in the wider world, it’s the Charleston Post and Courier’s Tony Bartelme, one of the foremost climate reporters in the South. Tony knows the mountains well and reading his reporting, from a Starbucks in Newberry I’d retreated to to charge my phones after five days without power, helped me understand the tragedy of those beautiful mountain counties.
And right here on Substack, Southlands is essential reading, especially if you’re thinking about our climate future here in the South. Erin Brockovitch has some pretty great ideas about mitigating the storm of pollution these cyclones release as well.
And also, please, be a good neighbor and spend a little time playing whackamole on social media. Not for the trolls, the deluded who want to argue with you about events that you’re experiencing, too. They’re unlikely to listen.
No, do it for the bystanders—the social media “lurkers.” Like that woman shouting “the HELL it’s not climate change!” at Lowe’s—you’ll never know whose heart you may be lifting.