Commentary by Jared: Natural Disaster? Try Fossil Fueled Disaster

Commentary published by VTDigger July 28, 2023 -

Between witnessing and helping respond to the recent catastrophic flooding in Vermont, I’ve noticed national media coverage using an increasingly inaccurate and out-of-touch phrase: “natural disaster.” 

When it comes to describing extreme events that would have almost no chance of happening were it not for the fossil-fueled destabilization of the climate, it is past time to stop calling them “natural.” 

What Vermont experienced on July 10 and 11 was not “natural.” The rainfall that many parts of our state endured, including in my hometown of Montpelier, was known as a “100-year” rainfall event (note: a 100-year event doesn’t mean that it will happen once every hundred years but rather that it has only a 1% chance of happening in any given year).

This recent rainfall and flooding occurred just 12 years after our last “100-year rainfall event,” during Tropical Storm Irene. As The Washington Post reported, the chances of two such deluges hitting the Green Mountain State in such a short span were just 0.6 percent, according to Art DeGaetano, a professor at Cornell University and director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Regional Climate Center.

Experiencing two 100-year rainfall events in the span of 12 years would be almost impossibly unlikely — except that these are exactly the kinds of severe impacts from fossil-fueled climate destabilization that climate scientists have been warning us to expect, including in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. 

In the Northeast, in particular, over the last 50 or so years, scientists have observed a 100% increase in the incidence of 5-inch rainfall events, an 84% increase in 4-inch events, and a 57% increase in 3-inch events, according to Dr. Kenneth Kunkel, an atmospheric sciences professor at North Carolina State University, and as reported in USA Today.

When we call these exceedingly unlikely but increasingly frequent disasters “natural” or “acts of God” or even “climate disasters,” it mis-assigns responsibility and denies our agency. The responsibility is not nature’s — it is, increasingly, ours. The scientific reality is that the damages we are experiencing from extreme events around the world — from record droughts and wildfires and rainfall and floods and high temperatures — would not be happening at this frequency and intensity were it not for human-caused climate pollution, primarily from burning fossil fuels.

If we want to stop events like these from getting even more frequent and severe, we must quicken the pace to move beyond fossil fuels to clean energy, including with policy action at every level of government. 

At the same time, catastrophic impacts from decades of fossil-fuel combustion are baked into our reality and life now. Communities and families have been unmoored by extreme flooding. Punishing heat in many regions is becoming a public health crisis, alongside devastating impacts from growing numbers of wildfires. 

We must lean into and accelerate adaptation and resilience strategies to make this new reality livable. 

As we do so, we must not turn attention away from or slow down on vital efforts to reduce climate pollution, because we know that there can be no true or durable adaptation or resilience without mitigation. In other words, we must address the root cause of the problem: the primarily fossil-fueled pollution that is causing the ever-worsening climate crisis in the first place. After all, when you are in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

To recognize the true nature of the problem we are facing, accurate language matters. What Vermont and many other places around the world have been experiencing in terms of record-breaking extreme events are often not “natural disasters.” It is time to retire the default use of that phrase. 

Instead, these events and the damages they wreak are fossil-fueled disasters. They are supercharged by human-caused greenhouse gas pollution that has destabilized the climate, with one of the consequences being hotter air and water temperatures, with hotter air holding more moisture. 

But changing words is just a start. More importantly, we must act on them. Yes, we must meet immediate response and recovery needs. Yes, we must focus on and invest in additional adaptation and resilience. 

But to have any hope that we can avoid even worse consequences going forward, we must also redouble efforts to move beyond fossil fuels to a clean energy future, as quickly and equitably as possible. That is the scientific imperative and the deep moral responsibility before us, both here in Vermont and everywhere else.