Memo to the Media: Extreme Weather Is Linked to Global Warming

This article has appeared previously on the Huffington Post and on Common Dreams.

It wasn't Katrina, not even close, but Seattle's storm of the century was no picnic. It gave me one more a taste of a future where the weather can suddenly turn--and destroy the habitability of our world. The storm hit Seattle mid-December with pounding rain and 70 mile-an-hour winds, reaching 110 miles per hour near the slopes of the Cascade Mountains.

The ground was already soggy from the wettest November in Seattle history, and as the wind and rain uprooted trees, many fell on houses and cars, blocked roads and took down local power lines, cutting off heat and light to over a million residents in the city and surrounding areas. Thirteen people died. Sanitation systems overflowed, dumping tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Puget Sound.

A week later, nearly a hundred thousand people were still living in the cold and the dark. Although my own lights stayed on, the next street was dark, and I could drive ten minutes and pass block after block of blackened houses. Those affected joked at first about sleeping with mittens and down parkas, then grew increasingly testy as gas stations couldn't pump gas, supermarkets were closed and what seemed at first a brief interruption turned into days without the basics of modern human existence.

Now, a month later, the last residences are finally getting back their phone services. And 29,000 people just lost power again from yet another Seattle storm.

The December storm dominated our local news and made national headlines, preceding the blizzard that stranded five thousand travelers at the Denver airport. Both storms fit the predictive model of extreme weather events caused by global climate change, and ours fit the specific predictions for our region.

But other than a single Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist, I found no media commentator who raised the link to global climate change. For two weeks our newspapers, radio stations and TV stations talked about little else except the storm. Reporters interviewed victims, judged the performance of local utilities, suggested ways we could have been better prepared.

But by offering no larger context, they lost the chance to get people involved in shaping precisely the kinds of individual and common actions that might help prevent similar storms in the future. We'd encountered a profound teachable moment, then that moment was quickly lost.

This failure to draw broader conclusions was no exception. Last May, New England made national news with the worst storms and floods since a 1938 hurricane. In June, a 200-year storm flooded the Mid-Atlantic region. In July, in St. Louis, thunderstorms knocked out power to three quarters of a million people (the city's largest power loss ever), and then freezing rain returned in early December, two weeks before the Seattle storm, to leave another half million people without power for up to a week. Missouri and Illinois had record numbers of tornadoes, and western states record levels of forest fires. Meanwhile New York City saw balmy winter temperatures in the 60s.

Although you can't absolutely prove a specific exceptional event was triggered by global warming, they all fit the larger predicted pattern. Yet mainstream commentators drew few broader links. As Mark Twain once wrote, "Everybody talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it." Commentators certainly talked about these events, but by failing to place them in any broader context, they made it that much less likely that ordinary citizens will do anything to change a future that risks looking seriously ugly.

America's major media haven't been entirely silent on global warming. You could even say 2006 brought a sea change in their public acknowledgment of its gravity. If you really read the superb Time or Parade magazine cover stories, or even the coverage in Business Week and Fortune, you couldn't fail to be concerned.