【2010 Archives】

President Trump's first official State of the Union speech began with a reminder of the disasters that010 Archivesbefallen Americans during the past year, from wildfires in California to three of the top 5 most expensive hurricanes in U.S. history.

"We have faced challenges we expected, and others we could never have imagined," Trump said. "We have endured floods and fires and storms. But through it all, we have seen the beauty of America's soul, and the steel in America's spine."

During 2017, the U.S. was struck with 16 billion-dollar weather and climate events costing a total of $306 billion in damage, which set a new record. It was enough devastation to get attention of the global business and political elite, who in Davos, Switzerland, ranked climate change and extreme weather events as the greatest threat to global security and prosperity.

It wasn't enough carnage, though, to get a climate denying president to make basic connections between the disasters befalling his nation, and human-caused climate change.

Trump rightfully cited examples of courageous rescuers from Hurricane Harvey in Texas, and the deadly California wildfire season. But he did so totally divorced from the broader context that is raising the risks of more and bigger disasters in the years to come. Instead, he portrayed it almost as just a string of bad luck.

"We saw the volunteers of the Cajun Navy, racing to the rescue with their fishing boats to save people in the aftermath of a totally devastating hurricane," Trump said.

He also pledged continued assistance to hard hit areas, from California to Florida to Puerto Rico.

"To everyone still recovering in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands — everywhere — we are with you, we love you, and we always will pull through together, always," Trump said.

His words likely rang hollow in some areas, like Puerto Rico, where FEMA's food and water deliveries stopped on Wednesday, as the agency officially shifts from a crisis to a recovery phase of the ongoing disaster. Nearly half a million people still lack power more than four months after the storm.

But scientists have made clear, in studies both before and soon after these extreme weather events, that climate change is ushering in a new era of extreme weather that requires policies to be put in place that make the country's infrastructure more resilient, and head off the worst consequences of climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead, the Trump administration is mounting an all-out assault on not only environmental regulations, from the planned pullout of the Paris Climate Agreement to an executive order rescinding Obama-era protections mandating that infrastructure plans take sea level rise into account. The administration's new infrastructure plan would also gut the environmental review process for approving new roads, bridges, tunnels, and more, including reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, not to mention the changing risks of so-called "100-year" floods.

Simply put, climate scientists nearly unanimously say that the climate of our grandparents is gone, and what was a 100-year flood is now occurring far more frequently as the climate warms. The fact that Trump is causing us to lag behind the shifting climate risks more damage from floods, wildfires, and hurricanes.

Take Hurricane Harvey, for example, a storm so full of superlatives that meteorologists are still trying to wrap their heads around it.

According to a recent assessment from the National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Harvey which made landfall in Texas as a Category 4 storm in late August, was the most extreme rainstorm ever recorded in the U.S. The maximum rainfall total was a staggering 60.58 inches near Nederland, Texas, with 18 locations seeing more than 4 feet of rain during the course of a few days.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a large portion of the Houston area saw a 1,000-year or greater flood, meaning that it had a chance of less than 0.1 percent of occurring in any given year. But those odds are deceiving, because the probability of precipitation and heat extremes is rising in many locations as human activities belch more planet-warming greenhouse gases into the air.

According to research by Adrian Borsa of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which was discussed at a scientific conference in December, ground-based GPS sensors even detected an overall sinking of southeastern Texas by up to 1.5 centimeters under the sheer weight of the rainfall. The GPS network provided an estimated total size of the rainfall of about 24 to 34 trillion gallons of water, Borsa said during the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Studies published since Harvey have shown that the storm's rainfall totals were made more likely due to global warming, since warming air and ocean temperatures have resulted in greater amounts of water vapor available for storm systems to tap into.

One study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that climate change likely increased Harvey's total rainfall in the Houston area by about 38 percent, and boosted the chances of observed rainfall by a factor of about 10.

Other studies published since the storm, which have also focused on the changing odds of such an extreme flood event, have also found sizable increases in the risk due in large part to global warming.

This year was also a terrifying preview of what may be to come for Californians, as a warmer, drier climate brings the ingredients together for fast-moving, large wildfires. This year's wildfire season was California's worst on record, with communities like Santa Rosa and Montecito now synonymous with disaster. Wildfire dangers, like flooding damage, are also intertwined with myriad development decisions that are putting more Americans in harms' way. For example, Houston is now wrestling with their longtime lack of zoning regulations, and how that worsened the flooding from Harvey.

If Trump truly wants to be "with" us, as he said in his speech on Tuesday night, he could start by admitting the obvious — there was nothing purely natural about the disasters that befell this country in 2017, and his policies are only putting us in more danger for many years to come.