There is a weather conspiracy but it's not the one your uncle is posting about on Facebook
Feel free to share this post with him, he might learn something
There — is — a massive weather conspiracy happening right under our noses. And our conservative uncles and old high school classmates are so close to getting it right.
But before we get into that, thanks for all the new followers and subscribers! I know this is my first post since 2021, but since so many of you have followed and subscribed, I feel like I owe folks something a little more frequent. My writing appears more frequently at AlterNet (where I’m a full-time staff editor) and Occupy.com these days, so give those places a read. And a special thanks to Jonathan Larsen and The Fucking News for the recommendations!
When Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit Florida back-to-back, I caught myself describing it as a “once-in-a-century event” while talking to a flood adjuster colleague. But then I wondered: How rare is it really for two hurricanes to hit the same state in the same season? Part of me wondered if the last time this happened was before modern hurricane record-keeping began.
But actually, Nashville ABC affiliate WKRN reported that this has happened three times in the last 20 years! Hurricanes Katrina and Rita both hit Louisiana in 2005, and Hurricanes Laura and Delta slammed into the Bayou State in 2020. The 2020 season was so busy that meteorologists literally ran out of letters for named storms and had to go into the Greek alphabet.
As destructive as Helene and Milton are, they’re even worse considering that many Floridians have just barely started getting things back to normal since Hurricane Ian ravaged the Fort Myers Beach as a Category 4 storm late into the 2022 season. And Milton just ripped through Fort Myers Beach, burying those same neighborhoods in sand.
Ian was Florida’s costliest storm on record, killing 149 people and causing more than $113 billion in damages. As a licensed flood insurance adjuster I got to see a lot of the damage firsthand, and I had insureds calling me asking about their claim check as many as three months after I submitted my final report to the carriers. And that was well into 2023, so it’s not a stretch to say insureds likely finished rebuilding their houses just this year. So what’s causing all this? Is it the liberal weather machine or is it the far more obvious alternative?
(A cat belonging to one of my Hurricane Ian insureds. She followed me around while I took my exterior photos. Courtesy of my Instagram)
Everyone knows the reason we’ve already seen dozens of once-in-a-century storms in the last decade alone is because of our rapidly changing climate, and we all know the climate is changing rapidly due to CO2 emissions from fossil fuel. The 100 companies who are responsible for roughly 71% of global emissions know it too. Even the two Fort Myers insureds I talked to on the front lawn of their million-dollar home with a two-foot waterline and a ripped-up Trump flag on the front of their house didn’t disagree when I mentioned that climate change will make storms like Ian more common.
Exxon in particular has known about the threat posed by climate change since the 1970s. In 2023, a team of Harvard scientists published a study in Science.org about how Exxon executives knew five decades ago about the long-term consequences of burning fossil fuels. The company knew its emissions led to an abundance of CO2, which would rapidly warm ocean temperatures and create a far higher chance of catastrophic and frequent weather events.
Geoffrey Supran — the lead author of the study — told the Harvard Gazette that Exxon effectively chose higher profit margins over informing the public about the very real danger of climate change:
“This paper is the first ever systematic assessment of a fossil fuel company’s climate projections, the first time we’ve been able to put a number on what they knew,” Supran said. “What we found is that between 1977 and 2003, excellent scientists within Exxon modeled and predicted global warming with, frankly, shocking skill and accuracy only for the company to then spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science.”
A billion-dollar company conspiring to pay “scientists” to deny climate science, and PR experts to downplay climate change in the media, and putting politicians in office all for the sake of killing regulations that might make them part with a slight hit to their profit margins, may not be much of a conspiracy theory as much as it is what’s plainly happening in front of our eyes. If someone is looking for the shadowy organization working to increase the damage, scope, and frequency of catastrophic weather events, they’re all publicly traded companies with boards of directors. There’s no conspiracy to the climate emergency. It’s just capitalism.
(If you’re still reading this far and feel like donating, give to East Carolina University’s efforts to support work on the ground helping North Carolina residents recover from Hurricane Helene.)