Suppose you have a friend who gambles at the local casino. An acquaintance who’s in the FBI just let slip that the managers will face fraud charges because they tout a fair game while statistical monitoring of the gaming tables shows a huge increase in loss rates for customers. You call your friend to pass the word, and he just laughs dismissively. “Get serious,” he says, “I just won $2K last weekend, and my hand’s feeling hot. Forget your paranoia – join me next Saturday night!”Would you join him? Don’t be ridiculous, you say? Then how do you feel about the American climate casino, where the same thing is happening? As I’ve recently reported (here, here and here), statistical analysis of extreme weather events shows a huge increase in loss rates for Americans (and people in many other countries). Climate scientists have long since identified the culprit: Unrestrained carbon emissions are driving rapid climate change. But we play on without acting, lulled by profit-takers from the climate casino who tout good weather when it occurs and dismiss each catastrophe in the steadily-increasing series as “just bad luck”.Here are some entries from this week’s chronicle of “bad luck”:The recent tornado surge has rewritten the record book, according to NOAA’s latest analysis.The US Army Corps of Engineers is dynamiting levees on the Mississippi River, flooding huge swaths of farmland in Missouri to prevent even bigger catastrophes downstream as regional downpours keep driving the river’s record-breaking surge.Oklahoma’s worst drought in 90 years continues.New research projects much faster coastal inundation because Arctic melting has accelerated.For more on extreme weather in 2010, see The Year of Living Dangerously, just published by the Center for American Progress. They’ve included an interactive map that displays the impacts of US climate change, state-by-state. And our own global climate impact map shows that things are equally bad worldwide.Climate change hasn’t given us the luxury of dithering for 30 more years about our carbon emissions. It’s hitting us now, and the hour is already very late. So let’s face reality, close the American climate casino and move on.
