CNN featured Washington Post weather editor James Samenow Wednesday so he could claim there is an “obvious” connection between climate change and Tropical Storm Harvey.
“There was just abnormal warmth in the Gulf Coast states back in the winter. The warm water persisted in the Gulf of Mexico leading up the Hurricane Harvey. And you need that fuel, you need that warm water in the Gulf of Mexico to power these storms and we saw that explosive intensification of Harvey at it approached the Texas coast. So, obviously the warm water spurred by climate change played a role here,” Samenow said on CNN’s “New Day.”
Samenow left room for the possibility that other factors played a role in the impact of the storm, but said global warming was adding to the issues.
“Now of course there is natural variability. We have had hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast for decades. So I think there’s a combination. I think global warming intensified this storm some, but obviously there have always been these storms and there will continue to be these storms moving into the future,” he said.
Samenow added people could expect to see more of these types of disasters as a result of human behavior and greenhouse gas emissions, predicting storms get more powerful in the future.
“There is a clear and unambiguous signal that there is an anthropogenic (man-made) component to this warming,” he said. “And we are just going to see that human signal on the climate system continue to grow as long as we increase greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.”
“We’re going to see continued warming and there’s going to be more potential for these storms to blow up and become even more intense in future decades,” he added. “We should expect to see more of these 500 year or 1000 year events because we’re loading the atmosphere with these greenhouse gasses and we are seeing these more intense storms develop as a result.”
“New Day” co-host Chris Cuomo said it is hard to blame a storm of this magnitude on just one thing, but ultimately bowed to climate change as a main cause of the carnage.
“It’s never one thing, it’s multiple things,” Cuomo said. “It’s how they developed in Houston. It’s how the engineered in the New Orleans area and the levee system. And greenhouse gases are also something you have to take into account if you want it to be better.”
This is just one of several examples of CNN and other mainstream media outlets politicizing Tropical Storm Harvey and pivoting to the issue of climate change while citizens are still being rescued from the flood.
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