Pirate's Cove

Right on cue, the climate cult ghouls at The Week are using bad weather events, which saw people hurt and killed, to push their climate cult agenda

Climate change is coming for the red states — but will it matter?

Extreme weather doesn’t really bother me. I’ve lived in Kansas most of my life, have witnessed tornadoes and flooding, love nothing more than a good gullywasher rain storm. You respect the danger of such events, but you also get used to them. It’s part of the landscape here, as familiar as grain silos.

Wednesday felt different.

Fierce windstorms battered my state throughout the day, starting large-scale wildfires, blowing off roofs, knocking out power to tens of thousands of people, and generating images out of a disaster movie. The late part of the day brought tornado warnings and severe thunderstorms. We hunkered down. And for most of the day I felt uneasy — not just because of the power and size of the storms, but because of the timing: We were getting May weather in December.

That happens. Always has. Always will.

Climate change has come to my red state. (I know that it’s difficult to attribute any one weather event to warming, but c’mon: The high temperatures here were in the 70s on Wednesday.) And it’s not just mine: Kansas windstorms came hot on the heels of last weekend’s deadly tornadoes that battered Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and Illinois. With the exception of the last, these are all states that vote reliably for Republicans and side with candidates who at best treat global warming a secondary concern to sustaining a carbon-fueled economy — or at worst deride it as a “hoax.”

And the majority of the Red State voters in Kansas and the others will attribute this to nature doing nature. They aren’t going to blame witchcraft, er, anthropogenic causation. If climahysteric Joel Mathis wants to, well, OK, give up your own use of fossil fuels and make your life carbon neutral. The rest of us will simply chalk it up to weather happening, and that this is a typical Holocene warm period.

But while their politicians might mock a “Green New Deal,” GOP-voting states won’t be able to avoid the pain of climate change. Until recently, those of us who live in “flyover country” have largely avoided the kind of singular, in-your-face events that plague coastal regions — the drought-fueled wildfires that scorched Oregon and California this last summer, the red tides and flooding that afflict Florida, the massive storms like Hurricane Ida that battered Louisiana before unleashing tornadoes and flash floods in Maryland, New Jersey, and New York in September. Getting tornadoes in December, however, is pretty unusual for the interior states.

Weather happens. Wildfires happen when dumbasses set fires, intentionally or unintentionally. You aren’t going to make us buy into your cult.

There is another possibility, though. Kansas has always been reliably Republican, but in 1931, a severe drought hit the state, which was already groaning under the Great Depression. It was the start of a decade-long Dust Bowl that created misery even worse than what we saw Wednesday. The next year Kansas gave its Electoral College votes to one Franklin D. Roosevelt.

What caused that warming, which was, before they fucked around with the data, warmer than today? When CO2 was much lower? Answer that one, sparky. Regardless, we aren’t buying what you’re selling.