Hurricane Harvey“Mother nature always bats last, and she always bats 1,000": Rob Watson

Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal who has frequently written about the impacts of global climate change, has written an important article for Politico Magazine on the significance of the relationship between climate change and Hurricane Harvey.

The article, “Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like,” brings to mind the words — from seven years ago! — of Rob Watson, a leader in the green building movement, founded the LEED Green Building Rating System of the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) and CEO and Chief Scientist of The ECON Group.

In July 2010, Thomas Friedman talked with Watson, and published Watson’s observations in his column (Friedman, “We’re Gonna Be Sorry,” New York Times, 24 July 2010). Watson told Friedman:

Mother nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is. You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate. Mother nature always bats last, and she always bats 1,000.”

Here are excerpts from Holthaus article in Politico Magazine:

In all of U.S. history, there’s never been a storm like Hurricane Harvey. That fact is increasingly clear, even though the rains are still falling and the water levels in Houston are still rising.

But there’s an uncomfortable point that, so far, everyone is skating around: We knew this would happen, decades ago. We knew this would happen, and we didn’t care. Now is the time to say it as loudly as possible: Harvey is what climate change looks like. More specifically, Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously.
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Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years, but Harvey is in a class by itself…. For most of the Houston area, in a stable climate, a rainstorm like Harvey is not expected to happen more than once in a millennium.
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Adapting to a future in which a millennium-scale flood can wipe out a major city is much harder than preventing that flood in the first place. By and large, the built world we have right now wasn’t constructed with climate change in mind. By continuing to pretend that we can engineer our way out of the worsening flooding problem with bigger dams, more levees and higher-powered pumping equipment, we’re fooling ourselves into a more dangerous future.

It’s possible to imagine something else: a hopeful future that diverges from climate dystopia and embraces the scenario in which our culture inevitably shifts toward building cities that work with the storms that are coming, instead of Sisyphean efforts to hold them back. That will require abandoning buildings and concepts we currently hold dear, but we’ll be rewarded with a safer, richer, more enduring world in the end….
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The symbolism of the worst flooding disaster in U.S. history hitting the sprawled-out capital city of America’s oil industry is likely not lost on many. Institutionalized climate denial in our political system and climate denial by inaction by the rest of us have real consequences. They look like Houston.

Once Harvey’s floodwaters recede, the process will begin to imagine a New Houston, and that city will inevitably endure future mega-rainstorms as the world warms. The rebuilding process provides an opportunity to chart a new path. The choice isn’t between left and right, or denier and believer. The choice is between success and failure.