The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will now require states to plan for climate change before they are eligible for grants. This de facto oath of fealty to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its failing climate models further politicizes FEMA—an agency that can only operate effectively through nonpartisan cooperation with the affected states and regions.
FEMA’s argument is a specious one. The agency claims, based on the IPCC climate models, that climate change will bring more extreme weather events of the sort that will require FEMA’s response. However, the actual weather appears unaware of the climate models’ predictions: World temperature for the past 30 years has warmed at about half the rate predicted by the IPCC models—and has flat-lined for the past 15 years or more.
In addition there are no significant positive trends, in the U.S. or worldwide, for hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or droughts. The increase in extreme weather events to which President Obama frequently refers are not evident in the data kept by his own Administration’s National Climatic Data Center, nor do the IPCC data confirm any trends. In what may be an ironic twist, hurricane activity is at a low spot relative to previous decades, and we are currently in the midst of a record-breaking interval between U.S. landfall of a category three or higher hurricane.
The policies guiding the State Mitigation Plan Review Guide acknowledge the difficultly in predicting climate change in that the “scope, severity, and pace of future climate change impacts are difficult to predict,” though they ask states to calculate these predictions into their preparedness models. If states failed to agree with FEMA’s new guidelines, they would not receive important grants, even in the aftermath of a disaster.
Of course we will have extreme weather in the future and records will be broken (the lull in landfalls of severe hurricanes will end and hurricane activity will pick up just as it has done in the past). The states and FEMA should plan for this because it will happen regardless of our CO2 emissions. However, framing natural disasters in the breathless rhetoric of climate-change panic is unhelpful, and requiring states with cooler-headed leaders to embrace the hysteria is unnecessary and harmful to building the requisite cooperative relationships between the states and FEMA.
Regardless of what you believe about climate change, the future will be dangerous. It will include decades-long droughts, devastating floods, catastrophic hurricanes, and years with swarms of deadly and terrifying tornadoes. We can be confident in this because it has happened repeatedly in the past. FEMA should plan for it, but it shouldn’t make governors play its petty political game of Simon Says to join in the preparations.
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