Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times via AP
Jake Moses, 19, left, and Heather Jones, 18, of Fort Myers, explore a section of destroyed businesses at Fort Myers Beach, Florida, on Thursday, following Hurricane Ian.
In a 2018 CNN appearance, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that while he grudgingly supported some modest adaptation measures to handle climate change, the cost must be taken into account. “I’m also not going to destroy our economy. There’s a reality here. There’s a balance on that end of it that we need to be focused on,” he said. That’s surely one reason why like every other Republican senator, Rubio voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, which was basically a huge climate bill.
The world-historical stupidity of this argument was exposed this week, as Hurricane Ian laid waste to Rubio’s home state of Florida. Cape Coral and Fort Myers suffered a direct hit, with winds reaching 155 miles per hour and a possible 18 feet of storm surge. Large swaths of both cities were devastated, two bridges were knocked out, and at time of writing more than two million people had no power. Cleanup and repairs will probably cost in the tens of billions.
Rubio’s portrayal of climate policy as being an economic burden is backwards. It is climate change that poses a dire threat to the economy, not to mention the physical existence of Florida as a state.
Obviously, hurricanes have hit Florida since time immemorial, but there are strong reasons to think that climate change made Ian significantly worse. As Andrew Freedman writes at Axios, Ian strengthened exceptionally quickly as it neared landfall—surging from a Category 3 storm with winds of 120 miles per hour to very nearly Category 5 in just a couple of hours on Wednesday morning.
In the past, hurricanes tended to weaken as they approached land, but thanks to climate change, ocean temperatures are higher and a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, both of which tend to strengthen storms. Of the five fastest-strengthening hurricanes or cyclones ever measured, four of them have come since 2015. Climate models are also clear on this point: Higher temperatures mean more extreme weather.
Indeed, in some ways Florida got lucky with Ian. The Tampa Bay region to the north of Cape Coral is even more vulnerable to storm surge, because of a great deal of ill-advised construction and how the bay would magnify the effect of a direct hit (which has not happened since 1921, before the city was much developed).
Meanwhile, sea level rise (up eight to nine inches since 1880) means more damage from storm surges. This rise has accelerated in recent decades. Studies estimate that even with aggressive climate action, something like two feet of additional rise by 2100 is unavoidable—and it will probably be much more than that. More recent work has found that the enormous Thwaites Glacier on Antarctica is highly unstable, and should it collapse, it would raise global sea levels by about two feet just by itself. Similar threats can be found elsewhere on the continent and on Greenland.
Needless to say, sea level rise of this magnitude would erase big chunks of Florida’s major cities, particularly the Miami metro area, which would be extremely difficult to protect with a seawall because it is built on porous limestone.
In short, no state more badly needs climate policy than Florida. But if Republicans have anything to do with it, we can kiss Palm Beach goodbye.
