The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 by Folger Tim

Author:Folger, Tim [Folger, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Anthologies
ISBN: 9780544748996
Amazon: 0544748999
Goodreads: 28114489
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2016-10-04T07:00:00+00:00

Marco Rubio, Florida’s junior senator, who has been running third in Republican primary polls, grew up not far from Shorecrest, in West Miami, which sounds like it’s a neighborhood but is actually its own city. For several years, he served in Florida’s House of Representatives, and his district included Miami’s flood-vulnerable airport. Appearing this past spring on Face the Nation, Rubio was asked to explain a statement he had made about climate change. He offered the following: “What I said is, humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of these people out there are trying to make us believe, for the following reason: I believe that climate is changing because there’s never been a moment where the climate is not changing.”

Around the same time, it was revealed that aides to Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, also a Republican, had instructed state workers not to discuss climate change, or even to use the term. The Scott administration, according to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, also tried to ban talk of sea level rise; state employees were supposed to speak, instead, of “nuisance flooding.” Scott denied having imposed any such Orwellian restrictions, but I met several people who told me they’d bumped up against them. One was Hammer, who, a few years ago, worked on a report to the state about threats to Florida’s transportation system. She said that she was instructed to remove all climate-change references from it. “In some places, it was impossible,” she recalled. “Like when we talked about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has ‘climate change’ in the title.”

Scientists who study climate change (and the reporters who cover them) often speculate about when the partisan debate on the issue will end. If Florida is a guide, the answer seems to be never. During September’s series of king tides, former vice president Al Gore spent a morning sloshing through the flooded streets of Miami Beach with Mayor Levine, a Democrat. I met up with Gore the following day, and he told me that the boots he’d worn had turned out to be too low; the water had poured in over the top.

“When the governor of the state is a full-out climate denier, the irony is just excruciatingly painful,” Gore observed. He said that he thought Florida ought to “join with the Maldives and some of the small island states that are urging the world to adopt stronger restrictions on global-warming pollution.”

Instead, the state is doing the opposite. In October Florida filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency, seeking to block new rules aimed at limiting warming by reducing power-plant emissions. (Two dozen states are participating in the lawsuit.)

“The level of disconnect from reality is pretty profound,” Jeff Goodell, a journalist who’s working on a book on the impacts of sea level rise, told me. “We’re sort of used to that in the climate world. But in Florida there are real consequences. The water is rising right now.”

Meanwhile, people continue to flock to South Florida.

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