The Destruction of Climate Change Is Happening Right Now Before Our Eyes

Last week we drove to Utah for a wedding. Along the way we stayed overnight in Kearney, Nebraska, on I80. The town is famous for the Sandhill crane migration, and we saw tens of thousands of cranes flying overhead and standing in the fields at dusk.

My wife saw that a storm was going to hit Denver the day we planned to visit a nephew and stay there, so we continued on and stayed in Glenwood Springs, on the other side of the pass along I70.

The next day we tried going to Vernal, UT, to check out Dinosaur National Monument, but the highway was in near white-out conditions. We turned back south and headed to Grand Junction instead. On the way we saw a dozen emergency vehicles headed the opposite direction.

The weather reports were calling the storm a "bomb cyclone," and it was hitting everything from Utah to Iowa, so we stayed in Grand Junction. A record was set for the lowest atmospheric pressure in Colorado, at 968 millibars. This was a land-based hurricane, with winds up to 96 mph, equivalent to category 2 hurricane.

We got to Utah without incident, but along the way we heard many stories from several travelers who simply couldn't get home. After the snow there was rain, and then it got really warm, and all the snow melted at once. Highways in Nebraska and Iowa were inundated by flood water, and thousands of people were stranded.

Damage reports are trickling in. Nebraska's bill for the storm will be $1.3 billion. Iowa's will be $1.9 billion. Other states suffered similar destruction.

Meanwhile, temperatures in Alaska have been in the 70s.

Climate change didn't "cause" this storm. But it made the storm that much more destructive. Global temperatures are rising, and that means the air can hold more water. More water means more energy in the atmosphere, more snow, more rain, more floods and more death and destruction.

Places like Alaska, Nebraska and Iowa are strongholds of the Republican Party and climate change denial. Yet they're the ones who are going to suffer the most damage from climate change. Nebraska is sucking its aquifers dry (pretty much every farm uses irrigation) and as it turns into a semi-desert it will cease to be the breadbasket of the United States.

It's so confounding: voters in these states keep electing the people who are responsible for the destruction of their way of life. How long will they let the Republicans play them for suckers?