I was mowing my lawn in Myrtle Beach as Hurricane Milton’s outer bands and the tornadoes it brought with it began to lash Florida on Wednesday. Though the lawnmowing was trivial compared to the lashing, a slight inconvenience alongside a pending catastrophe, I couldn’t help linking the two because of climate change.
In all my years as a homeowner, I don’t remember mowing my lawn this consistently this late in the season. I took out the lawnmower, edger and clippers a couple of weeks ago as well. The hedges had regrown to heights they usually reach at the end of spring.
All it cost me was a few dollars of gas money and a sweaty T-shirt. No biggie. But a change in the climate, even a modest one, could dearly cost Myrtle Beach. Despite the draw of Broadway at the Beach, the SkyWheel and Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, weather remains the top reason some 20 million people flock to the area every year. Sitting on the beach taking in the beauty of the Atlantic becomes less palatable without mild, stable weather.
The good news is that the fight to persuade people we are undergoing change is over. NASA says there is “no question that increased greenhouse gas levels warm Earth in response,” even if scientists may not be able to say definitively that my lawn is changing or Milton’s historic strength was directly caused by climate change because climate is more than just individual weather events. Now, nearly 80% of South Carolinians believe climate change is real, according to Winthrop University polling. That’s higher than the national average of about 72%.
The bad news is that fewer of us are in agreement about its causes, what should be done, or if climate change is an urgent matter at all. While 55% of North Carolina residents believe recent extreme weather events are related to climate change, only 47% believe it’s an emergency, according to High Point University polling. That’s even while knowing rural areas are most vulnerable, which Hurricane Helene has unfortunately just illustrated in devastating ways.
In Florida, the gap is starker. While 90% of Floridians believe climate change is real, less than half would be willing to pay $10 a month to strengthen that state’s infrastructure to weather hazards.
In Congress, when Democrats talk about climate change or “green” projects, many Republicans criticize them. Only 13 House GOP members voted for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which represents the country’s biggest investment in the climate change fight. More needs to be done, but President Joe Biden signed it into law just a couple of years after President Donald Trump spent his time in office rolling back such efforts.
It’s akin to knowing an out-of-control freight train is screaming down the track. Instead of working to either try and stop it or get people out of the way, we’re stuck arguing if it’s really an emergency worth the sacrifice of short-term political wins or a few extra dollars to equip those who can mitigate the damage with the tools they need.
The truth is we’ve been forking over extra dollars anyway. Some of it has been in the form of having to mow the lawn and cut the hedges a few extra times, the kind of thing that feels small but will add up over time. We’ve even accepted the occasional house on the North Carolina coast falling into the Atlantic because of rising seas as a curiosity rather than calamity.
In other ways, it is easier to see that the freight train that is climate change has already arrived. In recent years, a variety of storms and other natural disasters around the nation have caused damage that is approaching nearly $100 billion annually — the highest it’s ever been.
While there is no way to say with absolute certainty the damage from Helene and Milton is a direct cause of climate change, we’d be fools to believe it isn’t, and bigger fools to let partisanship stop us from committing to doing something serious and sustained about it.
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.
