Ida May Be the New Normal
The After Effects of the Hurricane Caused a Level of Death and Damage That Is No Longer an Exception
I was startled awake last night by what sounded like a deer running into the side of the house. Or a tree smashing into it. Or something. I checked, but there was nothing I could see.
This was at about 1 a.m. I went back to bed and, as I started to drift back off to sleep, my phone buzzed. An alert from Ring: “Did anyone else hear an explosion?” I checked the local Facebook page. Same thing. A loud, sonic boom of sorts woke people around South Brunswick from their sleep. No one seemed to know what it was.
Reports of an explosion in Manville started circulating, reports that would be confirmed in the morning by video and then by NJ.com. Saffron exploded. The Indian restaurant and banquet hall, formerly known as Rhythms, was at the southern edge of Manville near the convergence of the Millstone River and Royce Brook, an area that had been underwater thanks to the remnants of Hurricane Ida.
It was only the latest calamity caused by the trailing storms from the hurricane, which had devastated New Orleans and wreaked damage as it continued its path north. There were tornadoes in Mullica Hill and the Princeton area and more than a dozen dead in New Jersey, before it continued dumping rain into New York and New England.
Hurricane Ida was one of the weaker storms to make landfall in the United States in recent years, but it is part of a pattern of increasingly devastating weather events around the globe that are becoming more frequent because of climate change.
Let me be clear: climate change did not cause Ida, but it likely intensified Ida and it is responsible for the growing number of Ida-like storms, for the drought conditions in the mid-west affecting our food supply and along the West Coast that have allowed the spread of damaging wild fires.
This is not conjecture. There is consensus among climate scientists that the Earth has grown dangerously warmer over the last 50 years, that the warming is leading to more extreme weather, and that we are approaching a tipping point of no return (assuming we haven’t already passed it). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that reviews the science and tracking the impact of global warming, issued its latest assessment recently and outlined the damage we already have done. Our world is hotter and more volatile, the report said, with “hot extremes (including heatwaves)” becoming “more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s, while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less frequent and less severe, with high confidence that human-induced climate change is the main driver of these changes.” The report also ties the increased “frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events” and “increases in agricultural and ecological droughts” to “human-induced climate change.”
Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence); fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence); and compound flooding in some locations.
N.J. Gov. Phil Murphy, who was touring Mullica Hill this morning, pointed to climate change as a major reason behind the damage wrought by Ida, and he said the state — and all of us — need to understand this.
"The world is changing,” Murphy said. “These storms are coming in more frequently. They're coming in with more intensity. As it relates to our infrastructure, our resiliency, our whole mindset, the playbook that we use — we have got to leap forward and get out ahead of this."
That means fortifying areas, as we started to do post-Sandy, but that can only help so much. Small-scale and personal changes to our lifestyles will help but, again, the impact of these is likely to be limited. Bold action is needed along the lines of the Green New Deal proposed in 2019, and that kind of action can only happen if the government fully commits to addressing the root causes of warming — our societal reliance on fossil fuels for transportation, heating and cooling, development patterns that increase our distances from work and each other, reliance on non-local food, and so on. These ills are the by-product of capitalism’s voracious appetite for resources and the corporate sector’s efforts to increase profit by not acknowledging the full costs of their behaviors. Our legal structures make it too easy for business — mostly large, corporate businesses — to pad the bottom line by pushing the cost of their businesses onto the rest of us. Warming and extreme weather patterns — like poverty, homelessness, and income inequality, like unequal healthcare and schooling, like polluted waterways and poisoned air, like poverty, like hunger and our reliance on cheap but empty calories — are baked into a system that focuses only on profit.
This is a systemic issue, one that cannot be changed without mass citizen action and government engagement. We can’t wait any longer.
Ida was not the first major storm to affect Central Jersey, though it was the first time I had to take shelter because of the threat of tornadoes. My classes at Rutgers were canceled — New Brunswick was under water. Even today, many areas remain in passable in the region. This seems extreme, but it is fast becoming the new normal.