Climate Change Deniers, Left Out in the Cold

It’s freezing this week in the United States.

And not just in the normally winter-frigid Northeast or Midwest. In southern states like Texas and Oklahoma, it has been in the 20s or lower. As of Wednesday, 73 percent of the country was covered in snow, which The Weather Channel says is “the most widespread snow cover across the contiguous U.S. in at least 17 years.”

So here we are, again, in a situation in which climate crisis deniers cry foul about global warming: How can the planet possibly be heating up when we’re all so cold?

Scientists can tell you why, here and here (among a zillion other places). The Environmental Defense Fund explains how more snowfall during winter storms “is an expected outcome of climate change.”

“What we’re seeing this year is an extreme example of what happens when the jet stream trough goes really deep southward,” Paul Beckwith, a climate system scientist in Ottawa, told Reuters on Wednesday. “I think it's a rock-solid case,” he said of climate change affecting the polar vortex. But “it might take a bit of time for the science to catch up and find all the details” to prove it.

Between the warming Arctic and the destabilization of the polar vortex, there are sound scientific reasons to stop asking how severe cold and extreme storms could be part of climate change. Yet climate change deniers, like former President Trump, have made fun repeatedly of climate science when it gets cold, perpetuating basic illiteracy of how planetary warming works.

In fact, just this Monday, Newsmax, the conservative media outlet that has crept into the mainstream in the past couple years, ran a climate denial opinion piece arguing that “present global temperatures are comfortably similar to those that existed two thousand years ago during the Roman Warm Period, a thousand years ago during the Medieval Warm Period, and far more recently during the 1930s… all when CO2 levels were lower.” The op-ed is by Larry Bell, a professor of space architecture at the — yes, now-snowed in — University of Houston.

Millions of people in Houston and throughout Texas currently have no power, especially those in lower-income neighborhoods that house mainly people of color. They are being told to boil their water for consumption because of a grand infrastructure system failure — one that can be avoided in the future if the country would actually prepare for climate change, and combine that remediation with solutions for racial and social injustice, as Jane Fonda recently wrote for WMC Climate.

But, in a weird twist, on Thursday, Newsmax told its readers that climate change is real, even when it involves cold.

The outlet chose to run a wire story from The Associated Press that says: “This week’s storms — with more still heading east — fit a pattern of worsening extremes under climate change and demonstrate anew that local, state, and federal officials have failed to do nearly enough to prepare for greater and more dangerous weather.”

And, in another unusual move for a highly conservative media outlet, Newsmax ran a part of the AP story that contained a quote recognizing the danger of climate change to the poor and underprivileged: The storm, a woman in Oklahoma said, “was also a harbinger of what social service providers and governments say will be a surge of increased needs for society’s most vulnerable as climate and natural disasters worsen.”

And in the U.S., society’s most vulnerable are mainly women and people of color, as well as people with disabilities.

More women than men live in poverty in the country, at 56 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. And of those women, women of color are the worst off, economically. This applies worldwide: Women are poorer than men, and women of color even more so. And people in poverty are the main population affected by climate change.

In developing countries, not only do poor women do most or all of the firewood, charcoal, and water collection, they also have fewer rights and abilities to make decisions. They are thereby unable to move their families as global warming dries up or contaminates water sources and ruins agriculture with droughts and extreme storms. Also, as instability rises, women bear the brunt of violence, whether at home or as they carry out work beyond the house.

It is — right now — time to come in from the cold, experts say. It is time to recognize that the less we talk about climate change as real, the more people are going to suffer, be they women trekking to find clean water in the developing world, or women of color trying to keep their families warm during freak snowstorms in Texas.