Ignore Climate Change at your own risk

 

 

The recent destructive flooding that happened in Central Texas this past week is one more warning about the ramifications of ignoring climate change.

Climate change skeptics are quick to dispute how flooding, like the recent Kerrville, Texas tragedy, has anything to do with man-made climate change.  What many are dismissively calling “acts of God” are more realistically abuses of God’s creation.  

We pump tons of God’s earth bound carbon and methane into the atmosphere every second of every day (1) through our extraction of those elements to meet our ever expanding energy needs.  Our attempts to mitigate this abuse is  constantly being hampered by those who profit from fossil fuel production.

The National Weather Service, that provides more accurate weather forecasts than they were able to in the past, warned citizens in Central Texas about the potential for such devastating floods, but way too late to prevent the deaths for many who got caught up in this severe storm, including many of the young girls who were camping at the popular Camp Mystic, that sat nearly 200 yards from the Guadalupe River’s edge. (2)   This river saw as much as a 36 feet incise in just 5 hours.

This was a tragedy that could have been avoided had the Kerr County officials not decided a few years earlier to forego “their … ability to warn people, including a delayed flood risk alert from Kerr County and stalled development of a flood monitoring system.” (3)  And how ironic too that Kerr County state Rep. Wes Virdell, voted three weeks earlier to prevent the passage of HB 13 that would "have established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure." (4)

Then there’s the Trump administration’s plan to diminish the effectiveness of the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (5)  Along with their plans “to eliminate [FEMA] ‘as it exists today’ and to dole out less money to states that are hit by disasters”, (6) communities become much more vulnerable to these disastrous events.

Trump’s Big Ugly Bill (BUB), that was recently signed into law, is ending all clean energy efforts so they can regenerate the coal and oil production which has brought us to the threshold of catastrophic weather changes.  Changes that will kill innocent and vulnerable men, women and children who sit along coastal waters or near designated flood plains.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) gave solar development a more certain timeline (10 years) of which they could depend on federal tax credits that incentivized solar developers and consumers.  This assurance created demand which in turn created jobs and lower prices for solar engineered products.  Trump’s BUB would completely eliminate developer tax credits by 2028 (7)

The climate science is now showing us that these destructive events will happen far more quickly than they have been.(8)  

The leaders of countries like ours, who ignore the threatening consequences of climate change, are in affect deciding the deadly fate of this unstoppable force, by failing to mitigate the human contribution of green house gases. In so doing, we are coming ever closer through our non-action of even being able to preserve life on this planet as we know it. (9)


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(1) https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/climate-science/how-much-carbon-dioxide-are-we-emitting/
(2) https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/07/06/texas-flood-risks-warnings-alerts-preparation/?location=alert
(3)https://www.axios.com/2025/04/11/trump-eyes-huge-climate-research-cuts-at-noaa
(4) https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5343144-trump-noem-fema-dhs-hurricane-season/
(5) https://www.douglewin.com/p/the-end-of-solar-and-battery-manufacturing?publication_id=1180283&post_id=166762725&isFreemail=true&r=8pb8r&triedRedirect=true
(6)  https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/Climate-change-QA/how-fast-is-climate-changing
(7  https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-best-and-worst-case-scenarios-sea-level-rise 

(8) https://www.csiro.au/.../Cli.../how-fast-is-climate-changing

(9)  https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-best-and-worst-case-scenarios-sea-level-rise