All week, I’ve listened on this tiny island in the Chesapeake Bay as the winds of a winter storm have whistled and whipped this body of water into a frenzy; whitewater pounding the already-depleted shores of a fragile coastline. It hits your nerves; you have to create sounds to avoid it—the tv, music, anything to get away from that constant sucking whistle through the chimney draining the moisture and the quiet and peace from winter’s solace.
The stark contrast of snow blustering outside with the Los Angeles fire on the tv screen as Anderson Cooper, so much less jocular than he was on New Year’s Eve doing shots with Andy Cohen, now reporting live with Gavin Newsom—the news cycle rages on as Trump accuses him and Biden of somehow running the state out of water as though they did it on purpose, the liberal Democrat agenda to burn Hollywood down… why? Politics, the stupid yet inevitable cards-against-humanity party game overlay of every national and natural disaster, all set for a speed round of idiocy for the next four years.
Rising waters are often called the potential prime villain in the climate change WWE battle; we’ll all drown when the icecaps melt. Fire is up there on the Biblical plague list as we see the news from California, where God seems to inflict earthquakes on top of mudslides on top of drought on top of floods; and the only things missing are frogs and locusts. But this time around the wind is the up-and-coming mother nature villain.
“Climate models and projections often ignore wind, despite its potential to signal and accelerate climate disruptions. Wind is a wild card we ignore at our peril, given its capacity to increase wildfire risks, aggravate drought and endanger boaters,” according to climatoligists in Maine, which has seen an increase in wildfires in recent years. Global wind speeds, once thought to be slowing, are now speeding up.
The Santa Ana winds in California are a major player in the current L.A. wildfires; the combination of low humidity with hurricane-force winds and 100 mph gusts have been the leading cause of the rapid spread of the devastation.
Similarly, extreme winds of up to 140 mph and flooding in Hurricane Helene were increased over 10 percent as a result of climate change, according to a study. "Hurricane Helene and the storms that were happening in the region anyway have all been amplified by the fact that the air is warmer and can hold more moisture, which meant that the rainfall totals—which, even without climate change, would have been incredibly high given the circumstances—were even higher," Ben Clarke, a study co-author and a climate researcher at Imperial College London, said in an interview.
Conversely, wind (from wind farms) as a renewable energy resource has gotten bad press from Trump’s disinformation about bird casualties and whale mental health.
"There is absolutely zero evidence that any of the offshore wind activity has been involved in any of those (whale) strandings," says Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. Claims that noise from offshore wind surveys are driving whales into harm's way don't hold water, according to Nowacek—and it bears noting that seismic surveys for oil and gas are far louder. Many of the dead whales have borne signs of ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear.
Whether wildfires, hurricanes, blizzards, or other natural disasters, being a climate change denier only makes someone look like they live in a house with no windows; wind is increasingly something to brace against in our future.