Louisiana Voice

The good news about projections of what climate change will do to South Louisiana by the year 2040 is in all likelihood, I won’t be around to witness the destruction to human quality of life.

The bad news is my children and grandchildren will be.

The New York Times Magazine has just published an extensive look at the worldwide effects of climate change expected over the twenty-year span from 2040 to 2060 and the expectations are alarming, to say the least.

One of the features of the study that jumped out at me was an ANALYSIS of each of the 3,071 counties (and parishes) in the U.S. to determine which counties/parishes are at the greatest risks when considerations such as heat, wet bulb (humidity), farm crop yields, sea level rise, large fire dangers and economic damages are factored in.

The third-worst in overall ratings was St. Martin Parish and the sixth through ninth-worst were, in order, Assumption, Jefferson Davis, Livingston and St. John the Baptist. Livingston is where I have called home since 1981. That means that Louisiana has five of the nine counties at greatest risk over the next 40 years.

Heading the list were Beaufort County, S.C. and Pinal County, Arizona. Others among the 10 worst were Colleton County, S.C. and Wakulla County (4^th and 5^th-worst, respectively) and Jackson County, Mississippi (10^th.).

Louisiana had 15 of the worst 50 counties on the list. The other 10 and their ranking include Calcasieu, Lafayette, St. James and St. Landry (in order, 12^th through 15^th), Beauregard and Lafourche (24^th and 25^th), East Baton Rouge, Iberville, Pointe Coupee, and Tangipahoa (in order, 39^th through 42^nd.

The three biggest factors for those 15 South Louisiana parishes were heat, humidity and sea level rise, as might be expected, though none of the 15 had the worst rating in all three categories.

Of course, California, Nevada and Arizona were plagued with the most intensive heat seen in those states in generations with a surge in the demand for air conditioning straining the electrical grid strained to the breaking point. California was hit with an unprecedented 900 wildfires that forced 100,000 to be evacuated from their homes. Some of the fires spread into adjacent Oregon and the entire Pacific Northwest was covered in thick blankets of smoke that made the air quality in Portland and Seattle the worst in the world, worse even than Hong Kong, which has been notorious for its smog levels for decades.

But the most alarming projection was the predicted shift of today’s most “suitable zone by temperature and precipitation” from the nation’s breadbasket (currently extending from the Atlantic coast westward into Oklahoma and Kansas and from the Gulf Coast north into Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia) in a northerly direction bordered on the south by Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia to a new northern border in the lower Great Lakes area by the year 2070.

Heat was described as “one of the largest drivers driving the niche of human habitability northward out of Arizona, Texas and Louisiana.

And while most don’t think of humidity when speaking of southwestern Arizona or Missouri, scientists project that residents of those areas will in 50 years feel like South Louisiana does today and wildfires will continue to be a major problem in the West, Northwest and Rocky Mountains as well as a growing threat in Florida, Georgia and the Southeast.

Sea levels will rise along all coastal areas of the U.S., including the entire lengths of the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines as well as the Gulf Coast while farm yields, just as with human migration, will move northward.

Gulf Coast states and the Carolinas are projected to feel the worst effects of economic damages with losses in such places as Houston and Miami running into the billions of dollars, due largely to the impact of rising sea levels, storms and heat.

The greatest climate risk will come from “compounding calamities,” the report says, which is cause for much of the concern over counties and parishes in Texas and Louisiana, including those 15 Louisiana parishes projected to be the hardest hit.

You can read the entire report by clicking HERE

But set aside plenty of time to read it. It’s one of the most comprehensive studies on the worldwide effects of climate change ever undertaken – the opinions of Donald Trump and his science-denier followers about global warming notwithstanding.