Dane's floods, and others, are our climate wake-up calls. End complacent denial.

The flooding that ravaged Dane County - - home to the State Capitol, our largest public university, and a powerful urban and rural economy - - was a cannot be dismissed as a fluke in isolation.

What took place several days ago, and which is still unfolding as more rain falls and waterways on saturated ground continue to rise, is Wisconsin's wake-up call about a changing, destructive climate that demands the state's full, energetic and committed attention.

No more denial. No more refusal to connect the dots and do business as usual, as I noted just last month. 

How long do we have to wait for TV news anchors and weather forecasters to incorporate basic, consensus science about climate change into their correspondents coverage of increasingly devastating fires and floods in a demonstrably warmed and warming climate?

While many state officials and governors, like Scott Walker, have nothing to say about it, or worse, as documented repeatedly on this blog, here, here, or here, and elsewhere.

Because if you've taken the Koch brothers anti-climate change pledge, that's what you do. Nothing.

TUESDAY, JULY 2, 2013

Walker Pledges Fealty to King Koch, Coal 

All that stupidity and intentional, ideological complacency has just washed itself away with all the raging water from Western Dane County through the Isthmus   to the similarly damaged eastern part of the county.

Let's remember that the storm killed a man, James Sewell, who, by all accounts was a wonderful citizen, and let's remember that others witnessed his being swept away.

...a Madison man in his 70s, was ripped from the hands of a bystander by a strong current in the floodwaters. 

Damaged basements can be repaired and broken roads replaced. James Sewell cannot.

Nor can we forget that people also died in heavy storm flooding in NW Wisconsin in 2016, and 2018, with this alarm bell also not heard widely enough: 

...the flooding in Bayfield County seems worse than the deluge that occurred two years ago because the damage to roads is more widespread.

Nor from this report about the same 2018 flood:

Reports of 15 inches of rain from Drummond in Bayfield County may go on the record as a 1,000-year rainfall...The damage in Douglas County appears to be greater than what was witnessed during the floods of 2012 and 2016. 

Those should have been wake-up calls, too, regardless of their sounding in smaller media markets. 

The signs were also not given enough attention in Racine's County's back-to-back floods in 2017 and this year. (And no wonder downstream Illinois is worried that Wisconsin's rush to plow and pave 3,000 acres for Foxconn, and waive wetland-and-lake-filling and stream-rerouting prohibitions might end up sending the next major rainstorm pouring across the border.  

Ditto for Western Wisconsin's back-to-back floods 2017 and 2018.

Plus Madison flooded just a few weeks ago.

I've tried to stay on top of the story, expand and advance it.

But now we need action, immediate pressure on elected officials and candidates in both parties to use their power and influence to get Wisconsin back in the business of science-based public planning.

Lives, the state's economy, and our collective well-being are at stake.

In March, 2017, I posted this suggestion, along with more than a dozen specific ideas and links to organizational, scientific and related resources and websites to do what Walker and the state were actively resisting:

You probably heard that right-wing WI Gov. and pollution-enabler Scott Walker's "chamber of commerce mentality" management at the intentionally-diminished Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources scrubbed climate science information from the agency's main web page about the causes of climate change and its effects on the Great Lakes.

And I got to thinking that just because Walker and his hand-picked agency Secretary and mission-killer Cathy Stepp withhold critical data and useful links to information from the people shouldn't mean that we can't create resources that might even improve on those which our state-paid censors have deleted.

So here's a first draft of A Wisconsin Citizen's Guide to Climate Change

All we'd have to do is take a look at how Minnesota, with which we share an upper Midwestern/Great Lakes climate, is handling matters, as I've summarized in 2016 and 2017 and run with it.

Actually, there is plenty of homegrown talent at the ready.

For example, there is an impressive collaborative centered in the UW - - The Wisconsin Initiative in on Climate Change Impacts - - that is loaded with materials and talent; just because Walker's 'chamber of commerce mentality' mangers deleted a link to it from the DNR's now infamously scrubbed website doesn't mean you can't find it on Google and tap it:

The Mission of the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts is to generate and share information that can limit vulnerability to climate change in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest.

Madison is home to many such experts, writers and groups which could turn out a resource and a blueprint in a matter of days.

It could be posted, circulated it, put it in front of every office holder and candidate in the state who would be pressured to endorse and implement it.

We don't need any more Wisconsin residents washed to their deaths. 

No more homes and businesses and farms and roads and budgets damaged or destroyed while officials sit idly by 

ignore reality and the facts, and 'govern' in crisis times by looking through the most insultingly superficial and self-serving of frames - - like no taxes a few months before the 2018 election on school supplies for a few days, or enjoying free plane rides around Wisconsin while 'unofficially' campaigning, or staying busy posting Twitter pictures shilling for friendly franchises and 'everyman-or-woman-votes which show half-eaten cups of frozen custard or burgers.   

Politicians who won't get serious about life-and-death in Wisconsin need to be moved out and replaced with serious alternatives who will respond to a wakeup call that is sounding louder and more frequently. 

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