Allow me to interrupt the Scott Pruitt coverage long enough to point out that doing nothing substantive about climate change is going to cost more lives and massive amounts of money -- according to a new study:
The globe’s hurricanes have seen a striking slowdown in their speed of movement across landscapes and seascapes over the past 65 years, a finding that suggests rising rainfall and storm-surge risks, according to research reported Wednesday.
The study, published in the journal Nature, finds a 10 percent slowdown in storm speed between 1949 and 2016. It points directly to the example of Hurricane Harvey, whose catastrophic rains were enabled by the storm’s lingering in the Houston area for such a long period.
Slower-moving storms will rain more over a given area, batter that area longer with their winds and pile up more water ahead of them as they approach shorelines, said Jim Kossin, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the study’s author.
Kossin said the effect was much bigger than he expected. And in travel over land, in some cases, the slowdown was even more pronounced than it was over oceans. In the Atlantic region, storms moved 20 percent slower over land, he found.
But don't worry. I'm sure Scott Pruitt will be right on it!
