When Texas-Size Weather Messes with Texas

Former Republican State Chairman Kirby Wilbur relocated to Texas not long ago, for a new career selling homes to conservatives fleeing blue states and the Left Coast. He promptly went native.

Wilbur was up on Facebook Tuesday with a boast (he just paid $2.44 a gallon for gas) but also furious denial about causes of a lethal flash flood that hit the Hill Country over the Independence Day weekend.

“A true tragedy, a once in a thousand year flood according to some,” wrote Kirby. “True tragedy, but the tales of heroism and the massive response by both the private and public sectors says a lot about the uniqueness of Texas. And for you leftist ghouls who are blaming climate change, or DOGE, or saying those victims voted for Trump so they deserve this somehow, you are lowlife disgusting pieces of garbage.”

Defending their fossil fuel economy, Texas’ Republican rulers have adopted a three-pronged response to a stream of climate disasters: Belligerent denial of anything out of the ordinary, professed ignorance, and invocation of the Almighty.

Flash floods are “common” in the Hill Country. Sen. Ted Cruz has taken out after “global warming alarmists” and proclaimed that buildup of carbon in the atmosphere is “good for plant life.” At one hearing, Cruz claimed: “For the past 13 years … there has been no warming whatever.”

Hurricane Harvey, the wettest tropical cyclone in history, stalled over Houston for four days in 2017. It caused 100-plus deaths and $225 billion in damage. Trump flew down to view the damage, accompanied by the First Lady wearing spike heels.

Afterward, two dozen academics, armed with a report entitled “Eye of the Storm,” prepared out of Texas A.& M, went to see Gov. Greg Abbott. They argued that global warming is producing wetter, more lingering storms (sound familiar?) and that the Lone Star state should take modest steps to reduce its carbon footprint.

The warming warning received a cold shoulder. “I am not a climate scientist,” Abbott told reporters, “and it is impossible to answer that.” Eight years later, a word-for-word response from Cruz: “I am not a climate scientist.”

You don’t need scientific credentials to see that a succession of millennial climate events has struck Texas. The 2024 Smokehouse Creek fire consumed 1.06 million acres in the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma; it ranks as the largest wildfire in Texas history, and second largest in U.S. history. The East Amarillo fire is close behind at 907,000 acres.

Texans are used to fire, but not on this scale. Even Gov. Abbott was taken aback, saying after a flyover: “When you look at the damages that have occurred here, it’s just gone, nothing left but ashes on the ground, so those who are affected by this have gone through utter destruction.”

The climate experts at World Weather have studied these fires, finding that prolonged heat has created one-in-a-thousand-years events that “would have been at least 150 times rarer without human-caused climate change.”

With the warming of the Earth has come Texas-sized extremes of heat, severe cold, and prolonged drought. Look at a color-coded pre-July 4th map and you’ll see deep red, signaling severe drought, in the Hill Country. Parched, baked, hardened soil did not absorb the sudden deluge.

Texas temperatures smashed all time records last year from heat index of consecutive days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Texans are used to hot weather, an Axios report noted, but the combination of tropical level humidity with triple-digit high temperatures made for “a dangerous, precedent-shattering extreme heat event.”

Texas experienced the opposite extreme three years ago — record low temperatures with millions losing power and even water. One prominent Texan did find an answer: Sen. Cruz and family decamped for Cancun and $309-a-night digs at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in the Mexican resort city.

He was, said Ted, “just being a good dad,” and scurried home once identified and photographed. Mrs. Cruz had cheerfully invited friends to escape from a state where the temperatures were “FREEZING.”

The senator was vacationing in Greece last Friday when floods roared down the Guadalupe River and carried with it girls from Camp Mystic. Cruz lingered, touring the Parthenon in Athens the next day. But the spin started in Greece with a call to Trump followed by a phone conversation with reporters: “I said, ‘Mr. President, we are hearing [what] appears to be bad. Really bad.” (A rare disaster joke: What’s the difference between God and Ted Cruz? Answer: in times of calamity, He is everywhere. Ted Cruz is everywhere but Texas.)

Once home, Cruz invoked the Almighty, speaking of God’s hand in the whole situation” and saying, “God created us to take care of ourselves.” Cruz has also said that the response to Texas’ disaster should be free of “partisan politics” but earlier this year blamed catastrophic Los Angeles-area brush fires on “catastrophic policy decisions” by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass.

When faced with extreme climate events, Texas political leaders demand intervention — by God. Former Gov. Rick Perry, a global warming denier, confronted a drought as he prepared to run for President. Texas had just experienced its hottest (since broken) month in recorded history.

With extreme heat, and thousands of fires breaking out, the governor acted: Perry designated “days of prayer for rain in the state of Texas,” and explained: “I think it is time for us to just hand it over to God and say, ‘God, you’re going to have to fix this.’”

In the temporal realm, the Texas Legislature has its own fixes. It acted to deny state investments to funds that have divested from fossil fuels. “This bill sends a strong message to both Washington and Wall Street that if you boycott Texas energy, Texas will boycott you,” said chief sponsor, State Rep. Phil King.

The flood disaster has produced, with national networks, an exercise in stud-muffin journalism. Beefy young anchors wade through the muck. At press briefings, they’ve powered through self-praise by guys in Stetsons, to demand why Kerr County did not have flood alarms. As Ted Cruz has astutely pointed out, warnings posted on Facebook at 1:30AM and 4:30AM did not reach many folk.

Larger questions have been lost. Only Today Show weather anchor Al Roker has consistently put climate change atop the cause list. Jay Inslee posted that rising temperatures generate higher “precipitation events.” He was immediately the subject of abuse from far-right pundits Brandi Kruse and Jason Rantz: The party line, in Rantz’s words, was that Inslee seeks to “shamelessly exploit the dead to push his extremist climate agenda.”

But science is with the Big Guy. Storms are staying in place and dumping on climate deniers. Just look at what struck New Mexico this week, and the tropical depression that just trundled ashore in South Carolina. Sure, Hill Country rivers flood. But, in words of ex-Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, “No one knew this kind of flood was coming.”

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, dismissed as “absurd” any criticism of the Trump Administration, yet affirmed some criticism, telling Glenn Beck: “They were prepared for flash flooding but they were prepared for normal or even bad flash flooding — just not the level that occurred.”

One guy might have picked up on it. But Paul Yura, the veteran National Weather Service “warning coordinator” for the so-called Flash Flood Alley, was recently forced into retirement thanks to DOGE cuts.

The Trump Administration wants to cut $2.2 billion from the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and has already laid off 2,000 workers, pointed out Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Wednesday at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. NOAA oversees the Weather Service. The administration also wants to eliminate the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research division. Currently, NOAA has 3,000 vacant positions. Trump is also talking of axing the Federal Emergency Management Agency, arguably the fastest responding and quickest delivering arm of the government.

Kirby Wilbur should get incensed at this, given the deluges, floods, freezes, heat waves, droughts, and fires that are striking his state. The message to Trump, quoting a popular slogan, Don’t Mess With Texas. Bellicose denial is the response of Texas.

This article also appears in Cascadia Advocate.