Why can’t our congressmen connect the dots?

This post is reprinted from John Frederick’s Substack Allegheny Matters. The recent storms with 80 mph winds on Labor Day in the Johnstown area also underscore climate change’s impacts.

An average five-year-old can draw a connect-the-dots picture, transforming a scattered bunch of numbers into a coherent image. And no matter how hard one tries, it’s impossible to turn the picture into something else if you count properly.

Follow-the-dots is not just a silly childhood diversion, but an exercise in turning a slew of seemingly unrelated things into a descriptive message or image. If we can’t (or refuse to) count in numeric order, we’ll never see the true picture.

In our climate connect-the-dots book, it so happens that a few pages in the less publicized parts of the book are dedicated to the Allegheny Mountains and Plateaus. Beyond some powers-that-be insisting the entire book is a work of fiction, many others don’t realize the pages for our part of the world are included in this climate change story.

Unanticipated Connections

Pennsylvania’s fruit trees were walloped by a late freeze in 2026 which doomed much of the summer’s harvest before fruit growth really began.

At first glance, this would seem to have nothing to do with a warming planet, but stay with me and you’ll see why it does. The warming we have been experiencing means, among other things, that the chances of getting very warm early spring days is much greater. Fruit trees pay no attention to calendars; when it gets warm, buds break.

Unusual early spring warmth began at my house in Blair County on March 9th and a second hot spell started on the last day of March. But the real killer would be an eight day stretch ending April 17th that averaged 77 degrees, including two days well into the eighties. In Pennsylvania’s fruit tree capital, Franklin County (on the Maryland border and 400 feet lower), it was even hotter.

Sensing it was late spring, buds had broken and fruit was setting when the temperatures dipped into the low thirties April 19th and 20th and plummeted into the low twenties on April 24th. But here’s the thing: April 24th is not such a ridiculous date for a frost or freeze. It was the sixteen days of early summer-like weather that preceded it that was the real culprit. The loss to Pennsylvania’s fruit growers was staggering, two-thirds of producers losing at least 75% of their fruit according to Farm Bureau reports.

Hotter than Blazes

Summer extremes are another separate challenge. We don’t normally think of places with temperate climates as being places likely to reach dangerously hot extremes. Long stretches of such extremes have not plagued the Alleghenies, but the record-breaking hot spells in the Europe and the Pacific Northwest over the last few years prove that not even places with milder summers are immune from potentially deadly heat. In the eastern United States, high heat indices are exacerbated by higher humidities brought by extremely moist air from the record-breaking warm water in the Gulf of Mexico.

And traditionally hot places, like America’s Desert Southwest or the Indian subcontinent, have been even hotter than their already extreme tendency. It is noteworthy that these hot spells in both southern and mid-latitude regions have not just been record heat waves; they have shattered records that date back to the late 1800s.

In days gone by, century-and-a-half heat records had typically been broken by a degree or two, but are now frequently broken by much wider margins. (The persistent heat this summer in Eastern European and the Pacific Northwest’s devastating heatwave in 2021 saw many city records fall by three to nine degrees Fahrenheit!) This extreme record-breaking is unusual.

The higher elevations of the Alleghenies may temper such extreme hot spells, but the Pacific Northwest was supposed to be tempered by the moderating influence of the nearby ocean water. Mid latitude heatwaves which break prior records by five or more degrees are clearly possible and seem likely to increase in frequency.

Wildfires: Not Just for Dry Climates Anymore

When large wildfires happen in drier western states, many of us east of the Mississippi dismiss this is an inherent hazard of living in such a climate. All other factors being equal, that assumption that drier places have a higher risk is accurate. But the widespread wildfires in eastern Canada, Minnesota, Georgia and Florida over the last few years show that forests in wetter places can be subject to those risks as well.

These were not minor events. The two largest fires in both Georgia and Minnesota totaled over 55,000 acres and nine in Florida were in excess of 5,000 acres each. Given that the most common cause of wildfires in Pennsylvania is the burning of brush and trash (and rural Pennsylvanians believe it’s their right to engage in this barbaric habit), it would seem such calamities are inevitable.

Perhaps a sudden awakening, good fortune, or a combination of the two will prevail and the Alleghenies will manage to avoid fires of such a scope. Unfortunately, we know from recent experience that we cannot escape the particulate pollution that will blow across the continent from fires over the hills and far away. Nearby fires or not, we’ll see the impacts here.

Flooding: More Rain in Less Time

Just in the last few months, extraordinarily heavy precipitation events have resulted in serious flash flooding in Kentucky, Indiana, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. This continues a trend of more intense rainfall across the Eastern United States fueled by warmer ocean water. Like a steamy bathroom after a hot shower, the very humid air feeds such storms and increases their frequency. Urban flooding has become more serious in the highly populated parts of Pennsylvania, while the valleys of the Allegheny Plateau can experience flash flooding brought on by such heavy rain. Like extreme heat, the table is set for these flooding storms to occur in the Alleghenies.

The Politics and Public Perception Mismatch

It’s difficult to dispute that extreme weather is happening more frequently and can impact Pennsylvania and its nearby neighbors. Two-thirds of Americans are concerned about global warming and its impacts. By a two to one margin, Americans believe climate change is caused by human actions, according to a recent report from the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. While the public is connecting the dots, much of the congressional delegation from the Alleghenies has gone on record denying that man-made climate change is even occurring.

The Pennsylvania congressmen from the Alleghenies and Pocono regions, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Scott Perry, Dan Meuser, Rob Bresnahan and Glenn Thompson, have all publicly stated their climate change denial and/or support for the rolling back of climate rules and renewable energy programs. Those eight House members have collectively received close to $3 million in lifetime contributions from the fossil fuel industry and other well-funded critics of climate change science. All eight also voted for the so-called Big Beautiful Bill which eased fossil fuel regulations and cut $27 billion in funding from thirty climate-related programs. (For the details on those rescissions, visit the Climate Program Portal.)

After the nightmares of the last five years, anyone still clinging to the fallacy that man-made climate change is a hoax is delusional, obsessed, or avaricious. Perhaps we should ask a few of our pre-schoolers to help them follow-the-dots.

Sources