We need a new system

Climate change makes floods worse. Climate change makes droughts worse. Climate change makes forest fires worse. Climate change makes hurricanes worse.

Category 5 hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas Monday and Tuesday, leaving a trail of utter destruction in its wake.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, "This is what climate change looks like: it hits vulnerable communities first."

Greta Thunberg, tweeted "How many more nations in ruins do we need to see?"

The Union of Concerned Scientists explained earlier this year how experts believe the human-caused climate crisis is causing more intense hurricanes:

“While hurricanes are a natural part of our climate system, recent research suggests that there has been an increase in intense hurricane activity in the North Atlantic since the 1970s. In the future, there may not necessarily be more hurricanes, but there will likely be more intense hurricanes that carry higher wind speeds and more precipitation as a result of global warming. The impacts of this trend are likely to be exacerbated by sea level rise and a growing population along coastlines.”

"While the science has yet to come in on the specifics of just how much worse climate change made Dorian, we already know enough to say that warming worsened the damage," Michael Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and Andrew Dessler, a professor at Texas A&M University, wrote. Global warming made Hurricane Dorian bigger, wetter and more deadly

Although Hurricane Dorian exemplifies what climate scientists have been warning about, U.S. media are failing to connect the climate crisis to the strongest Atlantic storm ever to hit land, Public Citizen explained in an analysis Tuesday.

The consumer advocacy group found that "between Friday and Monday, climate or global warming was mentioned in just 7.2 percent of the 167 pieces on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. The top 49 newspapers by circulation didn't do much better. Of them, 32 covered Dorian in their print editions, but only eight papers connected Dorian to climate. Of 363 articles about Dorian in those papers' print editions, just nine (2.5 percent) mentioned climate change."

Natural disasters are escalating because of climate change, but too few reporters are willing to make that connection clear to the public.

"It is mind-boggling that major media outlets can report about a storm of epic proportions that is exactly what climate scientists have warned about yet fail to mention two key words: 'climate change," said Allison Fisher, outreach director for Public Citizen's Energy Program. "We can't address the looming climate catastrophe if we aren't talking about it."

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt wrote Tuesday, "much of the conversation about Hurricane Dorian—including most media coverage—ignores climate change." According to him, "That's a mistake. It's akin to talking about lung cancer and being afraid to mention smoking, or talking about traffic deaths and being afraid to talk about drunken driving."

Catastrophic climate change is already costing tens of billions in damage, displacing more and more people, causing more and more casualties from California fires to the increasing force of hurricanes, the spread of desert and drought. While we can’t control whether or not we get hit by hurricanes or tornadoes, we can control being prepared

If we are all going to survive and prosper tomorrow we cannot let capitalist interests to dictate social and economic policies. As radical as it sounds the Green New Deal and many other reforms don't go far enough to resolve the causes of global warming. if we want to have a meaningful impact on climate change we will have to confront the capitalist system. We need to think about socialism if we are to end the global threat climate change poses to humanity. If we don't work together, we are going to suffer together. We need to address the root reasons for the environmental crises. We won't see an improvement unless profound structural changes are put into place. We need a transformation in the way we run our economic system. It is vital to embed ecological sustainability at the heart of our economic system. We believe that climate justice will not be possible without abolishing capitalism, a system reliant on the exploitation of the environment. The Socialist Party has critique the false solutions offered by the proponents of ‘green capitalism’ and government legislation and regulatory controls. The real solution to the looming ecological disaster is the socialist revolution.