Throughout human history, the climate system has been a source of life and death, the sun and rain capable of feeding our crops and bringing us comfort, or unleashing terrible devastation in wind, fire, drought, storm, and flood. Each tragedy that occurs — such as the terrible outbreak of tornadoes and flooding storms this week in the South — reminds us of that awesome power, which is beyond our control and at the limits of our comprehension. We have also learned that humanity is meddling with that power, primarily through the burning of coal and oil that increases the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere and oceans. Scientists have been warning our leaders for decades that this interference with the climate system is dangerous, and have worked tirelessly to explain how these threats are now coming to pass.

However, the Republican Party is now dominated by ideologues who deny the threat of polluting our climate, even when faced with direct evidence of what the climate system can do to the people they are sworn to protect.

Conservatives attack any discussion of climate policy within the context of the killer tornadoes as “grotesque,” saying that to do so is blaming the victims.

In an email interview with ThinkProgress, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s top climate scientists, who has been exploring for years how greenhouse pollution influences extreme weather, said he believes that it is “irresponsible not to mention climate change” in the context of these extreme tornadoes. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, added that the scientific understanding of how polluting our atmosphere with billions of tons of greenhouse gases affects tornadic activity is still ongoing:

It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. … The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming). Tornadoes come from thunderstorms in a wind shear environment. This occurs east of the Rockies more than anywhere else in the world. The wind shear is from southerly (SE, S or SW) flow from the Gulf overlaid by westerlies aloft that have come over the Rockies. That wind shear can be converted to rotation. The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft. With global warming the low level air is warm and moister and there is more energy available to fuel all of these storms and increase the buoyancy of the air so that thunderstorms are strong. There is no clear research on changes in shear related to global warming. On average the low level air is 1 deg F and 4 percent moister than in the 1970s.

Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, explains further that “climate change is present in every single meteorological event”:

The fact remains that there is 4 percent more water vapor–and associated additional moist energy–available both to power individual storms and to produce intense rainfall from them. Climate change is present in every single meteorological event, in that these events are occurring within a baseline atmospheric environment that has shifted in favor of more intense weather events.

Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, concurred:

It is a truism to say that everything has been affected by climate change so far and therefore this latest outbreak must in some sense have been affected, but attribution is hard and the further down the chain the causality is supposed to go, the harder this is. For heat waves it is easier, for statistics on precipitation intensity it easier – there are multiple levels of good modelling, theory and observations to back it up. But we have much less to go on with tornadoes.

Those who deny the threat of polluting our climate system are not to blame for its fury — but none of us can shirk our responsibility to end our interference with the weather.

To find out if loved ones are okay, use safeandwell.org. Text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 to relief efforts.

Video recorded by ThinkProgress Blog Fellow Micah Uetricht, a reporter from the Chicago area.

On Tuesday at a town hall in Sycamore City, IL, freshmen Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) was asked about the nearly $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies Big Oil companies receive every year, which the House GOP recently voted to preserve. A well-informed man in the audience asked Hultgren why he had done nothing to cut the subsidies, in light of the high national debt. The constituent noted that the billions in cuts forced by the GOP in the FY 2011 budget deal from valuable programs like Pell Grants and FEMA is about equivalent to the amount of money given to incredibly profitable oil companies. Hultgren hemmed and hawed before finally saying he would “look into that”:

CONSTITUENT: With the oil industry, we’re giving them $63 billion in oil subsidies. And you cut what, thirty one, thirty two billion?

HULTGREN: Thirty nine billion.

CONSTITUENT: Thirty nine? Why don’t you cut out the subsidies? The depletion allowance that they take, four dollar, every quarter its a record profit. C’mon, you don’t have to subsidize an organization, a group of organizations that every quarter they make so much more than they did the last quarter and the quarter before that and so on. How about cutting that out? It’ll give you a nice tidy sum over ten years.

HULTGREN: I’m very open to looking at every subsidy that we do and questioning why we do this. And I want to know. I want to have the answers there. I just–

CONSTITUENT: But there’s no logic there. None whatsoever.

HULTGREN: Well I’ll look into that. That’s something we just talked about on the way into here.

Watch it:

Hultgren mentioned that he had been talking about the oil subsidies issue earlier that day, but had no answer for the question. Although he claimed that he has been “questioning” the subsidies, Hultgren concealed the fact that earlier this year, around the same time he voted for the GOP’s budget cuts, he voted twice to extend billions in tax subsidies to big oil.

Republicans are facing a growing backlash over oil subsidies. Not only have top lawmakers faced angry constituents and questions from the press, but even Tea Party activists have called for the GOP to stop giving so much taxpayer money to multinational oil companies.

A few Republican lawmakers, like Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), have called for an end to oil subsidies, as well as all other energy subsidies.

On Wednesday, Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) held a town hall meeting with constituents in Brooklyn. As video posted on YouTube shows, his constituents peppered him with questions about the GOP budget and were clearly outraged by his vote to end Medicare and give even more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans.

During one exchange, a frustrated constituent who works in the medical industry explained that we can’t dismantle Medicare because it would devastate seniors, drawing huge applause from the audience. Later, a frustrated Grimm asked the audience if they were all against the GOP budget, to which they responded with a chorus of “Yes!” The audience repeatedly demanded an end to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Watch a video compilation of highlights from the town hall:

“I think most of the people here did not buy what he was selling,” Grimm constituent Peggy Devane told local news source WNYC. “He didn’t listen to people. He said yes, yes. He followed his script and he is Republican and it is what he thinks.” (h/t: YouTube account taxdayvideosny)