"Unprecedented" Extreme Weather Is About to Hit the US and Its Non-Functioning Government

What do you get when you combine a bitterly divided, de-funded government with a fierce, fast-approaching spate of "unprecedented" extreme weather? We're about to find out.

As you know, we're now finishing out the first week of a government shutdown precipitated by Tea Party Republicans who are angry about a health care law that was democratically passed three years ago. Meanwhile, very literal storms are brewing across the nation. And it is a truly frightening spread: There is a blizzard warning in the Midwest, a tornado risk in Iowa, a tropical storm brewing in the Gulf of Mexico, and wildfires looming in Southern California.

"After an extraordinarily quiet period devoid of tropical storms and significant tornado activity, dangerous weather extremes are impacting or closing in on the US, from coast to coast," writes James Samenow, The Washington Post's chief meteorologist. "This combination of threatening weather—occurring simultaneously—may be unprecedented."

Samenow also points to National Weather Service spokesman Chris Vaccaro, who recently said that, “There are multiple hazards in multiple regions that warrant the highest level of awareness."

Most alarming of these "multiple hazards," perhaps, is the ominously named tropical storm Karen that is heading towards Louisiana. It is threatening to become a hurricane, and governor Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency yesterday.

Of course, the federal government is shut down.

So many crucial services that would normally be geared up to respond are laying dormant. The National Weather Service, for instance, which millions of people rely on for crucial forecasts and weather data, is still up and running, but under budget constraints. Its social media feeds, for instance, are offline:

We will not be Tweeting or responding to @ replies during the government shutdown. See http://t.co/SNylEPEHt6 for more info.

— NWS (@usNWSgov) October 1, 2013

It gets worse. As Popular Science points out, the employees involved in the process of protecting the nation from hurricanes aren't getting paid. Meteorologists, storm trackers, and data analysts are basically working for IOUs.

"There's no money to pay them," Dan Sobien, president of the NWS Employees Organization, told PopSci. "Nobody knows when anyone's going to get paid." The NWS staff is quietly disgruntled, obviously—so much so that the Anchorage branch has taken to dropping cryptic pleas for payment into their public forecast discussions in the form of acrostics:

Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which collects and processes vital weather satellite data and is part of the Commerce Department, has gone dark. The website is down, and data now more difficult to access. This is because approximately 40,000 of the department's 46,000 employees have been sent home without pay.

In the wake of the shutdown, FEMA had furloughed 3,000 employees, but is recalling some to help southern coast dwellers brace for the storm's impact. All of which is to say, we are, stupidly, not as prepared for incoming disaster as we should be.

Look. The shutdown itself is not the end of the world; it does not mean there will be nobody at the ready to organize or help in disaster relief efforts. There will in fact be a solid emergency preparedness apparatus in place as these storms hit—but in spite of, not because of, the behavior of our Congress.

More than anything, this is an ill omen for the future. We have a reasonably advanced storm forecasting and disaster response systems—satellites, storm trackers, even drones—and yet we can't take full advantage of them because our political institutions are veering towards useless. This tension will only be exacerbated as we drive towards the future. Many of the extreme weather events forecasted to lay into the country—the hurricanes, the wildfires, the unseasonable blizzards—are the sort that climatologists believe will become nastier and more frequent as global warming advances. It's alarming to think that we will face that world with a barely-functioning government.