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extreme weather
Climate Crisis Made Hurricane Milton 'Wetter, Windier, and More Destructive'
World Weather Attribution found that "Milton's rainfall was made 10-50% more intense and about twice as likely due to climate change, while wind speeds were around 10% stronger."
Oct 11, 2024
With rescue and cleanup efforts underway in Florida following back-to-back disasters wrought by hurricanes Helene and Milton, scientists on Friday released an analysis highlighting how the latter storm was "wetter, windier, and more destructive because of climate change" driven by fossil fuels.
Hurricane categories are based on wind speed, and scientists have connected quick jumps in ratings to the climate emergency. Milton rapidly intensified to Category 5, the highest on the scale, while in the Gulf of Mexico but made landfall late Wednesday as a Category 3 storm—less than two weeks after Category 4 Helene hit Florida and then left a trail of destruction across the Southeast.
Based on modeling, "climate change was responsible for an increase of about 40% in the number of storms of this intensity, and equivalently that the maximum wind speeds of similar storms are now about 5 m/s (around 10%) stronger than in a world without climate change," World Weather Attribution (WWA) said Friday. "In other words, without climate change Milton would have made landfall as a Category 2 instead of a Category 3 storm."
WWA also detailed how the warming climate is connected to the water that Milton left in its wake. As the group said: "In 3 out of the 4 analyzed datasets we find that heavy one-day rainfall events such as the one associated with Milton are 20-30% more intense and about twice as likely in today's climate, that is 1.3°C warmer than it would have been without human-induced climate change. The fourth dataset shows much larger changes."
"These results are based on observational data and do not include climate models and are thus higher than the overarching attribution statement given for Hurricane Helene, where we combined observations and climate models. Nevertheless the results are compatible with those obtained for other hurricanes in the area that have been studied in the scientific literature," WWA continued. "Despite using different temporal and geographical event definitions, as well as different observational datasets and climate models, all these studies show a similar increase in intensity of between 10% and 50% and about a doubling in likelihood. We are therefore confident that such changes in heavy rainfall are attributable to human-caused climate change."
Both storms have generated fresh calls to "make polluters pay" for the damage and deaths caused by extreme weather exacerbated by fossil fuels. There are ongoing state-level lawsuits against Big Oil and recent demands for prosecutors to consider bringing criminal charges against companies, using attribution science to make their cases.
"This study has confirmed what should already be abundantly clear: Climate change is supercharging storms, and burning fossil fuels is to blame," Ian Duff, head of Greenpeace International's Stop Drilling Start Paying campaign, toldReuters about the WWA findings out Friday. "Millions of people across Florida—many of whom lack insurance—now face astronomical costs to rebuild shattered homes and communities."
Milton killed at least 16 people—on top of the over 230 deaths tied to Helene—and could cause up to $50 billion in insured losses for property owners in Florida alone, Fitch Ratings said Thursday. As of early Friday, over 2 million state residents still lacked power, according toCBS News.
While Milton barreled toward Florida on Wednesday, WWA published a report detailing how climate change was a "key driver of catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Helene that devastated both coastal and inland communities."
That followed a Monday analysis from the research organization Climate Central showing that high sea-surface temperatures that fuled Milton's rapid intensification were made 400-800 times more likely by the climate crisis.
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) pointed to both of those studies on social media Friday, in a series of posts promoting his appearance on MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes" earlier this week.
During Khanna's MSNBC appearance, he pointed out how Democrats on Capitol Hill have fought for more funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which responds to disasters like Milton and Helene, while Republicans have opposed it.
Speaking to reporters last week, before Milton made landfall, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that FEMA is urgently in need of more money for this hurricane season, which lasts until November.
"We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting," Mayorkas said in anticipation of Milton. "FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season."
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Climate Advocates Demand Hurricane Town Hall With Harris and Trump
"The climate crisis is here, it's caused by Big Oil, and the American people deserve to know what our future president will do to keep us safe and hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its crimes against humanity."
Oct 10, 2024
As families mourned the deaths of hundreds of people from Hurricane Helene and Floridians began to take stock of the damage done by Hurricane Milton on Thursday, climate advocates called on major news networks to hold a town hall focused on the growing threat of extreme weather—and demand answers from the two major presidential candidates regarding what they plan to do about it.
Campaigners with the Sunrise Movement in Florida and North Carolina said CNN, ABC, NBC, or CBS should host a "Hurricane Town Hall" with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and former Republican President Donald Trump in the latter state before early voting starts there on October 17.
Manu Ivan, an 18-year-old Sunrise member from Orlando, Florida, noted that—as his group demanded—in the vice presidential debate earlier this month, CBS moderators asked Republican candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Democratic contender Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota how they would confront the climate emergency.
"We deserve the opportunity to hear from Harris and Trump about what they will do to take on Big Oil and fight for people like me who are scared about what our state will look like when I'm older," said Ivan.
Sunrise said the town hall would present an opportunity for questions about Trump's promise to oil executives earlier this year that he would swiftly unravel climate progress made by President Joe Biden and expand drilling if the industry donated $1 billion to his campaign.
Advocates also have concerns about Project 2025's proposal to dismantle the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service.
"Americans deserve to know the truth: Donald Trump sold out Asheville, North Carolina and plans to sell out the rest of us for his own political gain," said the group, referring to the city that faced devastating flooding from Hurricane Helene.
The group said the town hall would also allow media networks to "set the record straight on disaster response and fact-check Donald Trump's dangerous lies about the Biden-Harris disaster response," after the Republican nominee spread baseless claims that Harris spent Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding on housing for undocumented immigrants and that Biden ignored Republican-controlled states' calls for help.
"Media networks need to do their jobs and host a hurricane town hall," said Shiva Rajbhandari, a 20-year-old North Carolina student. "In just the last two weeks, millions of people have been affected and thousands have lost their homes, loved ones, and livelihoods. I'm sick of seeing death count headlines and pretending like this is just an act of God. The climate crisis is here, it's caused by Big Oil, and the American people deserve to know what our future president will do to keep us safe and hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its crimes against humanity."
Climate campaigners have expressed doubt that Harris would be a "climate president," following her promises at the presidential debate in September that she would allow fracking to continue and her comments boasting about the country's "largest increase in domestic oil production in history."
But advocates have said the prospect of pushing a Harris administration to act on the clear evidence of the climate emergency is preferable to pushing Trump and Vance, who have called the climate crisis a "hoax" and "weird science."
The Sunrise Movement on Thursday circulated an open letter to its supporters asking networks to host a hurricane town hall, to allow "Vice President Harris and former President Trump to explain to the American people what they will do to stop the climate crisis."
"Without bold climate action from the federal government, all of our communities risk being wiped away," the letter reads. "Our leaders must answer to those who have lost everything."
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Sleepless and Fearful When Hurricane Milton Made Landfall
There are important moments when fear is a crucial resource. And the fear of a planet where the old rules no longer hold is the ultimate fear—because then how do you even think about the future?
Oct 10, 2024
Since I couldn’t sleep, I figured I might as well write. I couldn’t sleep because of the picture in my mind—that tightly coiled ball of physics we’re calling Hurricane Milton as it tracks mercilessly across the Gulf of Mexico, headed toward a landfall tonight along the west coast of Florida. It scares me, for two reasons.
The first is the unrivaled speed with which it spun up, from tropical storm to Category 5 monster inside a day. This “rapid intensification” has become an increasingly common feature of hurricanes, because the heat content in the ocean is so high that the old models no longer suffice. We live, more and more, in a world of instant chaos: where wildfires can “blow up” in a matter of minutes because the fuels that feed them are so desiccated, where “flash” floods can, in minutes, turn a record rain into a street clogged with bobbing cars. These things have always been possible, but now they are common: we have in our minds the idea that the world changes at a geologic pace, moving in stately fashion through epochs and eras. But right now—as carbon dioxide accumulates more quickly in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 500 million years—”geologic pace” is measured in months. Hell, glaciers—our metaphor for moving slowly—disappear from one winter to the next.
And the second reason is: this speeded-up physics is increasingly crashing into the heart of the civilizations that we’ve built. Given the size of the planet, it’s more likely than not that a disaster will happen in somewhere sparsely populated—the boreal forests of Canada burned last summer, displacing Indigenous people of the north but mostly avoiding cities. Even Hurricane Helene last week came ashore in the Big Bend country north of Cedar Key, where people are thin on the ground. But just as California’s wildfires eventually and inevitably started taking out whole towns, Milton is aimed at one of the most built-up and vulnerable landscapes on earth. I think—from this morning’s bearings—that the very worst outcome may be dodged: if the hurricane comes in just south of Tampa Bay, its counterclockwise winds will work to drive the storm surge off that body of water. But if so it will mean sheer agony for somewhere further south, somewhere almost as overbuilt. Sarasota? Port Charlotte? And in very short order that will mean deep trouble for the insurance industry, already tottering in Florida
(It’s worth noting, if only in passing, that the two places Americans of my age thought of as refuges, idylls, dreams of the easy life were California and Florida. No longer).
We’ve spent some time in recent years worrying that there was too much fear-mongering and doom-saying in the way we talked about climate change—that it was wearing people out. And indeed there’s truth there—if we’re going to do what we must, the story in the years ahead needs to be as much about the adventure of turning our planet solar as the dread that we’ll turn our planet Venus.
But there are important moments when fear is a crucial resource. A week ago, in the wake of Helene, the veteran climate activist and North Carolina native Anna Jane Joyner wrote this dispatch from New York’s “Climate Week”
There were fancy parties, cheerful sun imagery and giant signs reading “HOPE.” The dominant theme was: We can solve this! We need to tell hopeful climate stories! But there’s no “solving” a hurricane wiping out western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the sea. Only focusing on optimism is like telling a cancer patient that everything will be OK if they just stay positive. At best, it comes across as out of touch; at worst, it feels callous. Yes, we can still prevent the worst impacts and must demand our governments scale solutions and act urgently, but we cannot minimize the horrors unfolding now, or that it will get worse in the coming years.
And yesterday, on air, the veteran Florida weatherman John Morales let his fear show through. As Cara Buckley recounted in the Times,
“It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” Mr. Morales said of Milton, closing his eyes and slightly shaking his head. “It has dropped. …”
His voice faltered. He looked down, drew a shaky breath and continued, “… it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.” For viewers who didn’t understand the staggering implications of this barometric plunge, Mr. Morales’s choked delivery said enough. “I apologize,” he said in a quavering voice. “This is just horrific.”
This kind of fear is entirely useful—there are, I have no doubt, people who left their homes and drove north towards Georgia after hearing the break in Morales’ voice. He saved lives. And he did it entirely honestly. “You know what’s driving that,” he said to viewers. “I don’t need to tell you. Global warming. Climate change.” It’s honest fear, driven by deep understanding. As Morales wrote in an essay in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last year
“As the temperature of the planet increases, my confidence in forecasting storm intensity is decreasing… Today I am no longer as comfortable in putting everyone at ease in regard to the strength of a storm. I am afraid of rapid intensification cycles happening at the drop of a hat.”
The fear of a planet where the old rules no longer hold is the ultimate fear—because then how do you even think about the future? And that’s as true as politics as it is in meteorology. The deep fear that wakes me up at night has only partly to do with the weather weather; it’s the political fronts moving through America that scare me just as much. In the wake of Helene, absurd lies about FEMA spread across social media, fueled of course by the GOP nominee. Josh Marshall, one of the finest trackers of political craziness in this country, reports this morning that the news currently circulating on the right is that Milton and Helene were the result of “weather manipulation” by Democrats designed to…something.
That, of course, is dishonest fear, driven by dishonest people. And those dishonest people may well end up in control of our country. We have 26 days left, and every one of them counts. We need to hold our nerve, do the work, and see if we can bring America safely through Hurricane Trump. That won’t deliver us to safety, but it’s a start.
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