America’s Hurricane Luck Is Running Out

In the wake of Hurricanes Helene, we are still waiting to hear from friends who summer in Ashville, North Carolina, which has been devastated by flooding from Helene even though it is hundreds of miles from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.  With most cell service down in the area, hopefully the lack of a response is attributable to that and not something worse.  Meanwhile, we heard from friends in Anna Marie Island and Treasure Island, Florida, who had three feet and two feet of water in their homes, respectively, and lost vehicles to storm surge flood waters. As a piece in The Atlantic notes, storms like Helene are likely to become more the norm thanks to climate change which even the despicable Florida U.S. Senator Rick Scott has belatedly conceded is real even as the State of Florida prohibits the use of the term "climate change" by state offices and agencies. Worse yet, Donald Trump promises, if elected, to end many clean energy initiatives of the Biden administration that seek to reduce climate changing discharges and Project 2025 would privatize NOAA and make media outlets and citizens have to subscribe to have access to information.  Having lived through a direct hit by Hurricane Frederic in Mobile, Alabama (Wind gusts of 145 mph were recorded at the Dauphin Island Bridge and a storm surge of 12–15 feet hit the Gulf  beaches and 8–10 feet were experienced in Mobile Bay), and had our former home in Virginia flood three times from hurricanes, I know the pain and nightmare of those faces cleanup post Helene. One has to wonder when more Americans will wake up to the reality of what climate change is wreaking and stop voting for politicians who deny or ignore its existence.   Here are article highlights:

From high above, Hurricane Helene’s swirling clouds seem to have taken a piece of the United States and swallowed it whole. Helene, which made landfall last night as a Category 4 storm, has drenched the Southeast from the tip of Florida all the way up to North Carolina. Even though it weakened to a tropical storm this morning, streets have transformed into rivers, dams are threatening to fail, and more flooding is still to come. At least 22 people have died in the Southeast. Millions are without power. Florida’s Big Bend region, where Helene came ashore, had never faced such a strong hurricane in recorded history.

Helene arrived during an Atlantic hurricane season that forecasters had predicted would be unprecedented, thanks to record-warm ocean temperatures proffering extra fuel for storms. Since Hurricane Beryl swept over the Gulf Coast in July, the season has been quieter so far than the most dire expectations—but still unusually intense for Americans living in hurricane country. On average, one or two hurricanes make landfall in the U.S. per season. Helene is the fourth to come ashore on the Gulf Coast this year. This has only occurred a handful of times since the mid-1800s, with six as the record for landfalls on the U.S. mainland in a single season. This season isn’t over yet, so topping that record isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

Climate change isn’t to blame for where a hurricane touches down, or if it does at all. But Helene’s strength is a different kind of bad luck—a variety that we humans inadvertently engineered. Many of the hurricanes that do reach land these days are more intense because of oceans warmed by climate change. Decades ago, Helene might have become a medium-size storm—still destructive, but not a beast. This hurricane is a sign of America’s relentless hurricane seasons to come.

For months now, the waters in the Gulf of Mexico have been abnormally hot, spiking several degrees over the past decade’s average temperatures. “It is simply not within or even close to the range of natural variability to have water temperatures this far above normal in the Gulf, over this wide of an area, to that deep of a depth,” Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Florida who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger, told me. “When the other ingredients you need to form a hurricane are present, the results are explosive.” In Helene’s case, those other ingredients included the state of hurricane-slowing winds (low) and hurricane-bolstering moisture in the air (plenty) . . . .

The problem is that, when atmospheric conditions allow a storm to form, our warming, moistening world is poised to grow them into major threats. “Even 100 years ago, the Gulf would have been plenty warm to support a hurricane of Helene’s strength,” Klotzbach said. But in this century, the chances of this particular outcome are simply higher.

Global warming doesn’t dictate whether storms like Beryl and Helene exist, but as Earth continues to heat up, more and more of the disasters that arrive on our shores will bear our fingerprints. “You hope, when you go into these years where the forecasts are really high, that maybe we’ll luck out; maybe we won’t get the big hurricane hits,” Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist in Miami, told me. So far, the opposite situation is unfolding. And we still have two more months to go.

The more Atlantic storms make landfall as hurricanes, the greater the chances that each American town or city will face disasters shaped by a combination of natural misfortune and human-made blight. In our warming world, it seems that hurricane country won’t be able to catch a break.