I watched the footage of Hurricane Beryl destroying St. Vincent, the Grenadines and Jamaica, Hurricane Helene ravage the southeastern United States and Hurricane Milton strike Florida a mere two weeks later. I watched the storms build and crash like a tidal wave hurtling across the Atlantic. And I held my breath. I held my breath the way I do every time NOAA announces in their typewriter font “major hurricane”.
I became well acquainted with the chaos that comes in the calm before the storm, the storm itself, the aftermath of Hurricanes Earl, Irma, Maria, Dorian and every close call through the U.S.V.I. I know what it is like closing your front door and not knowing if your neighbor’s home will still be standing in 24hrs, if yours will. I know the frantic scrabble of doomsday shopping at the grocery store: sandbags, AA batteries, water jugs, and canned beans.
I know that while everyone is worried about the storms impact, no one is truly prepared for the days, weeks, months and years of recovery. The loss of life. The emotional trauma that will always stab at the back of your psyche. The PTSD. Spending weeks to months eating MREs by flashlight. The powerlessness to protect that which you love and prevent it from happening again.
I hold my breath every hurricane season because I know that it will only get worse.
Climate scientists and meteorologists have been raising alarms about the growing threat of hurricanes. They are growing stronger. There are not necessarily more than there used to be, but the likelihood of any individual storm being a “major hurricane” is increasing.
Our oceans are warming. That is not a theory, but a fact read straight from a thermometer. A fact that reverberates through our coral reefs, our fishery populations, our algal blooms. Our marine life is drowning in a jacuzzi. But you know who’s not struggling? Major hurricanes.
Heat is energy; and energy, ultimately, is what determines a hurricane’s strength. This energy is transferred into a different form – wind. Warmer waters allow for storms with stronger winds. A hurricane’s category rating is a measure of its energy. And if water is warmer and thus more energetic, then a storm borne of hotter water will be more intense.
That is the reason they occur between June and October, when our ocean is at its hottest. That is the reason most of our strongest hurricanes don’t occur until roughly the August mark. Hurricane Beryl was a category 5 by July 2nd, the earliest storm to reach that strength in the history of meteorology in the Atlantic. Why? Because the water temperature is skyrocketing to 88F.
Our oceans are only warming because our atmospheric temperatures are warming. Higher atmospheric temperatures are also good for hurricanes. Warmer air holds more moisture. It has more potential to create storms with heavy rainfall. It causes flooding that lifts entire homes right off their foundations. It overpowers drainage systems and leaves no escape for people trapped in their homes, on their roofs.
Our ice is melting. That may seem irrelevant, but it is perhaps the most damaging culprit of all. Because as our polar ice melts, as Greenland vanishes, our sea level is rising. The base height at which our oceans and lakes sit is higher than what we’ve seen in modern history. Storm surge is a natural side effect of major hurricanes. It is a result of powerful winds pushing surface water ahead of the storm, raising the water level around itself. Higher sea levels mean that storm surge is that much more likely to inundate communities that were already at higher risk on the coast.
This is part of the reason that Hurricane Helene was so devastating to the coastal southeast. On top of her catastrophic rainfall, Hurricane Helene’s storm surge broke records in 6 different cities along Florida’s gulf coast. The storm surge ahead of Helene was 15ft higher than normal sea level. It killed at least 11 people in Tampa.
Just over a week since Helene made landfall and 227 people are dead across six states. Hurricane Beryl killed at least 70 people in the Caribbean and U.S.1 At the time writing, just 24hrs after Milton made landfall, the death toll sits at 12 people.
Climate change is not simply an environmental issue. It is a human issue. I don’t care if you call it climate change. I think we can agree that something is not the same as it was and I think we all care about people. People are suffering and inevitably more people will. My, your children and their children will suffer. No child should have to go through what I did, what my community did, what the people of the Caribbean and southeast are going through now. Every natural disaster should not be breaking a new record.
But we have a chance to do the unthinkable. We can turn this ship around. We can save lives. The situation is not hopeless. The knowledge and technology that we need exists and is actively being developed to help us save our warming planet so that families can live without the constant fear of storms, or drought, or flood, or fire. It is too late to make the issue go away, but do we not have a responsibility to do everything we can to keep it from getting worse?
The science is ready to be employed. We are waiting on political will. And isn’t it fortunate that we live in a democracy where our government reflects our choices and our elections? Isn’t it fortunate that we have the ability to vote in the polls and with our dollars? We all get the chance to be superheroes. We all get the chance to protect communities and those who are most vulnerable. It all starts with a conversation, casting a vote, supporting a cause, devesting from carbon emitting industries. It all starts with you.
1 Records from the Caribbean are typically not comprehensive. Total calculated by comparing sources across regions and individually tallying results.