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GELFAND’S WORLD - What used to be a once-in-a-hundred-year storm can now be once in three weeks if you happen to live in Florida.
Things really have become different. In the old days, there could be a hurricane that did some damage in part of Florida or Texas, but it was a rare moment that -- once in many years -- led to a super hurricane. Weather forecasters referred to "once in a hundred year" events because they really did fit the description. It took an unlikely juxtaposition of everything coming together in the worst way. It was analogous to that term "a perfect storm" which referred to everything bad happening in a particular place and all at the same time.
But now, some little reduction in the barometric pressure down in the southernmost part of the Gulf of Mexico is all it takes to set off a monster storm. Air flows toward the low pressure and, because this spherical globe of ours spins on an axis, the air develops a circular component and voila, we have a tropical storm.
But nowadays, it no longer takes all those rare juxtapositions to create that once in a hundred-year event. The waters of the Gulf are already preheated, so basically any storm that moves north through the Gulf will eventually hit the hot water. What we have seen so many times over the past decade is a storm ramping up -- over a few short hours -- into a monster.
The practical effects of the superheated Gulf are multiple, ranging from widespread loss of life to the recent crisis in the home insurance market. Unfortunately, the political atmosphere has not yet caught up with the physical reality. The latter question is of particular importance in this election year.
It's a curious coincidence that the southeastern United States is simultaneously the strongest bastion of climate change denialism and yet is also the main target for the new class of storms whose destruction is increasing due to that very climate change. Hurricane Helene was the second hurricane to hit the southeast in just a couple of months. Over the past few days, Helene began to develop in the southern Gulf of Mexico, moved steadily northward from a position south of Florida -- the western side, to be precise -- developed into a tropical storm and then a category 1 hurricane. Then, over a period of a few hours, and in a manner eerily similar to several other monster storms of the past two decades, it suddenly ramped up to a category 4.
What does this actually mean? For one thing, think of a giant eggbeater twirling the ocean waters, but make it a device that is hundreds of miles across. That's the effect of the hurricane force winds wrapped around a central core of low pressure: They swirl the ocean and, just like that eggbeater, the water revolving along the periphery rises up. On the television news, they call this a storm surge. In practice, it means rising water and strong waves which can be 7 or 10 or, in the extreme, 20 feet high. And as they hit the shore and move inland, they destroy properties and flood any area they come in contact with.
You can think of another aspect of these hurricanes. They funnel moisture and heat rising off the surface of the ocean and that moisture goes up high into the air and swirls around the central axis. The television news shows that moisture as rain clouds carried along by winds in ever-widening bands.
And particularly when those bands cross over land, they dump their water in the form of rain. In the 3-day period beginning at the end of last week, North Carolina got hit with 30 inches of rain. That's equivalent to about two years of rain here in southern California.
It's amazing how much energy and water gets transferred into the hurricane mass in its relatively short journey going up the west side of Florida. Hurricane Helene persisted all the way up through the Florida panhandle, then the entire state of Georgia, through Tennessee, across Kentucky, over Ohio, and up almost as far north as Chicago. If you have ever driven I-65 or I-75, you will have some feel for what that distance is. If you are historically minded, you might notice that the distance the hurricane (and its remnants) crossed in a couple of days are the length and breadth of the western campaigns of the Civil War, everything from Shiloh down to Atlanta, and then double that distance.
It's true that the hurricane dwindled from a category 4 down to a category 1 and then to mere storm status fairly quickly as it crossed over the land, but that process involved dumping all that moisture as rain, and that was where those torrential rains did so much of their damage.
So much for the simplistic depiction of Hurricane Helene. Why is this of interest?
The situation really is different, and the American people need to come to some realizations:
To the rational minded, it is no secret that there is a higher level of hurricane violence that is due to the increased water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico (and in the Atlantic Ocean), and these increased water temperatures are the direct result of human-caused global warming. We have three-quarters of a century of carbon dioxide measurements which explain the effect. We now have the mathematical models of atmospheric movement, and we have the resultant climatic predictions.
At this point, anybody who continues to deny the cause-and-effect nature of the problem is either ignorant or just plain dishonest.
So how did Fox respond to Hurricane Helene?
Here's how. There is a Fox Weather Channel which you can find on broadcast television here on channel 11.2. It gives, in general, a pretty good presentation of the national weather. It features a group of meteorologists (weather scientists) who show graphs and videos, and who explain a lot of the issues. There was a thorough discussion of why parts of North Carolina were under water this week, delivered by a studious-sounding young man.
I watched and listened to Fox Weather for several hours, spread out over the time while the hurricane was still out over the Gulf, and continuing through Sunday evening, at a time when the storm was abating, but communities were still in the process of recovering their dead and hoping eventually to get some electricity back on.
And never once during that entire time did I hear any one of those learned Fox meteorologists use the term Global Warming or utter the two words Climate Change -- at least not right after the other.
It is a sad fact that the Fox network does not abide by the more traditional journalistic practice of separating the reporting side from the editorial side. The reporters explained in great detail how the hurricane mechanism operates and how the warm waters of the northern part of the Gulf cause the storm machinery to ramp up so suddenly. But there is a taboo, it would appear, about talking about why that water is so warm.
By the way, the other news reporting organizations did not hold themselves to that taboo. On the NBC nightly news, anchorman Lester Holt mentioned global warming or climate change at least two times during the course of one short broadcast.
A CNN story by Angela Fritz was even more blunt. It was titled "Why was Hurricane Helene so bad? Fossil fuel pollution." You can find it here.
Mind you, the CNN story wasn't breaking new ground. This wasn't a scoop. But it was useful to the national discourse to have this well-established fact reported as such, rather than being treated as some controversial scientific question. Yes, cigarette smoking increases the chance of getting lung cancer and yes, the accumulating carbon dioxide in the air leads to hotter oceans which leads to more violent hurricanes.
If you click on the above cited links, you may run across another fact. It is something that ought to shock you. Over a period of 57 years, there were 8 hurricanes which reached category 4 or 5 and which crossed into American soil. That is an average of about 1 such storm each 7 years. But we have had 8 such monster storms just over the past 8 years. That's one each year on the average.
We have had storms Ida, Debby, Harvey and Irma in those past 8 years, and now Helene joins them. A little further back (but not all that long ago), Katrina flooded New Orleans. I mention these storms because several of them were so violent, did so much damage, that their names were retired from any future reuse.
Besides the Fox News taboo on word usage, there is political malpractice.
A few people who pay attention to political craziness notice the latest from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his cronies in the state legislature. This very year of 2024, Florida basically abolished and outlawed use of the term Climate Change from their laws. You can read a summary here. This is not the only time or the only state to do something similar, but it is noteworthy that here in 2024, when the scientific facts have become so well established, that the Floridians felt the need to engage in the creation of a legal prohibition.
Why some politicians think that they have to oppose one aspect of scientific practice is something I will leave to you. These are the same elected officials who stand behind the podium as the hurricane is approaching and piously tell the public how soon the hurricane will start blasting the coastline to kindling, but never quite admitting that the models and predictions have global warming baked into them. (That's because coastal water temperature is one important element in the calculation.) But politicians are not required to tell the whole truth, it would seem, and some obviously don't.
Back in 2017, when faced with a similar situation, I wrote an article for CityWatch which was titled, "Never mind Irma, the Gulf coast is toast." You can find it here. It is sad, if not curious, that the situation in 2017 was pretty much the same as it is now, except that the current presidential administration is not wedded to climate change denial. Some things have improved, even as global warming has continued. We have some decisions to make and lots of hard work to do over the next 20 years if the world is to come out of this situation in reasonable shape.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
