Hurricane Helen made landfall in Florida last night as a violent Category 4 storm after gaining strength after barreling across the Gulf of Mexico. According to Vox’s Benji Jones, the storm and its expected surge are likely to wreak havoc across the Southeast, but heavy rainfall is also possible in Appalachia and beyond.
Even before summer started, experts predicted it This year’s hurricane season will be an unusually active one One, churning up as many as 25 named storms across the Atlantic Ocean. The ingredients were all there: uniquely warm ocean temperatures, reduced Atlantic trade winds and wind shear, and La Niña conditions cooling Pacific waters.
But it’s impossible to look at hurricanes in 2024 without considering the context of climate change, which has made everything from global rainfall to drought to wildfires more extreme, and put more ecosystems and people at risk in the process. Record-warm waters in the Gulf this summer, for example, have intensified storms like Helen and Beryl, a supercharged hurricane that broke records for the first Category 5 in a season, making them more formidable.
I recently spoke with Umair Irfan, a Vox correspondent who has covered climate, environment and environmental policy for a decade, about this hurricane season, what has changed about these giant storms in recent years amid climate change — and what role humans play in compounding their effects. . Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
– Lavanya Ramanathan
Tell us how we used to think about hurricanes, in terms of category and strength. Now what’s that complicated thinking?
The main way hurricanes are classified is by wind speed. Category 1, 2, 3 — Thresholds defined by how fast the winds are moving from a hurricane. But what we’ve learned in recent decades and with much more recent experience is that wind is not the most destructive component of hurricanes. It’s water.
It is rainfall, it is flood, it is storm surge. Water is what causes the most property damage, and causes the most loss of life and the most widespread loss of human life. The water made it difficult for repair crews to get in and for ambulances to get in and get people out. Floods that block roads.
It’s a challenge to the public that when you think of water as a bigger threat than wind, you can take different precautions: storm-proofing your home, flood prevention and mitigation, but taking evacuation orders more seriously.
What should we know about this hurricane season? You wrote that this is expected to be an unusually active season.
To form a hurricane, you need a few things to fall into place. You need warm water at the surface of the ocean, at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer, you need limited wind shear in the air above, and then you need another thing called atmospheric instability, where the layers of the atmosphere start to mix and mix with each other. What this does is it creates an environment where you can have a lot of evaporation, where water can rise very high. It is the main engine of a hurricane.
Hurricanes are a relatively rare event; We only see a few dozen each year, whereas we see precipitation almost every day. Major hurricanes – we may see three or four. It’s not often that all these elements line up in the right way.
But last year was the warmest year on record, and we had a big El Niño, which is a major pattern in the Pacific Ocean that raises global average temperatures. So the air temperature was too high, causing the oceans to heat up. were the main ingredients.
I was in Houston after Hurricane Beryl hit in July, one of the biggest storms of the season. I found that the effects of the storm really took their toll on the city for days, in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. How is our understanding of the impact of hurricanes changing?
Houston and Hurricane Beryl are good examples of how the way we describe hurricanes does not reflect the risks they can pose. It’s not just the speed or strength of the wind, but how vulnerable the area is.
Houston was hit by Hurricane Harvey years ago, which caused record flooding as the storm towered over the city and dumped heavy rain. But Houston also has little in the way of zoning. It’s very flat, and it’s right next to the Gulf Coast, so there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure to deal with a lot of water. Major natural features that will absorb water Widened to support development.
And so there are human-level decisions that worsen the impact.
Along with Beryl, it was also a fast moving storm and the wind caused a lot of damage to power lines. A utility company there, CenterPoint, had a maintenance backlog and well-known vulnerabilities. So when you had a big storm, it knocked out a lot of energy, but it also took a long time to get it back. Meanwhile, there was a heat wave in Houston, so there was an intense energy demand. High heat, lack of power, all compounded the effects of this disaster.
If you see Beryl as just a Category 1 storm, you can write it off. But when you see all these other things happening, you realize that this is a much more serious disaster than the category would suggest.
And the effect was much wider, wasn’t it?
right Hurricanes tend to lose a lot of energy after making landfall. But they can still be fairly devastating storms, especially if they move into an area that isn’t prepared for it and isn’t used to receiving heavy rainfall.
The remnants of Tropical Storm Debbie and Beryl both hit Vermont and caused extensive flooding and damage, and indeed killed people. There was nowhere to go in that water, people there aren’t necessarily well-versed in how to move ahead of a storm, and the waterways, roads and bridges weren’t designed to withstand subtropical storms.
Is this something we are seeing more of, or going to see more of?
We see this commonly with extreme weather. We had a big heat wave in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago; It was devastating because it is the area with the least amount of air conditioning in the United States. This was detrimental to the people there because they are not used to the heat and do not have the infrastructure to deal with it.
We see the same thing with storms. A weak storm can still be devastating in an area that lacks infrastructure that can withstand the rain, or porous areas that can absorb water. And when an event occurs, more intense precipitation occurs, because as air temperatures warm, the air can hold more moisture.
So, while we are focusing on extremes, we should look at what is common and what is common is also changing.
Is there anything that people can do to protect themselves on an individual level that we aren’t already doing?
First, you need to start rethinking your mindset. There is a pervasive thought that nothing bad will happen to you. If you go years at a time without a hurricane or storm, or your home floods, and now it’s been a decade, that memory fades very quickly.
But one of the concerns about climate change is that it’s bringing extremes to areas that haven’t experienced them before. So this is a new process for some. The first step is to admit and realize that you are vulnerable, that bad things can happen but you can actually prepare for them.
The biggest thing is that you want your policymakers to also think about things that can mitigate disasters over time — things like building seawalls in coastal areas, but also thinking about big changes like rethinking where we’re allowed to build. Are we going to retreat from certain areas? Is the risk too great that we should just leave the sea border? These are far more difficult policy questions, but we need to start grappling with them because now is the best chance—not after a disaster.
