He can Hurricane Milton passed leaving behind – probably dozens of deaths – and biblical disasters in Florida, but the worst “storms” are yet to come for the United States.
When you hear Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green say that humans can control the climate, you understand the level of political controversy. “Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done,” Greene wrote in X last week, shortly after Hurricane Helen hit the southeastern US, killing 230 people.
Of course, even Green’s staid Republican colleagues were quick to tell her to “go to the…doctor and see what’s going on in her head.” Hurricane in my skull…
A study by the World Weather Attribution Science Initiative found that without human-caused global warming, Hurricane Helen would have been 11% weaker. Which doesn’t sound like much, but it actually created the force that was fatal to 230 people.
Three weeks before the Nov. 5 presidential election, misinformation and conspiracy theories give and take as the Republican presidential candidate donald trumpis trying to take political advantage of the hurricanes’ “October surprise.”
Because there has simply never been a month of October in which three hurricanes – together with Kirk – over the Atlantic hit Europe, but fortunately Europe weakened, meteorologists say for such weather phenomena to occur, sea surface temperatures above 26 are needed. degrees Celsius. and at least up to 50 meters deep. Mathematically, the severity of such storms should now be expected every 53 years. Before the climate crisis, the probability of a Hurricane Helen or Milton occurring was only “every 130 years.”
Hurricanes get their destructive energy from the heat released when ocean water is superheated. Normally the water temperature always drops below 26 degrees in autumn. But that was before climate change.
Ocean warming has almost doubled in the last 20 years, according to a Copernicus study. In some parts of the Atlantic the temperature this year was 5 degrees above the long-term average. A meteorologist from the National Observatory explains that when the water temperature increases by 2 degrees, the wind speed is 80% higher.”
2024 was the fourth consecutive year with record temperatures. And scientists warn that global warming will make hurricanes stronger and even more unpredictable in the future.