Science
The Impact of Climate Change and Monster Hurricanes
Published: 28 September 2022
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Ian displayed many of the characteristics scientists say climate change will bring — and already has brought — to hurricanes because of warmer ocean temperatures and increased moisture in the atmosphere. The storm intensified with alarming speed, its winds nearly doubling in 24 hours before landing on Florida’s west coast as a Category 4. These “rapid intensifying” hurricanes have accounted for 16 of the 20 hurricanes over the past two seasons in the Atlantic, The Washington Post reported.
Monster Hurricane Ian Destruction of the South West Coast of Florida - September 28, 2022
Hurricane Ian’s vicious combination of winds, rain and storm surge caused at least a dozen deaths, flooded homes, cut off roadways and left millions of Florida residents without power on September 28, 2022.
water damage Widespread Flooding in Fort Myers, Florida - Munster Hurricane IAN
Human-induced climate change increased the extreme rainfall brought by Hurricane Ian, which has devastated parts of Florida, by more than 10%, according to a new preliminary analysis. Much of the damage has been due to torrential rainfall, with the new analysisfinding that the heating of the atmosphere and ocean due to human activity has added significantly to the intensity of these downpours. The study, which is preliminary and yet to be peer reviewed, found that the amount of rain dumped by the storm was 10% higher because of the climate crisis. Scientists used a methodology established in previous research that rainfall during the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was up to 11% heavier due to global heating.
Damage from Hurricane Ian Cuts Sanibel Island off from Florida's Mainland September 28, 2022
“That sort of increase in rainfall isn’t small when it’s on top of an already intense storm,” said Kevin Reed, a researcher at Stony Brook University who undertook the new work. “It can really have significant effects, as we’ve seen with the extensive rainfall across Florida. It has had a widespread effect. “If you’ve got 1ft in rainfall over a day, 10% more adds an inch or so more, which is a lot in itself. It can really amplify the impacts.” The heating of the atmosphere, through the burning of fossil fuels, has caused it to accumulate more water in many places – about 7% more water for every extra 1C (1.8F) it warms. This can then be unleashed in heavy precipitation events that can quickly inundate houses and businesses. “These are conservative estimates on the human-induced increases in rain using our peer-reviewed method,” said Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who worked on the new analysis with Reed. “Climate change didn’t cause the storm but it did cause it to be wetter.”
Water Surge in Naples Florida due to Monster Hurricane Ian - September 28, 2022
Hurricanes derive much of their strength from heat in the ocean, and the Gulf of Mexico’s water temperature is about 0.8C (1.4F) above the long-term normal, leading scientists to point to a trend of storms rapidly gathering pace, in part due to global heating. In the case of Ian, what was a tropical storm morphed into a hurricane in less than 24 hours, ballooning further into something that was near to a category 5 storm, the fiercest category of storm, which has winds powerful enough to rip roofs off buildings. This sort of rapid intensification has happened several times in recent years alone the US Gulf coast, such as Hurricane Ida, which caused widespread chaos in Louisiana last year. “We are seeing much clearer indicators in these events, for sure,” Reed said. “It’s a good reminder that while we’ve had a relatively quiet hurricane season until this storm, we still have two months of the season left and we need to be really prepared.“The reality is that climate change is here, and it’s altering events here and around the world. It’s important that we realize this when we think about disasters like this.”
The Sanibel Causeway was destroyed by Monster Hurricane Ian on September 28, 2022, cutting off access to the barrier island on Florida's west coast. The strenght of the hurricane was devastating demonstrating the impact of climate change.
There are several characteristics of the changing climate that are helping to increase the risks of damage from Hurricanes, even though global warming is not directly causing such a storm to spin up. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate researcher at Texas Tech, put the relationship between climate change and storms such as Florence as follows: "Hurricanes are absolutely being affected by our changing climate, in many ways.
The US Air Force captured on early morning September 2, 2019 an eerily calm photos from inside the eye of Hurricane Dorian, as the category 5 storm continues on its path of destruction from the Bahamas to the entire coast of Florida. This phenomenon makes the clouds around the eye rise up on all sides until it looks like a giant bowl or sports arena. This effect is often seen during very strong hurricanes. The Hurricane Hunters have been carrying out a series of missions to collect weather data such as temperature, wind speed, wind direction, humidity and surface pressure. Crews usually fly through the eye of a storm four to six times in order to locate its low pressure centre. Major Kendall Dunn, who is part of the squadron, said the team would be repositioning to fly out of Florida as the storm closes in on the US. “It’s like chess, this is the time where experience is crucial for planning and staging our mission,” Major Dunn said. “This is why reservists are invaluable to our mission.”
Hurricane Florence - COFL Science
Because the climate system has a large "inertia" and greenhouse gases will remain in the atmosphere for a long time, many of these effects will persist for not only decades or centuries, but tens of thousands of years.
Satellite Image of Florence During Landfall
Hurricane Florence could become the strongest hurricane on record to strike so far north if it makes landfall north of the border between South Carolina and North Carolina as a Category 4 or 5 storm. It brings multiple threats, including a massive storm surge at the coast, as well as a potentially catastrophic inland flood situation.
Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina Before the Arrival of Huricane Florence
Hurricanes like Florence aren’t simply natural disasters ― they’re catastrophic events made worse by anthropogenic climate change, events that threaten human health and safety long after the storm has passed. As it happened, industries that are among the biggest contributors to the climate crisis were some of the hardest hit in Florence’s aftermath. Livestock production accounts for 14.5 percent of global human greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates the agricultural sector, including livestock and crop production, is responsible for 9 percent of all carbon emissions in the United States.
North Carolina is the second-largest pork producing state in the country, behind Iowa. Nearly 9 million hogs are raised for slaughter on the state’s 2,100 hog farms, where the animals’ waste is dumped into massive open-air cesspools called lagoons. A week after the ladfall of Hurricane Florence, flooding had caused structural damage to at least six of the state’s 3,300 hog waste lagoons. Three of these damaged pits were breached and another 30 had overflowed, causing swine fecal matter to spill into and potentially contaminate the surrounding waterways with toxic hydrogen sulfide and ammonia. One hog farmer in Duplin County reported the flooding resulted in a “total loss” of at least 2.2 million gallons of waste from a single lagoon, according to North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality.
“It’s yet another problem that is posed by this industrial model of production,” Waterkeeper Alliance attorney Will Hendrick said: “It should be the case that we can produce food without putting our people in jeopardy.” The North Carolina Pork Council has downplayed the significance of the lagoon overflow. “While we are dismayed by the release of some liquids from some lagoons, we also understand that what has been released from the farms is the result of a once-in-a-lifetime storm and that the contents are highly diluted with rainwater,” the hog farm advocacy group said in a statement.
This Sept. 17, 2018, photo shows flood waters from Hurricane Florence surround two hog houses and it’s lagoon near Kinston, North Carolina. But the increasing frequency of severe weather events in the last few years due to climate change suggests Florence is in no way a “once-in-a-lifetime” storm. And since most of the state’s hog farms sit on coastal plains, and climate change is producing bigger, wetter storms, it’s likely these swirling cesspools of hog waste will continue to pose a threat to waterways and their surrounding communities for years to come. “This industry has shown its vulnerabilities in terms of these weather events for decades and has still resisted the need for change,” Hendrick said. “They continue to prioritize profit over people who are affected by their operations.”
Duke Energy reported last Saturday that 2,000 cubic yards of coal ash had poured into Sutton Lake from an adjacent coal ash pond. The lake, constructed by Duke Energy in 1972 as a cooling pond for its power plant, has also been designated as a recreational boating and fishing area by the state. The current capitalist system is broken. Get updates on our progress toward building a fairer world. On Friday, the company said floodwaters breached a dam containing Sutton Lake and that it could not rule out that coal ash was flowing into the Cape Fear River. Spillage from three inactive coal ash ponds was also reported at the H.F. Lee Plant in Goldsboro on Monday. Duke Energy said visual inspections suggested low-hanging vegetation allowed only “a small amount” of coal ash to be displaced. But Waterkeeper Alliance pushed back on the company’s assessment after visiting the site.
“Floating coal ash is clearly visible because flood waters have eroded the vegetative cover and are steadily washing ash downstream,” Donna Lisenby, global advocacy manager for Waterkeeper Alliance, shared in a Facebook post on Wednesday. “Duke Energy is falsely telling news reporters and the public that the tree cover on the ash ponds at Lee are preventing ash releases.” Frank Holland, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said this was an entirely unnecessary catastrophe that could have been prevented by evacuating the coal ash ponds and moving its contents uphill. “Duke could have greatly reduced the risk to North Carolina and its rivers during Hurricane Florence if it had spent years removing the ash from these sites rather than spending years spending money on lawyers and lobbyists,” Holland said. In 2014, a drainage pipe burst at a Duke Energy coal ash pond in Eden, North Carolina, causing 39,000 tons of the contaminant to flow into the Dan River. It was the third-largest such spill in U.S. history and resulted in Duke Energy pleading guilty to criminal negligence. The company agreed to pay $102 million in fines and restitution, the largest federal criminal fine in state history. But Holland said Duke Energy has continued to drag its feet in cleaning up other coal ash basins, pushing back on demands from the state and environmental activists to evacuate its toxic ponds and landfills. “This is a danger nobody should have to worry about,” Holland told HuffPost. “The only reason this ash is sitting in these unlined pits next to these rivers is because Duke Energy ... made a choice to flush this ash downhill and create water pollution and a public safety hazard purely for their own convenience and to save some marginal dollars.”
