Climate

The devastation wrought by Helene and Milton could shake up priorities and bring the climate crisis more to the fore

Despite its enormous implications, the climate crisis has so far mostly been a dormant issue in the US presidential election. Some hope the devastation wrought in quick succession by two major hurricanes will shake up the priorities of American voters before a stark choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on polling day.

Last month, Hurricane Helene became one of the deadliest storms ever to hit the US, killing more than 220 people and causing billions of dollars in damage as it tore a path northwards, through the key election swing states of Georgia and North Carolina. This was followed two weeks later by Hurricane Milton, which rampaged across Florida.

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In August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its updated forecast for the 2024 hurricane season. It was to be above normal in every regard: more named storms and stronger hurricanes than usual. One of the main reasons for this forecast? Significantly warmer than usual surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean, which come largely as a result of human-caused climate change. 

Despite a quiet peak hurricane season in August and early September, 2024 will be a year to remember. In late June, Beryl became the earliest Category 5 hurricane in recorded Atlantic history. And in just the last two weeks, we’ve observed two powerful hurricanes develop in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico: Hurricanes Helene and Milton.  

Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida as a Category 4 hurricane and brought torrential rain and wind to North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia. Less than two weeks later, Milton made landfall near Sarasota, Florida as a Category 3 hurricane, knocking out power to nearly 3.5 million people throughout the central part of the state. Fossil fuel-caused climate change was a driving force in these storms, and despite the nearly perfect forecasts, we are still not ready for the effects of climate change. 

More hurricanes are rapidly intensifying because of climate change—Milton included

Both Helene and Milton underwent periods of rapid intensification, defined as a strengthening in winds of at least 35 mph in a 24-hour period, which were fueled by ocean temperatures nearly 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal for this time of year.  

The footprint of global warming caused by heat-trapping pollutants is undeniable: according to the Climate Shift Index (CSI) from Climate Central, the warmer surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made 400-800 times more likely due to climate change. In fact, Helene and Milton’s rapid intensification rates are part of a larger trend in the Atlantic Ocean, where rapidly strengthening hurricanes have increased significantly since 1982 as a result of warmer waters. 

In particular, Hurricane Milton was a storm for the record books. The hurricane went from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 5 hurricane in just 18 hours, making it the second fastest strengthening storm in Atlantic recorded history after Hurricane Wilma in 2005. After its jaw-dropping rapid intensification, Milton became the fourth most intense hurricane in the Atlantic basin since 1979, and the second most intense hurricane this late in the calendar year (for my fellow weather weenies, we remember Wilma’s record intensity in late October of 2005 like it was yesterday). 

Why are the oceans so warm and fueling this rapid intensification? The oceans have absorbed 93 percent of the extra heat trapped by increased heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere. The world’s burning of fossil fuels has raised global average temperatures significantly, with 2024 on track to be the warmest year on record. Not only were the ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean near record levels, but the ocean heat content in the Gulf of Mexico—the fuel for hurricanes to rapidly intensify—was at a record high. 

As the world continues to warm, hurricanes will become more intense; in fact, a rapid attribution analysis demonstrated that storms like Milton will become 40 percent more common due to human-caused climate change. Hurricanes Milton and Helene are merely a sign of the devastation that will become more common. 

Global warming led to Helene’s extreme rainfall

After undergoing rapid intensification, Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida as a Category 4 hurricane on the evening of September 26. Helene was the 8th Category 4 or 5 hurricane to make landfall in the US since 2017, which is the same number of Category 4 and 5 landfalls over the previous 57 years!  

While Floridian communities were affected by the strong winds and storm surge from Helene, Southern Appalachia—a region far inland from the coast—received record amounts of rainfall, which led to historic landslides and flooding not seen since the Great Flood of 1916. While rescue efforts are ongoing, nearly 230 deaths have been attributed to Helene, making it one of the deadliest US landfalling hurricanes since 1950.  

According to rapid climate attribution studies, human-caused climate change contributed significantly to Helene’s extreme rainfall. One study found that global warming may have caused 50 percent of the rainfall observed during Hurricane Helene. How is this possible? 

 Think of the atmosphere like a sponge: as the world warms due to additional heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere, the sponge will become bigger, allowing the sponge (atmosphere) to hold more water and carry it from the oceans further inland. 

Helene’s rainfall is a sign of what is to come in the future as the planet continues to warm. In the meantime, my colleague, Alicia Race, wrote an excellent blogpost on how you can help the ongoing Helene relief efforts. 

Humanity is not prepared for the climate we’ve created 

Milton and Helene were historic and unprecedented hurricanes. They both brought destruction and death to communities here in the US and were made worse by the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, these types of storms will become more common in the future as the planet continues to warm. 

A silver lining here is that weather forecasting models, which are used to predict the intensity and path of hurricanes, nailed the forecasts for Helene and Milton. In fact, the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) first forecast for Milton showed it making landfall only 12 miles north of where Milton made landfall four days later! 

On one the hand, it’s a good thing that the NHC, with its suite of weather models, could predict these unprecedented storms fueled by climate change, and partly because of this, people in coastal areas were asked to evacuate in advance. But despite the ample warning, we still lost many lives to these storms, especially in mountainous, inland areas with spotty Internet and cell services as well as limited evacuation infrastructure and experience with hurricanes.  

In a world with global warming, despite forecasts being nearly perfect, lives are being lost because we’re experiencing storms of unprecedented severity. How was a family in western North Carolina supposed to respond to a rainfall forecast of 15 inches of rain? Were they expected to know a landslide or flood would affect their home? The science is sound, but the nearly perfect forecasts can only do so much. My colleague Rachel Cleetus, Policy Director of the Climate and Energy Program, has this to say on the implications of stronger storms in the future:  

“Continuing to invest in NOAA’s science, data, and tools is crucial. And even with the best warning systems, we know there are many socioeconomic barriers to people being able to get to safety and recover from the devastation of storms like Helene and Milton. Not having enough money for a hotel room or gas for your car; being worried about losing your job if you miss work; having a disability or a health condition that makes it difficult to evacuate; having to flee with young children—these kinds of factors often force people to make tough decisions about whether they can leave or are trapped in place. And after disasters, those with the least resources—who may not have insurance or may be living in flood-prone areas in mobile homes, for example—often have the most difficult time getting back on their feet. Addressing these challenges in an equitable way is crucial if we are to limit the human toll of extreme climate disasters.” 

The hurricane forecasting models are sound. Now lawmakers must catch up and pass policies that reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and drastically cut heat-trapping emissions. 

Tech barons are forever predicting some amazing new technology to fix the climate crisis. Yet fixes already exist

There are so many ways to fiddle while Rome burns, or as this season’s weather would have it, gets torn apart by hurricanes and tornadoes and also goes underwater – and, in other places, burns. One particularly pernicious way comes from the men in love with big tech, who are forever insisting that we need some amazing new technology to solve our problems, be it geoengineering, carbon sequestration or fusion – but wait, it gets worse.

At an artificial intelligence conference in Washington DC, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed that “[w]e’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it” and that we should just plunge ahead with AI, which is so huge an energy hog it’s prompted a number of tech companies to abandon their climate goals. Schmidt then threw out the farfetched notion that we should go all in on AI because maybe AI will somehow, maybe, eventually know how to “solve” climate, saying: “I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

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Wolsingham school’s carbon-cutting event had been planned by pupils but parents raised concerns

A school has made a U-turn on a student-led plan to turn the heating off for a “blue nose” climate action day after parents raised concerns.

The heating was due to be turned off at Wolsingham school, County Durham, on Friday but the plan has now been postponed until the summer term of next year when it is likely to be warmer.

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A beloved sugar maple slowly succumbed to disease. Today, it lives on in a new form.

After Hurricane Milton, rebuilding in the Sunshine State requires “managed retreat.”

As the threats of climate change continue to become realities in new and sometimes terrifying ways, more and more teams and leagues will have to address the problem

The Arizona Diamondbacks have a climate problem. To be more precise, Phoenix has a climate problem and, as a result, the Diamondbacks have a field that needs renovations if the team is going to keep fans cool – and no one is sure whose responsibility it is to pay for it.

The team’s lease on Chase Field expires in 2027, and negotiations with Maricopa county have stalled. The organization’s plan to fund the $400m to $500m project is modeled on the Arizona Cardinals’ successful bid to fund their own field renovation through stadium sales and recaptured income, and the plan is supported by the Chamber of Commerce, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Greater Phoenix Leadership, the Economic Council and Downtown Phoenix, Inc.

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Bring in ‘future homes standard’ or leave families at risk of higher bills and emissions for decades, MPs and experts say

Ministers must take steps now to ensure that all homes are built to the most efficient low-carbon standards, or risk locking households into higher bills and greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come, a group of MPs and experts have urged.

The government is mulling changes to the building regulations in England to bring in a “future homes standard” that would require all new homes to be built with low-carbon equipment such as heat pumps and solar panels.

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A surge in power use worldwide could make it harder for nations to slash emissions and keep global warming in check.

On the west coast of Florida, a town built to weather hurricanes hosted more than 2,000 people during Hurricane Milton. Could communities like this help shape Florida’s future?

In 2020, nine bodies were found near US-Mexico border. In the first eight months of 2024, there were 108.

Ten times as many migrants died in New Mexico near the US-Mexico border in each of the last two years compared with just five years ago.

During the first eight months of 2024, the bodies of 108 presumed migrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America, were found near the border in New Mexico, according to the most recent data. Many of the bodies were discovered less than 10 miles (16km) from El Paso.

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For more on other harmful aspects of Project 2025, see this blog. 

The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint—Project 2025—to dramatically alter the US Environmental Protection Agency should concern you. It does me. 

This summer my family vacationed in Vancouver, BC, Canada where we had the good fortune of going on a whale watching trip and seeing majestic orcas. I’ll never forget witnessing how a family moved around hunting their prey—sea lions—and celebrated by springing out of the water.

The trained marine biologist guides shared that water pollution in the Pacific Ocean and local bay have contributed to the population’s decline, and they talked about what is being done to improve it. As it turns out, most orcas’ first-borns are miscarried. Why? Because they sit at the top of the food chain, and the toxic load in their systems needs to be expelled somehow. Nature has created a system, through their offspring, to expunge it.  

This made me think of the increasing numbers of people of all ages in my life and in communities across the country suffering from diseases linked to toxic chemicals. PFAS is shorthand for a class of “forever chemicals” that persist in the environment indefinitely. This, along with many other chemicals, like diesel particulates and ground-level ozone that form soot and smog, and metals like lead in paint and drinking water, are regulated by the EPA to keep us safe. Project 2025 takes aim at all those protections.  

Dismantling the EPA

The Blueprint would institute a major reorganization at the EPA that would slash full time positions, cut entire departments and programs deemed “duplicative, wasteful or superfluous.” Parts of EPA that historically had been run by career experts would instead be run by political appointees making decisions based on ideology, rather than science.  

Further, the Blueprint calls for rotating headquarters senior executives to regions in several places. And, there is the overarching specter of the next administration working to implement a new category of executive, Schedule F, and moving many existing staff into it, stripping them of their civil service protections, undermining career civil servants who provide continuity of leadership and allow the next administration to replace them with political appointments. If you’ve ever lived through a major shift in management, you know how much it affects the organization’s ability to deliver on the mission—and in the case of the EPA, that mission is crucial to protecting the health of people across the nation. This transition plan would be moving not only desks, but floors, ceilings, windows, and fire exits.  

Project 2025 takes aim at grants, as well. Grants are an important tool that agencies have used for decades to support environmental progress, such as for cleaning up waterways and contaminated land from legacy pollution, delivering safe drinking water, and limiting air pollution.  

For one thing, many regulatory functions are delegated to the state, tribal, and local levels. It shifts management of the office that oversees grants administration to a political appointee whose motivations would no doubt be more about political expediency than fiscal responsibility.  

It also suggests that funds going to nonprofits that support implementation of laws, especially in places where there are disproportionately high concentrations of pollution, such as from vehicle emissions or industrial activities, should instead be given to states. A move like this would erode the ability of civil society to participate in every level of government’s processes, all of which depend on meaningful involvement from the people to have durability.  

Race Forward, a racial justice nonprofit, suggests that this is part of a much larger agenda to undermine administrative government and offers a Toolkit with suggestions of what could be done about it.  

Science at risk

Almost all of EPA’s core work to help protect our health and the environment requires science and legal analysis to set a strong, fact-based foundation for its actions. Much of this could grind to a halt if the next administration follows through on the plan’s suggestion to narrowly and harmfully limit the science EPA can do under laws passed by Congress.

Instead of allowing the agency’s scientific experts to determine how best to conduct science that would help meet laws, Project 2025 imposes a requirement that all science itself must be explicitly congressionally mandated. And the plan takes specific aim at the standards for critical air pollutants that are covered by under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards—ones—that were specifically driven by science—suggesting that somehow, Congress would have the expertise or the time to set up the rigorous scientific processes that it would take to update these national standards at the frequency required to keep the public safe.  

Project 2025 also calls for EPA’s Science Advisory Board and other advisory bodies to be reformed to “ensure independence, balance, transparency, and geographic diversity.”  This suggestion is puzzling when you consider that EPA’s advisory committees are already made up of the country’s foremost experts from a variety of sectors. And let’s not forget who drafted the blueprint: people from the oil and gas, chemical and other industries. Adding their favored representatives with potential conflicts of interest to a process set up to protect the public interest is problematic.  

Alarmingly, the notion of scientific integrity itself, which people from all political affiliations should support, is also under fire. The blueprint recommends shifting responsibility for evaluating misconduct away from EPA’s Office of Scientific Integrity to an unnamed “independent body.”  

Human health on the chopping block

Remember the “forever chemicals” that are known carcinogens? EPA recently passed drinking water standards to protect 100 million people from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, contamination for the first time ever. The designation of PFAS chemicals as “hazardous substances” would be revisited through Project 2025. That’s despite the fact that these substances not only cause cancer but are also associated with liver and immune system damage, among other things. 

According to Breathing Easy, a recent assessment by the Environmental Protection Network,  the ten air pollution rules issued since 2021 with “the most significant quantified health impacts” would prevent:  

• 202,632 all-cause premature mortalities.  

• 107 million symptomatic asthma incidents.  

• 94 million minor-restricted activity days. 

Project 2025 calls for all of these regulations to be reexamined. I’m not sure about you, but I am grateful that EPA is doing its job so that my kids and I can spend more time outdoors without fear of shortening our lifespans or suffering respiratory distress.   

What’s more, when one pollutant is reduced, there are other benefits associated, and EPA used these associated benefits as a way to justify appropriately strong health-based safeguards. Moving forward, in making the case for stronger standards for any pollutants, the “co-benefits” of regulating a pollutant would be separated out from the cost-benefit analysis that accompanies regulatory packages. In other words, the cost to industry to reduce their emissions would show up much greater than any overall societal benefit of reducing pollution.  

In addition, the Project 2025 recommendations would weaken public health safeguards by prohibiting the EPA from using studies to set regulations unless the underlying raw data, which would include private medical records, is revealed. Recall that for privacy reasons, health data is kept confidential, and is only available aggregated at the county level, at best. Scientists often model localized risks. If this data is precluded, the EPA would likely wind up with much weaker regulations that would benefit polluters—presumably the intent of this proposal. The communities that suffer the most pollution tend to be those that are low-income and communities of color.  

Together with all of the cuts to limits on the production of hazardous chemicals, in other pollution permit limits, and in environmental standards, it is clear that the plan compromises human health. Yet, the Blueprint names remediation as “core,” and continues support for related programs. So, the authors recognize that pollution is harmful, but it is a problem for another day—for our children and their children to deal with. Not to mention that history shows that environmental cleanup is much more costly, and usually incomplete.  

Climate change

EPA has been a key agency to help cut greenhouse gases contributing to human-caused climate change and its harmful impacts on people and the environment. Oil and gas industry backed “scientists” who contest the scientific consensus have been engaged in a disinformation and misinformation campaign that unfortunately is slowing down important action.  

If the people who wrote this Blueprint were given prominent positions at the EPA, they would surely seek to overturn EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases (GHGs) endanger public health and the environment, which was critical to allowing EPA to regulate GHGs. If anything, since the original 2009 Endangerment Finding was issued, the science on climate change has only become more dire, as have the observed impacts of costly and harmful climate damages.  

Perhaps because overturning this finding, which has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, could be challenging if not impossible, Project 2025 also calls on the next administration to reconsider all the regulations that reduce GHGs, including vehicle and power plants standards. 

In addition, the EPA should revise or scrap the social cost of carbon (SCC), according to the Blueprint. The SCC is the accepted estimate made by experts in dollars, of the economic damages that result from emitting one additional ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is a central piece of the economics to substantiate the cost of regulations today when it is future generations who will bear the brunt of inaction.  

The Blueprint also recommends that the EPA greatly reduce the number of industries required to report their GHG emissions. As the EPA explains: This data can be used by businesses and others to track and compare facilities’ greenhouse gas emissions, identify opportunities to cut pollution, minimize wasted energy, and save money. States, cities, and other communities can use EPA’s greenhouse gas data to find high-emitting facilities in their area, compare emissions between similar facilities, and develop common-sense climate policies. In addition, without this data, it would be it extremely hard to report whether the United States has met its emissions reduction commitments under the Paris climate agreement. 

All in all, Project 2025 would undermine and decimate an important tool in the US government’s arsenal to protect human health and the environment now and for generations to come. It turns an agency that was set up to prevent pollution into one that can only clean up or remediate it after it’s done its damage.  Everyone in the United States should be taking this document very seriously and speaking out to ensure that none of these recommendations come to pass and none of the authors are put into positions of power to bring about these changes. There is simply too much at stake. 

Investors say climate change poses biggest risk to their assets, and urge Albanese government to see the economic dangers of a slow path to net zero

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Institutional investors dealing with portfolios in the trillions of dollars aren’t typically the most vocal climate campaigners. You won’t find many superannuation fund staff, fund managers, asset consultants or brokers with a placard on the streets or on top of a Newcastle coal train.

But you may increasingly find them on a screen you’re watching. Or at least their message.

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UC San Diego has added an innovative prerequisite to ‘prepare students for the future they really will encounter’

Melani Callicott, a human biology major at the University of California, San Diego, thinks about the climate crisis all the time. She discusses it with family and friends because of the intensity of hurricanes like Milton and Helene, which have ravaged the southern US, she says. “It just seems like it’s affecting more people every day.”

That’s one reason why she is glad that UC San Diego has implemented an innovative graduation requirement for students starting this autumn: a course in climate change. Courses must cover at least 30% climate-related content and address two of four areas, including scientific foundations, human impacts, mitigation strategies and project-based learning. About 7,000 students from the class of 2028 will be affected this year.

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These productions are grappling with climate change, reproductive rights, the Arab Spring and accusations of sexual assault.

Natural sinks of forests and peat were key to Finland’s ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2035. But now, the land has started emitting more greenhouse gases than it stores

Read more: Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?

Tiina Sanila-Aikio cannot remember a summer this warm. The months of midnight sun around Inari, in Finnish Lapland, have been hot and dry. Conifer needles on the branch-tips are orange when they should be a deep green. The moss on the forest floor, usually swollen with water, has withered.

“I have spoken with many old reindeer herders who have never experienced the heat that we’ve had this summer. The sun keeps shining and it never rains,” says Sanila-Aikio, former president of the Finnish Sami parliament.

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A US study estimates the total climate pollution from LNG was 33% greater than that from coal over a 20-year period. This should have major ramifications for emissions policy

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The claim that Australian gas exports are “clean” and needed to drive the transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions has become an article of faith for significant parts of the country’s industry, media and political classes – often repeated, only occasionally challenged.

It has buttressed a massive expansion of the liquified natural gas (LNG) industry in the north of the continent over the past decade, with major new developments in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

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Millions of Americans, many poor and vulnerable, live in mobile and manufactured homes. When catastrophe strikes, they’re often on their own.

Food is the springboard to talk about a host of issues, including climate, economic justice, public health and labor.

The sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heating

It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.

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