2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #40

Posted on 6 October 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 30 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, September 29, 2024 thru Sat, October 5, 2024.

Story of the week

We’re all made of standard human fabric so it’s nobody’s particular fault but while “other” parts of the world have very recently lived (mostly) through enormous floods with huge consequences, only over the past week has the United States focused its immediate attention on hydrometeorological extremes— thanks to the arrival and massive hammer blow of Hurricane Helene and its titanic delivery of rainfall (see “psychological distance“).

Our Story of the Week is statistically obvious by headcount in the list below. It’s all about Hurricane Helene. A common theme in reportage from affected areas is the element of surprise in arrival of flooding on a previously unimagined and unexperienced scale. Affected residents of a swathe of states spanning from Florida to Virginia were depending on guidance from experts to prepare for this storm and despite fairly strident warnings it’s safe to say that the advice they received didn’t encompass the unfolding reality of the storm, particularly as it intruded into the continental interior and subsequently stalled as it died away into a tropical depression.

How could we be so surprised by something as hard to hide as 40 triilion gallons (1.5¹⁴ liters) of water? Perhaps it’s because we’re using outmoded and inappropriate metrics when evaluating the threat posed by hurricanes. Our focus when it comes to hurricane preparation has traditionally been centered on wind and storm surge. These are certainly germane to coastal locations in terms of threat to life and overall destruction. Storm surge in particular is an urgent matter for people and infrastructure directly facing seas and oceans.

But are wind and storm surge the center of mass of potential hurricane disaster? With so much inland population potentially affected by hurricanes— and with the behavior of hurricanes now being significantly affected by global warming— how best can emergency commmunications serve the public? A hint lies in the fact that fresh water delivered by hurricanes typically kills more people than do wind or surge.

Storm surge fades as a factor not far from the coastline. Farther than a relatively few miles from shore and leaving surge behind, a hurricane’s principal impact and threat transitions from crazy wind speed and invasive waves to something more generally familiar: rain. Only this isn’t normal rain but instead precipitation from air absolutely stuffed with moisture thanks to its passage over warm ocean. The warmer the water, the higher the risk. Hurricane Helene was positivily juiced with moisture by passing over a Gulf of Mexico that like the rest of the world ocean is freakishly warm, and the storm carried that moisture just as far as it could— before shedding its unbearable load on Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Virginia. 

We clearly need to be thinking about a different perspective on hurricane risk and how to talk about it, and fortunately we have experts doing exactly that. We didn’t cover it in this week’s listing but the New York Times just ran an article laying out the current defects with how we convey hurricane threats, The Problem With the Hurricane Category Rating. In a nutshell, over half of US hurricane fatalities are due to deluges of fresh water, yet our thinking about these disasters is myopically focused on coastal contexts. We do as a technical matter know much better. For a comprehensive review of circumspect weather hazard communications (important in a non-stationary climate!), see Improving Societal Outcomes of Extreme Weather in a Changing Climate: An Integrated Perspective (pdf), Morss et al., Annual Review of Environment and Resources.

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before September 29

• Sorry, AI won’t “fix” climate change, Opinion, MIT Technology Review, James Temple. “OpenAI’s Sam Altman claims AI will deliver an ‘Intelligence Age,’ but tech breakthroughs alone can’t solve global warming.”
• As Florida Storms Worsen, Some in Tampa Bay Wonder: Is Living There Worth It?, US, New York Times, Isabelle Taft, Elisabeth Parker, Valerie Boey Ramsey & Patricia Mazzei. “Residents of the booming region are confronting a new reality: Even when storms make landfall far away, their impact is being felt.”
• A Controversial Play — and What It Taught Me About the Psychology of Climate, TedTalks on Youtube, David Finnigan.