Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Hurricane Ian Is a Storm That We Knew Would Occur

Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in southwest Florida on Wednesday, may join that lineage of truly monster storms—Katrina, Sandy, Camille—whose names are repeated for generations. Ian hit Cuba on Tuesday as a Category 3 hurricane, causing an island-wide blackout that left eleven million people without power. The storm blessedly moved a little to the east overnight, sparing Tampa Bay a direct hit; it cursedly jumped in strength to the very border of Category 5 on the intensity scale, and so Floridians face a deadly combination of roaring wind, surging ocean, and pelting rain. Whatever the eventual damage, it's already another stark demonstration of what happens when there's too much physical energy in a closed system, and too little political energy.

Physical energy first. We've trapped a huge amount of the sun's heat in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel—the heat equivalent of more than half a million Hiroshima-sized explosions each day. That energy gets expressed in many ways. Some of it drives mammoth heat waves, such as the one that afflicted China for most of the summer. (Next week, the temperature there is forecast to top forty degrees Celsius—a hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit—which would be a national record for October.) Most of that excess heat—about ninety-three per cent of it—has gone not into the atmosphere but into the oceans, and that has a direct bearing on storms like Ian. Hurricanes draw their power from ocean heat, and so more storms in recent years have shown an inclination toward what scientists call "rapid intensification," their winds spinning up rapidly as they pass over patches of particularly hot water (such as, for instance, the current Gulf of Mexico)... Bill McKibben

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