17.10.2024
Can we meet the challenge?
Milton and Sahara flooding are extreme weather events triggered by human-induced global warming, writes Eddie Ford. The danger is that they will become the norm
As everybody now knows, Hurricane Milton was a tropical cyclone that originated in the western Caribbean less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated Florida. Milton was the second-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded over the Gulf of Mexico (after Hurricane Rita in 2005, which itself was a record-breaking year in the Atlantic hurricane season). Adding to the destruction, Milton spawned dozens of tornadoes, due to the instability created by the extra heat and humidity in the atmosphere, and the sudden change in winds.
Category 5
At one point, Milton intensified to a category 5 hurricane, the highest level, with wind speeds at its peak up to 180mph and a pressure of 897 millibars, with terrifying implications for the possible death toll. Thankfully for the residents of Florida, though still devastating, increasing wind shear1 caused the hurricane to weaken, as it turned north-east towards Florida - falling to category 3 before making landfall late on October 9. Afterwards, it quickly weakened over land and emerged over the Atlantic as a category 1 storm, transitioning to an extratropical low. The remnants gradually weakened near the island of Bermuda before dissipating on October 12.
The main reason why Hurricane Milton was expected to be so destructive was not simply because of the velocity of the wind and the rising sea level. Rather, it was the fact that people in Florida were still in the process of clearing up the wreckage left by Helene - the authorities fearing that the new hurricane would pick up the debris left behind by the previous, hitting cars, buildings, power lines, etc. As of October 14, it is reported that Milton had killed at least 27 people (24 in the United States and three in Mexico), and preliminary damage is estimated to be at least $30 billion. The fact that relatively so few died is a testimony to an advanced society. If this had happened in Bangladesh or India, the consequences would have been on a qualitatively different scale, there being no doubt that the death toll would have been in the thousands.
The authorities put 80,000 people into shelters and the advice was given out: ‘If you live in this or that area, you should urgently consider evacuating’ under imminent threat of death. Nonetheless, at the end of this dreadful storm, 1.6 million people were left without power. On October 12 Joe Biden issued a disaster declaration for the state and by the following day over 250,000 Floridians registered for help, which was the most for a single day in US history. Meanwhile, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, was forced to open up three fuel sites, where residents could get ten gallons of fuel for free - which at any other time would have been denounced as ‘socialism’.
Incredibly, meteorologists tracking Milton got death threats from conspiracy theorists, saying that they were controlling the weather on behalf of the government, even using it as a weapon by controlled nuclear explosions - obviously unaware that a tropical hurricane can release as much energy as 10,000 nuclear bombs during its life cycle.2 Naturally, it was left to Marjorie Taylor Greene, possibly the most unhinged person in Congress, to articulate the madness: “Yes they can control the weather - it’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” She was the person, of course, who in 2018 blamed a massive California wildfire on “space lasers” fired off by the Rothschilds.
Indeed, with the conspiracy theories spinning out of control, the Federal Emergency Management Agency actually had to set up a ‘hurricane rumour response’ page on its website.3 In near despair, a CBS News meteorologist wrote on X: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. I can’t believe I just had to type that.”
Essentially, there is no mystery about the root cause of this deadly storm and the appearance of one hurricane following another. Yes (sorry, Donald Trump), it is global warming, CO2 emissions, the surface temperature of the oceans, rising sea levels. The fact that the ice glaciers are melting and putting more and more water into the oceans contributes to the conditions leading to more severe and more frequent storms.
When it comes to understanding the complex science of hurricanes, the World Weather Attribution Centre has performed a great service for us all by providing precise modelling based on 1.3°C above pre-industrial levels.4 Using different temporal and geographical event definitions, as well as different observational datasets and climate models, they confidently conclude that without human-caused climate change Milton would have made landfall as a category 2 instead of a category 3 storm. They go on to say that such hurricanes have gone from a once in 100 years expectation to one in 10 years - a scary thought, especially if you live in Florida. Furthermore, in three out of the four analysed datasets they find that heavy one-day rainfall events such as the one associated with Milton are between 20% and 30% more intense than they would have been pre-1850, using that date as a general landmark. And the danger is that in the near future hurricanes like Milton will come back-to-back with other equally strong hurricanes.
Attribution
But what World Weather Attribution and very many others are also saying is that clearly we are not simply at the level of 1.3°C above pre-industrial levels. As shown by innumerable studies, since the early 2020s, temperatures are nudging up to, and sometimes even beyond, a global average of over 1.5°C above pre-industrial times. For instance, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, this summer was the warmest on record globally.5 Additionally, August was also the 13th month out of 14 where the global average temperature exceeded that 1.5°C figure. Therefore, it is increasingly likely that 2024 will be the warmest year on record globally - bearing in mind that it was only last year (July 6) when global average temperatures reached a record high of 17.08°C. Some estimates have us reaching 2.1°C or more above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
Now, it may be a bit premature to declare that these record temperatures can be categorised as the new norm, but obviously we are approaching that territory soon. The New Scientist journal recently featured an article arguing that, even if human beings stopped releasing CO2 today, magically becoming carbon-neutral, it would probably still be too late.6
Cool down
As it sombrely notes, “we might not be able to cool the world down again after overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit - and, even if we can, a lot of irreversible damage will have been done”. Like the proverbial oil tanker, it takes a very long time to turn things around - maybe never. As the polar ice caps keep melting sea levels will continue to rise and temperatures in the sea and the air will increase. That is an absolute certainty, with more and more tipping points being reached and crossed.
Increased extreme weather like Milton and Helene is potentially creating conditions whereby whole cities become uninhabitable. Jakarta is being abandoned by the Indonesian government, which is actually attempting to build a new capital. But whole countries are also in danger, like the very low-lying Bangladesh, not to mention US states like Florida, which are threatened with inundation - not hundreds of years down the line, but possibly within all our lifetimes. This is not just about unusual or extreme weather. It is a climate question, the definition of climate being ‘big weather’, taken over a period of more than a year.
For a possible glimpse of the future, look at the spooky pictures of flooding in the Sahara, where two days of rainfall in September exceeded yearly averages in several areas of south-east Morocco.7 Satellite imagery showed Lake Iriqui, which had been dried up for 50 years, overflowing with rain - there was bright yellow sand with palm trees sticking out above the water.
As a result of rising temperatures, we are in a situation of extreme unpredictability. The hydrological cycle - a biogeochemical phenomenon that involves the continuous movement of water on, above and below the surface of the Earth - has accelerated, leaving us either with too much or too little water. What happened in the Sahara could happen again in the relatively near future elsewhere.
This poses a danger to human civilisation. The traditional agriculture areas in the Central Belt of the United States, for example, can be turned to desert, while cities like Miami or St Louis get submerged under water - with the same possibly going for Amsterdam, Lagos, Bangkok, Alexandria, Shanghai, Dhaka ... And what about the refugees from these places? Clearly, the market will be unable to rise to the challenge. The capitalist state can, but will it?
We are no longer in the realm of speculation or apocalyptic films like The day after tomorrow - the question is how we actually deal with global warming, not let it sweep us away. From our communist angle, the only rational and civilised approach is collective decision-making by the people for the people and shifting from production for the sake of profit, accumulation for the sake of accumulation, to production for the sake of need.
Our very existence depends on the working class organising to achieve just such a transition.
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Wind shear is a difference in wind speed and/or direction over a relatively short distance in the atmosphere.↩︎
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dw.com/en/hurricanes-release-energy-of-10000-nuclear-bombs/a-40627056.↩︎
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worldweatherattribution.org/yet-another-hurricane-wetter-windier-and-more-destructive-because-of-climate-change.↩︎
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newscientist.com/article/2451285-once-we-pass-1-5c-of-global-warming-there-is-no-going-back.↩︎
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theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/11/dramatic-images-show-the-first-floods-in-the-sahara-in-half-a-century.↩︎