Floridaposting
Three million Americans without power this morning: Hurricane Milton made landfall overnight close to Siesta Key, Florida, as a Category 3 storm with maximum wind speeds of 120 mph.
Fatalities have already been reported due to tornadoes that formed as a result of the storm. The hurricane has now weakened to a Category 1, but millions are without power this morning with plenty of property damaged sustained. Milton will now be making its way toward Florida’s east coast, but flash flood and storm surge warnings remain in effect for large parts of the state.
So far, the storm has destroyed the roof of a stadium in St. Petersburg, where emergency workers were sheltering, and flooded Tampa’s Hillsborough River, but it’s looking like the worst of the storm narrowly missed Tampa, thus sparing it even worse storm surges.
Why are these hurricanes so destructive? Many environmentalists will tell you that storms like Helene and Milton are getting more frequent; climate skeptics, meanwhile, will point to this year’s storm season and rightfully note that we haven’t seen a huge spike in frequency of hurricanes over the last few years. But arguing over that specific point alone would probably be wrong, because climate change is affecting several different factors. For example, “global heating made both of these storms more powerful than they had to be,” writes Mark Gongloff for Bloomberg:
“On the morning before Milton’s landfall, the research group World Weather Attribution released a report estimating climate change had made the sea surface temperatures fueling Helene 200 to 500 times more likely. The extra energy provided by this heat jacked up wind speeds and the rainfall that flooded supposed climate havens in the Appalachian Mountains hundreds of miles from shore.…[Milton] passed through hot Gulf water, which helped intensify it from a mere tropical storm to a Category 5 behemoth in less than 48 hours, one of the fastest cases of rapid intensification on record. It hasn’t been alone this season; both Helene and Beryl, which hammered the Caribbean, Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Texas in early July, also strengthened quickly because of freakishly warm sea water.”
“Climate change may not cause hurricanes, but when they do form, it tends to turn them into blockbusters,” concludes Gongloff. “That means anyone in the potential path of a hurricane—which can extend hundreds of miles from shore, as Helene taught us—needs to be prepared for the worst.”
Of course, the thing a lot of global warming types won’t say is that this has implications for whether we rebuild, and how. Some of the reason why there’s so much catastrophic destruction from these types of weather events is because we build in places we shouldn’t, and insurers don’t properly price risk into the equation (or are prevented from charging the full amount by the government).
Consider the National Flood Insurance Program, which is managed by FEMA, and created in the 1960s so that homeowners in risky areas can reasonably pay for insurance. “Federal law requires that mortgaged properties in designated flood hazard areas carry flood insurance, but insurance premiums in oft-flooded areas are significantly more expensive (if they’re even offered at all),” writes Reason‘s Joe Lancaster. “The NFIP offers federal backing for policies that private insurers would not otherwise touch or that would be too expensive for most people to afford.” And it’s not like this policy covers just a few people; some 5 million people are the beneficiaries of this federal backing. California, meanwhile, has regulations on the books that attempt to prevent insurers from accurately pricing wildfire risk, which has resulted in insurers like State Farm fleeing.
Even more Florida: “[Donald] Trump winning every swing state but Arizona?” asks polling analyst Nate Silver. “Surprising. [Kamala] Harris losing Pennsylvania and Michigan but winning Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina? Really surprising. But what about Harris
Article from Reason.com
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