All week, deniers of various stripes have been trying to preemptively deflate any coverage of Hurricane Florence that talks about climate change. The CATO Institute, for example, went all the way back to 1667 to show that hurricanes have been bad in the past. Because as any logical person understands, something being bad back then means there’s absolutely no possible way climate change could make it worse in the present and future...
Meanwhile the Koch-funded Daily Caller, had to balance its addiction to clickbait with its ideological bias. It put Koch-boy Michael Bastasch on double duty, writing stories that not only defend Trump but both hype the storm’s strength and the active hurricane season, while simultaneously trying to downplay the very climate connection that amplified Florence.
Did deniers succeed in convincing people there’s no climate connection? Judging by the range of pieces making the connection as of yesterday--from reporting in Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, Axios, Guardian, Quartz, NPR, and Independent to opinion pieces in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and CNN--they have (as usual) failed.
Unfortunately for them, the science is pretty clear on the ways in which warming amplifies hurricanes. With 80 foot waves, and spreading so far that even taking a picture from as far away as space required a wide angle lens, Florence is no exception.
And for the first time ever (at least that we’ve seen) researchers have performed an advanced attribution analysis, running climate models before the storm has even hit to determine if human activity influenced the storm’s forecast. They found that it has. Because of climate change, forecasted “rainfall will be significantly increased by over 50% in the heaviest precipitating parts of the storm.” What’s more, they also found it would stay stronger, longer, and will be at least 80km larger at its diameter than it would had it developed in an atmosphere we hadn’t changed.
The Climate Signals page on Florence has more of the basics along with some advanced science for you to use when the Twitter trolls and Koch boys start talking trash. Here’s a quick rundown:
Waters that are a full 2°C warmer than average are fueling Florence’s intensity, a result of oceans absorbing 90% of the increase in temperatures from climate change. That’s at least partly why this fairly active season’s Accumulated Cyclone Energy is the 3rd highest on record since 1970, behind only 2004 and 2015.
When it makes landfall, Florence will be bringing a lot more water with it, thanks to sea level rise. Warming has raised the sea level off the coast of Wilmington, NC, for example, by a full foot. While we won’t know for a while exactly how much more flooding this rise caused, we know that Sandy’s flooding was extended 27 miles by sea level rise, adding over $2 billion to its price tag.
Further, warmer air can hold more moisture, leading to significantly more flooding. As much as 38% of rain that fell during last year’s Hurricane Harvey, for example, has been attributed to climate change.
Making matters worse is that Florence is being forecast to stall over the coast (again, like Harvey), thanks to a change in the Jet Stream that’s been linked to warming in the Arctic.
Warmer air lets the hurricane, charged by warmer waters, carry more moisture to land as it pushes more of the climate-change-risen seas onto land, where it is expected to stall for days thanks to a warming-induced change in the jet stream.
Although he wasn’t particularly articulate about it, President Trump was actually right to say that Florence will be “tremendously big and tremendously wet.”
Now if only he’d do something about what’s making it so tremendous
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