In recent weeks, we’ve experienced two major hurricanes, one of which has greatly affected me and my team. Our home base of Asheville, North Carolina, was devastated by the intensity of Hurricane Helene.
Since Dr. James Hansen’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in June 1988, scientists have been warning us that unregulated growth in greenhouse-gas emissions would drastically alter our climate and produce more intense storms, as we’ve seen with hurricanes Helene and Milton.
At the same time, politicians and other individuals are acting as chaos agents, spreading misinformation and creating disinformation about the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government-run relief efforts. Their actions are unconscionable during a time of great suffering and tragedy. One politician even went so far as to tweet, “Yes, they can control the weather.” While the politician may have been right, it was not in the way he intended. Our climate is being affected by us — our continued use and support of fossil fuels.
For a long time, we’ve viewed climate change as something that would happen in the distant future. This mindset has driven our “kicking the can down the road” approach to action. Unfortunately, that strategy has led us to where we are now. Instead of climate change, it’s now dealing with a changed climate.
A report released by World Weather Attribution on Oct. 9 details many of the impacts that fossil-fuel-driven climate change is having on the intensity of the recent storms. Yale Climate Connections summarized the main findings:
- “Hurricanes as intense as Hurricane Helene are today about 2.5 times more likely in the region. They would be expected to occur on average every 130 years in a preindustrial climate but now have a 1-in-53 chance in any given year.
- Hurricane Helene’s wind speeds on the coast of Florida were about 13 mph, or 11%, more intense due to climate change.
- Climate change increased Helene’s rainfall by about 10%. As a result of climate change, the level of rainfall that led to catastrophic flooding in the Appalachians has shifted from a once-in-115-year event to a once-in-70-year event today.
- The high sea temperatures that fueled Helene were made 200 to 500 times more likely by climate change.
“Yet again, our study has shown that hurricanes will keep getting worse if humans keep burning fossil fuels and subsequently warming the planet,” Friederike Otto, lead of World Weather Attribution and a senior lecturer in climate science at the Imperial College London, said in a news release. “Americans shouldn’t have to fear hurricanes more violent than Helene; we have all the knowledge and technology needed to lower demand and replace oil, gas and coal with renewable energy.”
One statistic that stuck with me was that a 5% increase in wind speed increases a hurricane’s destructive power by 50%. This increase is not linear. Therefore, the 11% increase in wind speed quoted above is considerably more destructive than it would appear — it more than doubled the wind-driven impact.
In a separate analysis by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, scientists found that the changed climate caused over 50% more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas and made it up to 20 times more likely for that extra rainfall to occur.
The burning of fossil fuels is the cause of the extreme heat that we’ve been experiencing over the past several years. July 22 was the planet’s hottest day on record, and the records have continued to be broken year after year. “World Weather Attribution estimated that climate change made the Mexico heat wave in the spring of 2024 about 1.5°C (2.7°F) hotter and 35 to 200 times more likely to occur.”
The changed climate is likely going to make life more expensive for everyone. The costs of insuring property in storm-, drought- and fire-prone areas will increase exponentially; or insurers will pull out of these areas altogether, leaving homeowners to self-insure and bear all of the climate risk.
There is also the supply chain impact. Nearly all of the world’s high-purity quartz, one of the essential minerals required for the production of semiconductors worldwide, comes from a small town just north of Asheville. Spruce Pine, North Carolina, was not spared from Helene’s wrath. According to CNBC, production at the mine was halted on Sept. 26 after the hurricane, and there is no timeline for when normal operations will resume. Given how many products now have semiconductors, even a short disruption in quartz supply could have ripple effects across the economy.
In 2023 and early 2024, a drought limited navigation through the Panama Canal. The drought is attributed to the El Niño effect — which, according to a recent study, may be intensified by climate change. The study found that “current sea surface temperature extremes driven by El Niño have intensified by around 10% compared to pre-1960 levels.” While rainfall has picked back up, the economic costs of the drought were substantial. According to S&P Global, “During the crisis, crunched supplies saw a single transit slot fetch $4 million at auction, excluding a canal toll of $500,000 — a cost translating to a 50% hike.”
Meanwhile, S&P 500 companies tout their 2050 plans to become carbon-neutral while the climate grows more unstable. Fossil-fuel companies continue to be supported by politicians and the investment and banking communities.
This paradigm has to shift, and it has to shift now. It’s time to invest in the clean economy. It’s time to reinforce our systems and infrastructure to make them more stable and resilient. Adaptation to the changed climate is not something we can plan for tomorrow; action needs to be taken today.
As I think about the destruction we’ve seen in Asheville, I can’t help but wonder: Will they rebuild? How will they rebuild? Will the rebuild be insurable? And should we be rebuilding in flood zones at all?
Eventually, the economics of the climate crisis will price high-risk areas out of the reach for ordinary Americans, who will be forced to move to “safer” areas. But we’ve learned recently that there are no actual climate-safe zones.
Herein lies our dilemma and our opportunity. By investing in a cleaner and more resource-efficient, resilient and equitable economy, we still have a chance to help future generations to thrive — but we must act now.