Less than two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene ravaged southern Appalachia with unprecedented floods and claimed hundreds of lives. Today, Hurricane Milton is bearing down on the west coast of Florida, which is still cleaning up from Helene’s glancing blow. And less than a month from now, voters will choose between Democrats who accept the reality of climate change and Republicans who do not.
These are not the “normal” hurricanes of the past. Hurricanes are not supposed to retain catastrophic power as they race far inland from the Gulf of Mexico, dumping a Noah’s flood of rainfall all the way to Tennessee, the way Helene did. Hurricanes are not supposed to grow from newly formed tropical storm to Category 5 monster in less than two days, the way Milton did — intensification so lightning-fast that it stunned experts.
“I can’t even find the right adjective,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann told me Monday about Milton. And Mann — author of the famous “hockey stick” graph showing the human-induced rise in global temperatures — pointed me to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory rapid-attribution study reporting that rainfall from Helene was boosted 50 percent by climate change.
Understanding why hurricanes now behave differently is a matter of “basic physics,” Mann said. Warmer temperatures provide more energy and moisture to serve as fuel for hurricanes, making them bigger and wetter. It’s not that there are more hurricanes; rather, the ones that do form tend to be stronger and release much more rain. Counting Helene, the United States has seen eight Category 4 or Category 5 landfalls since 2017 — the same number as during the previous 57 years.
Milton could make it nine, though forecasters expect the storm to diminish slightly in wind speed before it lands. Another impact of climate change — roughly half a foot of sea level rise in the Gulf since 2010 — makes storm surge and coastal flooding much worse than before. Residents of low-lying areas in the Tampa Bay area have been told to leave their homes, and Tampa Mayor Jane Castor announced bluntly: “If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die.”
Many Republicans are reluctant even to acknowledge climate change, much less do anything about it, because of politics, not physics.
Four of the states that suffered fatalities and major damage from Helene — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee — have Republican governors and legislative majorities. Given all the death and destruction, you might think those officials would be clamoring for urgent action to cut global greenhouse gas emissions and keep climate change short of the worst-case scenarios.
But the GOP’s unchallenged leader, Donald Trump, has famously called climate change a “hoax” and frequently rails against clean-energy power sources such as solar and wind. He says he would dismantle the tax credits and incentives in President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act that encourage moving away from fossil fuels, vowing that his energy policy would be “drill, baby, drill.”
His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), refused to give a straight answer when asked on the debate stage if he agrees climate change is a hoax. Nonsensically, he reasons — or pretends to reason — that even if carbon emissions are causing the planet to warm and making weather events more extreme, this somehow means the United States should extract more oil and natural gas, not less.
Not all MAGA-cult Republicans are as clueless as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who offered a hallucinatory conspiracy theory to explain the storm, posting on X: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” Yeesh.
A Pew Research Center poll in March found that only 12 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents believed climate change should be a “top priority” for the president and Congress, as opposed to 59 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who felt that way.
But in a July 2023 poll, The Post found that 55 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believed that human activity is “causing changes to the world’s climate, including an increase in average temperature.” That is far less than the 93 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who believe in climate change, but it’s still a majority.
Those numbers suggest to me that Republican voters might be prepared to support policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change if the party’s leaders proposed them. But GOP elected officials must take their cues from Trump, lest he turn on them. Reality is no match for MAGA dogma.
Meanwhile, Helene and Milton and the supercharged hurricanes that will follow do not care whether the states they plow through are red or blue. Nor do the droughts, the wildfires or the punishing heat waves. Whether we like it or not, climate change is an area of common ground: We’re all in this together.
