The Heat Is On

In the 2024 hurricane season, Long Island dodged a huge bullet of a hurricane. Although we are on the northern part of the Atlantic coast’s hurricane alley, along which the enormous storms often move, we somehow avoided one this year.

That is not going to last.

This year, instead, terrible hurricanes, somehow, rather than going north and hitting us, struck in the south — most notably, Helene and Milton, which devastated a large portion of the Southeastern United States.

Helene on September 26 made landfall in Florida, and just two weeks later, on October 9, Milton also made landfall in Florida.

The rapidity of their intensifying and to such a level that there’s now consideration of providing a new hurricane category beyond what has been the highest, Category 5, is a result of global warming or, as it’s often described, climate change.

“Hurricanes Milton and Helene Were Intensified by Climate Change” was the headline on October 16 of a report by EcoWatch, the environmental news publication.

Its article, by Michael Riojas, began: “Hurricanes — the most powerful storms on Earth — are becoming more widespread and destructive as a warming planet increases their intensity.”

“Hurricanes Helene and Milton are following the trend of these storms becoming supercharged and more likely to form,” said the piece, reporting on “a pair of studies from the World Weather Attribution.”

World Weather Attribution, or WWA, is an international partnership based at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford in England and established in 2014 to analyze and communicate how climate change may affect extreme weather events. Its component organizations include: Princeton University; the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environment in France; the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, which includes 31 countries; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The Helene report of WWA is headed: “Climate change key driver of catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Helene that devastated both coastal and inland communities.” It describes how the storm “formed in the Gulf of Mexico above record-hot sea surface temperature” and rapidly intensified to a Category 4 hurricane.

The Milton report of WWA is headed: “Yet another hurricane wetter, windier and more destructive because of climate change.” It relates: “Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico and intensified in the course of only two days into a Category 5 hurricane.” Both reports are online at worldweatherattribution.org.

WWA also has focused on global warming, causing drought, extreme rainfall and heatwaves. As to heatwaves, we had quite a weird week last week: summer-like weather in late October, a record temperature of 82 degrees at Long Island MacArthur Airport on October 22.

As to extreme rainfall, consider what happened in northern portions of Suffolk County this August: up to 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. “During the extreme rainfall event, mudslides washed out roads, streets were inundated with flood waters,” noted the National Weather Service.

Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine declared a state of emergency. He called it “a once-in-100-year storm. I don’t think we’re going to have to wait another 100 years. It tells you the impact climate change is having on our weather and the natural disasters we’re having.”

Kevin McAllister, founder and president of the Sag Harbor-based organization Defend H20, who has long warned about the impacts of global warming on Long Island, said the intense rainstorm was “on a tropical scale.”

Our “existing stormwater infrastructure is incapable of handling the volume of water associated with drenching tropics-like rain events. Restoring wetlands to absorb floodwaters, which can be accomplished simply by removing obsolete dams, is an important step in local adaptation,” said McAllister last week.

Meanwhile, global warming is causing a sea level rise. And the storm surge from a “hurricane on steroids,” as was seen to our south this year, hitting Long Island, and the impacts of “wind and water,” would cause “enormous flooding and damage. Coastal Long Island would be transformed,” he says.

“As a greater community we have to get behind some hard choices,” says McAllister. “We have to talk about seriously moving back off the coast to save our beaches.”

He scores “unbridled shore hardening, allowing the rapid expansion of stone, steel and geotextile seawalls on the coast.”

McAllister says: “Delays instituting adaptive strategies, such as coastal retreat, are a prescription for coastal armoring which is an inevitable death sentence for recreational beaches and critical wildlife habitat. It’s death by anchoring, and it will be a heartfelt loss for all Long Islanders if we allow it to happen.”

He describes the “dumping of sand,” what has been given the nice name “beach nourishment,” as short-term and “exorbitantly” expensive.

There is “way too much reliance on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,” says McAllister, and coastal schemes that are “economically and environmentally unsustainable: millions of dollars in sand washed out to sea in storm after storm. With every coastal community up and down the East Coast in the same boat and soliciting the federal government for sand dollars, the money will run dry.”

The stakes are very high.

The Long Island Regional Planning Council presented a “Long Island Economic Risk Flood Risk Study” last month which concluded that 43,000 businesses employing 370,000 people on Long Island’s south shore face a significant chance of flooding.

“As we saw with Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the devastation from severe flooding impacts not only residents along the south shore but commercial properties,” said John Cameron, the chair of the council, in a statement. “It is vital to quantify the potential economic hit our regional economy could take from the next big storm, and work with all levels of government on developing measures and strategies that can reduce the risk.”

Meanwhile, there’s the politics of climate change. USA Today ran an article on October 19 on this. It began, “Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are both campaigning on climate as the 2024 presidential race enters its final days.” It said: “While Harris has repeatedly referred to climate change as a ‘crisis,’ Trump has pushed back against the existence of climate change …” He has said, noted the piece by Kate S. Peterson, “It’s a hoax.”

Climate change, not too incidentally, used to strictly be called global warming. But as the USA Today article noted, political strategist Frank Luntz, in a memo, “advised the George W. Bush administration to refer to ‘climate change’ rather than ‘global warming,’ because it was ‘less frightening’ than the phrase ‘global warming.’” Bush took his advice.

My first journalism on the issue occurred in 1997 with a TV program I hosted interviewing Ross Gelbspan on his then just-published book “The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, The Cover-up, The Prescription.” Gelbspan was a reporter and editor at newspapers including The Washington Post, Village Voice and Boston Globe.

The summary of the work by Basic Books, its publisher: “This book not only brings home the imminence of climate change but also examines the campaign of deception by big coal and big oil that is keeping the issue off the public agenda. It examines the various arenas in which the battle for control of the issue is being fought — a battle with surprising political alliances and relentless obstructionism.”

Gelbspan, a Pulitzer Prize winner, passed away this past January.

These days the heat is very much on.

You can view the TV program on myenvirovideo.com website by going to its “index of programs” and clicking on Program 516, or by searching at YouTube.