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Category: Extreme weather

  • ‘No rebuilding without them’: Trump’s immigration crackdown will affect disaster recovery

    Trump’s immigration crackdown could cause chaos for communities trying to rebuild after devastating wildfires and floods, as the vast majority of skilled disaster-restoration workers are immigrants, a leading expert has warned.

    Republican and Democratic voters across the US are reeling from climate-fueled disasters, with thousands of homes and businesses destroyed and damaged by the ongoing fires in Los Angeles, as well as major hurricanes in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia last year.

    In each place, recovery depends on restoration or resilience workers, who travel from disaster to disaster cleaning up and rebuilding American communities while facing hazards such as unstable buildings, ash and other toxins, and water-borne diseases.

    “Like farm workers in the fields, immigrants are indispensable to fire, flood, and hurricane recovery in the US. There is absolutely no rebuilding without them,” said Saket Soni, director of Resilience Force, a labor organization with almost 4,000 members, who are primarily immigrant workers.

    “Mass deportations would completely upend the ongoing recovery in Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina from last year’s hurricanes. It would stall the rebuilding of LA after fires … and at this point, anyone anywhere is at risk of having their home impacted by a climate disaster. So everyone need these skilled workers.”

    The disaster industry is growing in the US, as climate-fueled extreme weather events become more intense and destructive – and as rebuilding becomes more profitable.

    While there is no official count, the current resilience workforce includes tens of thousands of mostly foreign-born workers from across Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as India and the Philippines, among other countries. It is a diverse mix of skilled workers that includes undocumented immigrants, as well as many documented asylum seekers, settled refugees and those with work permits through temporary protected status (TPS).

    Trump’s flurry of executive orders and policy ambitions threaten to upend the entire immigration and asylum system. Expanding workplace raids and mass deportations may temporarily satisfy Trump’s anti-immigrant base, but the knock on labor shortages will likely be felt across multiple sectors including construction, food, hospitality, and disaster work.

    “The deportations plan is so out of touch with the reality of the victims, who without immigrants will continue to spend months, maybe years in hotels living out of pocket. Recovery often makes the poor even poorer and getting back into your home is the key safeguard against spiraling inequality,” said Soni, who has been involved in 25 disaster-recovery efforts over the past two decades.

    “We’re headed for a moment where there’ll be a reckoning between such political ploys and reality. And at some point this will become a moral question rather than a political one.”

    Among the biggest obstacles facing families after a destructive fire, tornado, or flood are labor shortages – and funding. Trump’s policy pledges will make both worse.

    On Friday, Trump announced his desire to potentially shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during a visit to North Carolina, where rural Republican-voting communities faced some of the worst damage from Hurricane Helene – one of the most destructive and deadly storms to hit the US mainland in years. Helene was among 27 separate billion-dollar disasters to hit the US in 2024.

    The estimated cost of the damage in North Carolina from Helene, which hit six states across southern Appalachia all of which voted for Trump, is almost $60 billion. Here, four months after the floods, there is much work still to do – from debris removal and mold remediation to roof replacements and geological repairs to hillsides.

    Also on Friday, Trump visited Los Angeles, where more than 11,000 homes have been destroyed and the damage caused by just two of the blazes – the Palisades and Eaton fires – is now estimated at $275 billion. At least 150,000 people have been displaced, and many have applied to FEMA for help. “You don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government, you fix it yourself,” said Trump, after touring some of the fire-ravaged area.

    FEMA provides emergency assistance for temporary accommodation, food and unemployment benefits, as well as reimbursing individuals and states for clean-up and rebuilding costs, which are not covered by private insurance.

    “Abolishing FEMA would invite a pretty major response over the next few years because no state will absorb that amount of responsibility or spending. The states would rise up – especially the very red states like Florida, Texas, and Louisiana that this administration counts on for its constituents and where disasters happen again and again,” said Soni.

    “We will need FEMA to be bigger, not smaller. Any resident who’s been through a hurricane or wildfire, whether Democrat or Republican, will agree with that. Fires aren’t making a distinction between political parties. We have Republicans in California who need FEMA just as much as the Democrats.”

    On Monday, it emerged that the Trump administration had issued new quotas to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ramp up raids and arrests, the Washington Post reported.

    The expansion of workplace raids could force some restoration workers underground – as happened in 2022 after Hurricane Idalia when Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed draconian anti-immigrant legislation. “Immigrant workers put their tools down and left in fear, leaving homes to be rebuilt and families in limbo. That was very bad for Floridians who were depending on those workers, but the workers needed to be careful,” said Soni, speaking from North Carolina where he was meeting homeowners desperate to repair and return to their homes.

    “Even among those who are documented, many restoration workers have a tenuous foothold in America – people who are not yet citizens and are being threatened by Trump. People are scared, and yet these workers have a deep sense of vocation. There’s something sacred about working after a fire or a hurricane so that a family can come home. What is more important than that?”

    The resilience workforce has grown massively since Katrina flattened New Orleans in 2005, after which the city was rebuilt by mostly undocumented Latino workers. Since then, the industry has consolidated, with private-equity firms buying up small businesses, with minimal protection for workers and little regulatory oversight.

    The working and living conditions can be brutal for the immigrant workers, many of whom come from countries hit hard by the climate crisis caused by planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions – of which the US is the largest historic contributor.

    “We have workers from Honduras who right now are rebuilding the homes of Floridians – and are in Florida because a hurricane destroyed their home and forced them to leave. Do you know how much grace it takes to replace someone else’s roof while your own home is uninhabitable? And yet the workers persevere with grace and persistence,” said Soni, author of The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, which chronicles the story of Indians lured to the US to help rebuild New Orleans.

    “Volunteer efforts in Appalachia and Los Angeles have been extraordinary, but the truth is that the scale of damage we’re seeing across the US requires a skilled, scaled workforce. If you deport one generation of restoration workers, you can’t just add water and have another generation appear. It’s taken two decades to build the workforce that we have. And without them, everyone’s at risk.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘No rebuilding without them’: Trump’s immigration crackdown will affect disaster recovery on Feb 2, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Insurers Are Abandoning Homeowners Over Wildfire Risk But Investing in Big Oil

    The massive Los Angles fires, stoked by climate change, have been devastating for thousands of displaced homeowners and renters whose dwellings have been damaged or destroyed. The full costs of the catastrophe are still emerging but will surely run into the tens of billions of dollars. The fires have once again thrown the growing crisis of the U.S. insurance industry into the media spotlight.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump says he’s sending water to LA. It’s actually going to megafarms.

    While President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of far-reaching decrees during his first week in office, one relatively niche issue has received a disproportionate share of the president’s ire and attention: California water policy. That might make sense if the remedies he’s pursuing could help stem deadly fires like those that have killed at least 29 people in the Los Angeles area in recent weeks. Indeed, the president has claimed that “firefighters were unable to fight the blaze due to dry hydrants, empty reservoirs, and inadequate water infrastructure.” 

    But unfortunately for future fire victims, the sole apparent aim of the president’s new policies is to deliver more water to farmers hundreds of miles away from the state’s fire zones.

    On his first day as president, Trump issued an executive order that directed his Interior Department to “route more water” to the southern part of the state. Then, on Sunday he issued another order that directed the department to immediately “override” the state’s management of its water, even if it meant overruling California law. The order also suggested Trump could withhold federal wildfire aid if the state failed to comply to his satisfaction.

    But the new measures wouldn’t deliver any more water to Los Angeles at all. Instead, his attempt to relax water restrictions would move more water to large farms in the state’s sparsely populated Central Valley, a longtime pet issue for the president, who attempted a similar maneuver during his first term. This time he’s going further, proposing to gut endangered species rules and overrule state policy to deliver a win for the influential farmers who backed all three of his campaigns.

    None of this has any relation to wildfires in Los Angeles. For one thing, the city isn’t experiencing a water shortage. It was ferocious, hurricane-force winds that fanned the Palisades and Eaton Fires — not a lack of water to contain the blazes. While some local water tanks in the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades did run out of water, that was only because the city couldn’t pump new supplies up to the hillside neighborhood fast enough to keep up with skyrocketing demand during the fire, not because there wasn’t enough water available to send there.

    Even if Los Angeles were low on water, Trump’s executive orders wouldn’t help with that, because the federal government’s canal system doesn’t actually deliver any water to the Los Angeles area. More than 90 percent of that water goes to farms in the Central Valley, with the rest going to far-away cities around San Francisco and Sacramento. All this water is already spoken for, and during dry years the government can’t even fulfill all its existing contracts. The most it can do is potentially ease environmental rules that limit some of the pumping, which farmers have long opposed.

    But even some farm advocates are skeptical of the sweeping scope of Trump’s most recent order, and its specious connection to wildfire.

    “I am always appreciative of attempts to create more flexibility for moving water around the state, but [federal] water by and large goes to agricultural contractors,” said Alex Biering, the senior policy advocate at the California Farm Bureau Federation, the state’s leading agricultural lobby. “I don’t believe that any amount of additional water coming from the federal project would be able to be applied to stop that fire. It’s an attempt to tie water supply to a natural disaster, but those connections don’t exist in reality.”

    Environmental groups, meanwhile, have blasted Trump’s attempt to strongarm California water policy, saying his most recent order would be devastating for the state’s vulnerable fish species — and the integrity of the federal Endangered Species Act as a whole.

    “It’s unrecognizable as anything that anybody who knows anything about California water would write,” said Jon Rosenfield, the science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental nonprofit in the Golden State. “It’s not from this planet.

    California’s water system has been the subject of heated political debate for decades. Over the course of the 20th century, the federal government and the state of California built a complex series of dams and canals designed to move water from the northern parts of the state, which see substantial precipitation and snowmelt, down to the agriculture-rich Central Valley and the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The federal government operates dams, canals, and pumping stations that push water south through the valley, and then the state operates the canal that extends down to Los Angeles. The system provides water to around 30 million Californians and irrigates around 4 million acres of the nation’s most productive farmland.

    The crux of this transport system is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a sensitive marshland region where two of the state’s largest rivers converge and flow out into the San Francisco Bay. This area is also the point where endangered fish species like Chinook salmon enter from the Pacific and swim upstream to spawn. If the federal and state pumps move too much water out of the Delta for farms and cities, they reverse current flows, pulling fish toward their predators or sucking them into the pumps. This is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. One of these vulnerable fish species, the 2-inch gray baitfish known as the Delta smelt, is particularly sensitive to these current changes, and the government often limits its pumping to protect it. 

    On Monday night, Trump erroneously claimed in a Truth Social post that he had the military “turn on the water … flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond” by activating the pumps, which had been offline for a few days for maintenance. The pumped water does not come from the Pacific Northwest, and because the federal government already controls the pumps and uses them all the time, such an action does not require the involvement of the military.

    A tractor drives on a melon farm near an irrigation canal in Firebaugh, California. President Trump has issued multiple executive orders seeking to deliver more water through the state’s canal system. Photo by David Swanson / AFP via Getty Images

    It’s California’s own state-run canal system that actually delivers water to Los Angeles and numerous other cities in Southern California — and the federal government has no jurisdiction over this. The state government curtails these water deliveries somewhat during dry years to maintain a robust supply, and it seldom provides all the water that each city requests. However, deliveries to Los Angeles were typical last year, and reservoir levels in the state are above average. (Furthermore, the Los Angeles metro gets a larger share of its water from other sources, like the Colorado River and the Owens Valley.)

    Despite his East Coast upbringing, Donald Trump has fixated on Central Valley water issues for years. He chose David Bernhardt, who has lobbied for the influential Westlands Water District, to lead the Department of the Interior during his first administration. He also hosted multiple rallies in the region during his 2020 campaign, during which he frequently foregrounded water policy. During his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast last year, then-candidate Trump led the host through a diatribe about water, describing dried-out farmland he saw while traveling through the region with Central Valley members of Congress years earlier.

    “We’re driving up, and I had never seen it before,” he said. “I said, ‘Do you have a drought? They said, ‘No … in order to protect a tiny little fish, the water gets routed into the Pacific.’ So I see this, and I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

    During his first term, Trump did draft new rules in an attempt to accelerate water deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Those rules proposed that pumping should be limited only when smelt-friendly turbid waters are present in the Delta, but they also contained a few provisions that farm groups said led to wasted water during recent wet periods, and failed to prevent salmon death even by their own metrics. After Joe Biden succeeded Trump in office, the Democratic president tweaked those rules in a joint effort with the state of California — and many environmental groups have criticized Biden’s rules as worse for fish than Trump’s.

    Trump may go much further this time. His most recent executive order calls for another wholesale rewrite of the pumping rules, proposes building new dams around the state, and even suggests that his administration could declare the Delta smelt functionally extinct. It also proposes to convene the federal committee known colloquially as the “God Squad,” a group of agency heads that can grant exemptions to the Endangered Species Act. This has only happened a few times since the law took effect, but in theory the “God Squad” could allow the government to pump much more water to farms, even if it means jeopardizing the very existence of smelt or salmon runs — or drying out the Delta.

    Some of California’s most powerful water districts, which are typically run by large agricultural landowners, have praised the executive order, although they haven’t followed Trump in connecting it to the fires. For instance, the Westlands Water District, which covers more than half a million acres on the west side of the Central Valley, said in a statement that they “welcomed” Trump’s “leadership in addressing the barriers to water delivery.”

    But despite the bluster of the White House actions, it’s far from clear that any of these changes will come to pass, at least in the short term. California water is one of the most heavily litigated issues in the United States, and even small tweaks to the state’s pumping system would likely raise legal challenges.

    “They can try a lot of this stuff,” said Biering, the California Farm Bureau advocate. “It’s just about: How many times do you want to get sued?”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump says he’s sending water to LA. It’s actually going to megafarms. on Jan 28, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Dispatch: Through The Fire

    Unprecedented January wildfires devastate Los Angeles, as communities face both natural disaster and militarized state response. The Eaton Fire displaces numerous families in the Pasadena-Altadena area, including multigenerational Black households who have built lives in these neighborhoods for decades. Among them, the Edwards family stands displaced from their home of 32 years.

    For those seeking to support impacted community members, the Edwards family’s GoFundMe, provides direct aid to one of many displaced households fighting to survive. A broader directory of displaced Black families seeking support can be found here.

    The post Dispatch: Through The Fire appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • New York Climate Activists Show A Powerful Path Forward

    On the evening of Dec. 10, 12 self-identified elder climate activists sat around the Christmas tree in the New York State Capitol, in Albany, singing carols as they waited to be arrested. The protesters, who were there to support New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, had been told by police they would face criminal misdemeanor trespass charges if they stayed put.

    “Normally, for a protest like this, we’d expect to be written a citation rather than charged with a misdemeanor,” said Michael Richardson of Third Act Upstate New York, which helped plan the civil disobedience.

    The post New York Climate Activists Show A Powerful Path Forward appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A Public Model For Home Insurance

    With every extreme weather event, housing is damaged and belongings are lost. Insurance is supposed to be the safety net that helps people to recover and restart their lives. But as major disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms increase in frequency and severity thanks to climate change, more insurance companies are cutting back on policies, jacking up premium rates, or refusing to cover whole areas of the country. This change is leaving people who live in affected homes—including everything from single-family houses to multifamily rental buildings—facing financial hardship and even homelessness, among other ruinous consequences.

    The post A Public Model For Home Insurance appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • What happens to kids when their schools are destroyed?

    Kids lose so much when a disaster strikes. Too many have lost family members to the wildfires that have raged across Los Angeles in recent days. They’ve lost homes. They’ve lost the sense of security and predictability that so many kids depend on. And, to add insult to injury, many of them have lost their schools.

    At least nine schools in the Los Angeles area have been destroyed or severely damaged by the fires. Video posted by the principal of Odyssey Charter School’s south campus in Altadena shows flames still smoldering in the buildings as smoke rises from the playground, blotting out the sky. Marquez Charter Elementary School in Pacific Palisades “is dust,” one parent told The Cut. Meanwhile, thousands more schools were closed last week as communities faced evacuation warnings, power outages, and smoke-filled air, leaving more than 600,000 students out of school.

    Unfortunately, these disruptions are part of a new normal for kids as climate disasters become more frequent. Last year, Americans experienced 27 weather-related disasters costing $1 billion or more in damage, the second-highest number ever — meanwhile, the number of days American schools are closed for extreme heat has doubled in recent years.

    There’s often nothing officials can do to avoid a closure, especially if schools are damaged or without power. But “when schools close, kids aren’t learning,” said Melinda Morrill, an economics professor at North Carolina State University who has studied the impact of closures.

    Research on school closures after hurricanes Matthew and Florence in North Carolina is sobering. Especially in the early grades, “students didn’t bounce back,” said Cassandra R. Davis, a professor of public policy at UNC Chapel Hill who studied the closures. In some cases, the academic impact persisted for more than a year.

    Beyond academics, millions of students rely on their schools for mental health support or services like speech therapy; millions more need the free or reduced-price food school cafeterias provide. Schools are also a crucial source of stability in many children’s lives, a place they go five days a week to see their friends, their teachers, their favorite books, their art on the walls, the special stuffed animal in the calm-down corner. Losing all that can be a huge emotional blow.

    The students from Odyssey Charter School are meeting for now at a local Boys and Girls Club, where teachers and staff have been visiting them, principal Bonnie Brimecombe told me. Some kids who used to have big, vibrant personalities are “just not talking, and they just sort of sit,” she said. Others “are just hugging you so tight and they don’t let go.”

    Experts, educators, and families are just beginning to understand what helps students recover after storms or fires devastate their schools. But one thing they agree on is that districts and policymakers need to start preparing schools and students for the next disaster — today. “It’s going to keep happening over and over and over,” said Susanna Joy Smith, a mom of two in Asheville, North Carolina, whose kids were out of school for a month last year after Hurricane Helene. “We need to learn from these experiences and we need to adapt.”

    Losing school hurts kids academically and emotionally

    In the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD, all schools closed for at least two days last week as the fires raged. Many reopened on Monday, but as of Monday evening around 10 remained closed, some because they were in evacuation zones and three because they had been badly damaged or destroyed, the office of LAUSD Deputy Superintendent of Business Services and Operations Pedro Salcido told me. Students from Marquez and another destroyed elementary school will be relocated to two nearby schools for the rest of the school year. All 23 schools in the Pasadena Unified School District, which includes Altadena and other areas devastated by the Eaton Fire, remain closed this week.

    It’s a disruption sadly familiar to more and more kids and families around the country. In 2018, the Camp Fire destroyed 8 of the 9 schools in Paradise, California. The same year, Hurricane Florence raged through North Carolina, forcing some schools to close for as long as 26 days. Then, last year, Hurricane Helene hit the western part of the state, destroying at least one school and leaving others closed for weeks due to flood damage and lack of power or water.

    School closures after Hurricane Florence were associated with significant drops in students’ math and reading test scores, Morrill found, with the impact seen across demographic groups and among both higher- and lower-performing students. “All students are affected,” Morrill said.

    For Smith’s older son, “missing a month of the second grade is just huge,” especially since the early grades are so important for building reading skills.

    Many school districts are shifting to remote instruction for at least some weather-related closures, like snow days. But remote school was difficult for many students during COVID lockdowns, a time when kids experienced significant learning loss. Not every kid has access to a laptop or internet connection, and neurodivergent students or those with learning differences may especially struggle with virtual learning.

    The students at Odyssey are scared of a return to the days of pandemic virtual learning, Brimecombe told me. “There’s so much trauma from their experiences being on Zoom.”

    The impact of missed days can also compound when disaster strikes the same kids again and again. In places like North Carolina, where “we typically get hit by a tropical storm every other year,” students can find their education disrupted again and again, pushing them further behind, Davis said. “It’s like a constant catch-up.”

    Meanwhile, students can struggle emotionally long after a disaster is over. Months after Hurricane Matthew, teachers had to stop class during rainstorms to help students who were afraid of getting “washed away,” Davis said.

    In the wake of Helene, Smith’s younger son, who is 4, is very aware of the fact that “the lights could go out overnight and they might not go on for weeks,” she told me. “It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also the reality these kids are growing up in.”

    Kids face a complicated recovery, too

    Adults can still help kids cope with this reality, experts say. That means learning how to adjust curricula to account for lost time as well as providing mental health support to both students and teachers, Davis said.

    Kids also need to learn about climate change and disaster preparedness in school, Smith said. “They’re just life skills for kids today.” Vox’s Allie Volpe has tips for preparing kids for climate disasters; LAist has a list of resources for talking to kids about fires, specifically.

    Making school buildings more climate-resilient is also important, experts say, something school districts around the country are already working on. And when disaster does strike, districts need to figure out how to get kids back to school as quickly as possible and arrange makeup time for the days they missed, Morrill said. It’s not enough to hold “weekend classes for the bottom 10 percent,” she told me. “Everybody is going to experience some harm.”

    At Odyssey, the first priority is finding classroom space kids can return to — school leaders are reaching out to local churches and rental spaces, and have launched a GoFundMe to help with costs. They hope to be back in person next week.

    When they are together in a new space, “we’re not going to start with learning,” Brimecombe said. “We’re going to start with community. We’re going to start with social-emotional lessons. We’re going to start with joy.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What happens to kids when their schools are destroyed? on Jan 19, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Mutual Aid Networks Are Mobilizing Amid Los Angeles Fires

    I’ve always said that Los Angeles is a mirror: Whatever you’re seeking, you’ll find it reflected back to you. Sure, the city has its ugly parts — celebrity worship and diet fads and smog that blots out the sky — but Los Angeles’ true core is multitudinous. Home to about 13 million people, the sprawling metropolis brims with countless communities and enclaves, neighborhoods and histories. If the ugly is all you see, then you’re not looking hard enough.

    Since the Palisades and Eaton fires roared to life last week, Los Angeles residents have shown how much strength and solidarity lies in their communities.

    The post Mutual Aid Networks Are Mobilizing Amid Los Angeles Fires appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Global economy could shrink 50% between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries

    The global economy could face a 50 percent loss in gross domestic product between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonize and restore nature, according to a new report.

    The stark warning from risk management experts at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, or IFoA, hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic well-being from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises, and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses math and statistics to analyze financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.

    Their report was published after data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5 Celsius target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.

    Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonization, remove carbon from the atmosphere, and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50 percent in the two decades before 2090, the IFoA report said.

    At 3 C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.

    Sandy Trust, the lead author of the report, said there was no realistic plan in place to avoid this scenario.

    He said economic predictions, which estimate that damages from global heating would be as low as 2 percent of global economic production for a 3 C rise in global average surface temperature, were inaccurate and were blinding political leaders to the risks of their policies.

    The climate risk assessments being used by financial institutions, politicians and civil servants to assess the economic effects of global heating were wrong, the report said, because they ignored the expected severe effects of climate change such as tipping points, sea temperature rises, migration, and conflict as a result of global heating.

    “[They] do not recognize there is a risk of ruin. They are precisely wrong, rather than being roughly right,” the report said.

    If these risks were taken into account the world faced an increasing risk of “planetary insolvency,” where the Earth’s systems were so degraded that humans could no longer receive enough of the critical services they relied on to support societies and economies.

    “You can’t have an economy without a society, and a society needs somewhere to live,” said Trust.

    “Nature is our foundation, providing food, water, and air, as well as the raw materials and energy that power our economy. Threats to the stability of this foundation are risks to future human prosperity, which we must take action to avoid.”

    The report, named “Planetary Solvency — finding our balance with nature,” criticizes the dominant economic theory used by governments in the U.K., U.S. and across the developed world, which focuses on what humans can take from the planet to create growth for themselves and fails to take into account the real risks from nature degradation to societies and economies.

    The report called for a paradigm shift by political leaders, civil servants, and governments to tackle global heating. It said: “Leaders and decision-makers across the globe need to understand why these changes are needed.

    “It is these extremes that should drive policy decisions … policymakers are currently unable to hear warnings about risks to ongoing human progress or unwilling to act upon them with the urgency required.”

    The report proposes a planetary solvency risk dashboard, to provide information to support policymakers to drive human activity within the finite bounds of the Earth.

    Tim Lenton, the chair of climate change and Earth systems science at the University of Exeter, and a co-author on the report, said: “Current approaches are failing to properly assess escalating planetary risks or help control them. Planetary solvency applies the established approaches of risk professionals to our life-support system and finds it in jeopardy. It offers a clear way of seeing global risks and prioritizing action to limit them.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Global economy could shrink 50% between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries on Jan 18, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Fire Weather

    The apocalyptic wildfires that have erupted in the boreal forest in Siberia, the Russian Far East and Canada, climate scientists repeatedly warned, would inevitably move southwards as rising global temperatures created hotter, more fire-prone landscapes. Now they have. The failures in California, where Los Angeles has had no significant rainfall in eight months, are not only failures of preparedness — the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, decreased funds for the fire department by $17 million — but a failure globally to halt the extraction of fossil fuel.

    The post Fire Weather appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘Weather Whiplash’ Is Fueling The Los Angeles Fires

    It’s supposed to be the rainy season in Southern California, but the last time Los Angeles measured more than a tenth-inch of rain was eight months ago, after the city logged one of the soggiest periods in its recorded history. Since then, bone-dry conditions have set the stage for the catastrophic wildfires now descending upon the metropolis from multiple directions.

    This quick cycling between very wet and very dry periods — one example of what scientists have come to call “weather whiplash” — creates prime conditions for wildfires: The rain encourages an abundance of brush and grass, and once all that vegetation dries out, it only takes a spark and a gust of wind to fuel a deadly fire.

    The post ‘Weather Whiplash’ Is Fueling The Los Angeles Fires appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The ‘weather whiplash’ fueling the Los Angeles fires is becoming more common

    It’s supposed to be the rainy season in Southern California, but the last time Los Angeles measured more than a tenth-inch of rain was eight months ago, after the city logged one of the soggiest periods in its recorded history. Since then, bone-dry conditions have set the stage for the catastrophic wildfires now descending upon the metropolis from multiple directions.

    This quick cycling between very wet and very dry periods — one example of what scientists have come to call “weather whiplash” — creates prime conditions for wildfires: The rain encourages an abundance of brush and grass, and once all that vegetation dries out, it only takes a spark and a gust of wind to fuel a deadly fire. That’s what happened in Los Angeles County this week, when a fierce windstorm fueled the Palisades and Eaton fires, which as of Wednesday night had killed at least five people, destroyed more than 2,000 buildings, and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes.

    The kind of weather whiplash that fueled the fires is only becoming more common, and not just in the United States. A new analysis in the peer-reviewed academic journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment has found that rapid shifts between heavy rain and drought (and vice versa) are becoming more intense — and the trend is unfolding faster than climate models have projected. Across the world’s land area, weather whiplash within three-month periods has increased by 31 to 66 percent since the mid-20th century, according to the research. That means that most places around the world find themselves getting both wetter and drier in quick succession, a dangerous combination that can lead to landslides, crop losses, and even the spread of diseases.

    “The volatility of wet and dry extremes is this sort of emerging signature of climate change,” said Daniel Swain, a co-author of the paper and a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “This year, unfortunately, I couldn’t have asked for a better poster child for this process than Southern California.”

    Swain, along with researchers across the United States and in Switzerland, analyzed a flurry of recent research on what they refer to as “hydroclimate volatility” and developed a way to measure how it might get worse in the future. They found that the swings between very wet and very dry weather are rising exponentially for each passing fraction of a degree the globe warms.

    “I do think this is a big part of the reason why it feels like climate change has accelerated,” Swain said.

    To understand why wet and dry periods are becoming more extreme, it can help to think of the atmosphere as a kitchen sponge that’s becoming more and more absorbent as it warms. When you wring out this more powerful sponge, it sends down heavier rains than before. On the other hand, when the sponge dries out, it has even more capacity to suck up moisture from the soil and plants below, parching the landscape and turning it into tinder. The paper’s authors coin a new phrase for this phenomenon: the “expanding atmospheric sponge effect.” Jim Stagge, who runs the Hydrologic Extremes Research Laboratory at The Ohio State University and was not involved in the new research, called it “a clever analogy” and said the paper’s evidence was generally convincing.

    The volatile swings between wet and dry patterns aren’t unfolding uniformly across the world. The Mediterranean, for example, is getting less rain on average, whereas the eastern United States is getting distinctly wetter, according to Swain. While the expanding atmospheric sponge effect is happening everywhere, changes in regional weather patterns are either countering some of its effects or else amplifying them. The regions experiencing the biggest whiplash include a broad swath of land from northern Africa through the Arabian Peninsula and into South Asia, as well as high latitudes in Canada and Eurasia, the research found.

    Adapting to a future that’s both wetter and drier presents a unique social challenge. For instance, it would be easy to get tunnel vision and focus on preparing for water scarcity, only to accidentally make a town more vulnerable to flooding in the process, Swain pointed out. Flexibility is key to successful interventions, according to the new paper. Some options include expanding natural floodplains and removing impermeable pavement from cities — approaches that allow the soil to absorb more rainfall, lessening flood risk, and at the same time stockpiling water underground for future use.

    While extreme weather like that highlighted in the new research gets the most attention, it’s also worth noting what the world is seeing less of as the climate changes: the moderate weather of the past. Light rain, the study observes, is becoming less common nearly everywhere.

    “When it rains, it pours,” Swain said. “Literally.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ‘weather whiplash’ fueling the Los Angeles fires is becoming more common on Jan 9, 2025.

    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

  • California overhauled its insurance system. Then Los Angeles caught fire.

    On Tuesday, after a ferocious Santa Ana windstorm blew through Southern California, a severe brush fire broke out in the wealthy Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, burning 1,000 structures and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate as of Wednesday afternoon. Another large brush fire broke out near Pasadena around the same time, killing at least two people. Together the two blazes threatened some of the most valuable homes and businesses in the United States. The damage from the Palisades Fire alone could exceed $10 billion, according to a preliminary estimate from J.P. Morgan.

    If this estimate holds true, it will test insurers’ commitment to a market that has been teetering on the verge of collapse for the better part of a decade now. Over the past five years, California has become a poster child for what climate-fueled weather disasters can do to a state’s home insurance market. Following a rash of historic wildfires in 2017 and 2018, insurance companies have fled the state, dropped tens of thousands of customers in flammable areas, and raised prices by double-digit percentages.

    Until recently, elected officials have taken few major steps to address the crisis. But late last month, after more than a year of drafting, California’s insurance commissioner unveiled a set of reforms that he claimed will bring companies back into the fold as they take effect this year. 

    “This is a historic moment for California,” said Ricardo Lara, the state’s insurance commissioner, when he revealed the rules in December. “With input from thousands of residents throughout California, this reform balances protecting consumers with the need to strengthen our market against climate risks.”

    The rules come after months of debate among state insurance officials, lawmakers, insurance companies, and consumer advocates. The biggest change is that California will now require many insurance companies to do more business in what the state calls “distressed areas,” the fire-prone scrubland and mountain regions where insurers are now hiking prices and dropping customers. Companies will soon have to ensure that their market share in these areas is at least 85 percent of their total statewide market share — in other words, if a company controls 10 percent of the state’s insurance market, it must control at least 8.5 percent of the market in fire-prone areas. 

    This mandate should push big companies like State Farm and Allstate to pick up customers they’ve dropped in flammable regions like the mountainous north of the state. Some companies have already begun to offer new policies in burned areas in anticipation of the state’s new rules: the insurance company Mercury announced last week that it will be the first insurance company in the state to offer new policies in Paradise, California, which was destroyed in the catastrophic 2018 Camp Fire. The move recognizes the town’s work to mitigate future fires by clearing trees and hardening homes.

    The requirement to expand coverage, coupled with recent announcements from companies like Mercury, “should give consumers hope that competition and options will be returning,” said Amy Bach, the head of insurance customer advocacy group United Policyholders, in a statement.

    Flames from the Palisades Fire approach homes in Pacific Palisades, California. The fire has threatened some of the most valuable homes in the United States.
    Flames from the Palisades Fire approach homes in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. The fire has threatened some of the most valuable homes in the United States.
    Photo by Tiffany Rose / Getty Images

    In return for this added coverage, the state is making a few big tweaks that will allow insurers to pass on the price of fire risk to their customers. California is the only state in the country that doesn’t allow insurance companies to use forward-looking “catastrophe models” when they set prices. It also prohibits companies from factoring in the rising costs of reinsurance, the insurance purchased by insurance companies to ensure they’re able to pay out big claims.

    These two restrictions have kept prices artificially low for years, and also prevented insurers from planning for climate change impacts, creating a de facto subsidy for homeowners in risky areas. 

    “This addresses the major stumbling blocks that companies have been identifying for a decade, so that’s a positive,” said Rex Frazier, the president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, the state’s leading insurance trade group. 

    This trade-off has some residents in fire-prone areas worried. Insurance companies might now have to offer more policies in flammable zones, but they also have more latitude to increase prices. 

    “I’m not optimistic that it will improve the experience of the consumer as the insurers can now pass certain costs onto consumers which I’m expecting will result in higher premiums,” said Jason Lloyd, who moved to mountainous Lake County last spring. He and his wife came to the area because they wanted to be closer to his wife’s family, but when they made an offer on a home, they learned that they would have to pay more than $8,000 a year for insurance, or else go to the California FAIR Plan, a state-run insurance program that offers minimal coverage. 

    Lloyd and his wife later bought another home in Hidden Valley Lake, a town that has taken ambitious steps to reduce flammable vegetation, but their insurance premium is still more than $4,500 a year, more than triple what it was on their last home in Kansas. Lloyd is worried that his insurance company will hike his price further under the new rules.

    Other states across the West such as Colorado and Oregon are also seeing insurance coverage gaps emerge after big wildfires, though their problems are less acute than those in the Golden State. In Colorado, for instance, officials just recently established a state fire insurance backstop like California’s FAIR Plan, since it’s only in the past few years that customers there have been dropped en masse. California’s grand bargain with the insurance industry provides a blueprint for those other states: If you want to address coverage gaps, you need to give insurers broader authority to set prices. 

    Firefighters battle the Eaton Fire near the Altadena area of Los Angeles, California. The fire exploded in strength earlier this week amid a fierce Santa Ana windstorm.
    Firefighters battle the Eaton Fire near the Altadena area of Los Angeles County, California. The fire exploded in strength earlier this week amid a fierce Santa Ana windstorm.
    hoto by David McNew / Getty Images

    Even this might not be enough. The past few years have seen a reprieve from major wildfires like the ones that struck in 2017 and 2018, but this week’s blazes in the Los Angeles area could cause billions of dollars of damage, on par with an event like the Camp Fire.

    Joel Laucher, a former regulator and fire insurance expert at the consumer advocacy organization United Policyholders, said that the damage from the Los Angeles blazes could lead to further price hikes and more availability gaps.

    “These are going to be major losses, certainly,” he told Grist. “Certain areas are definitely going to have new challenges, to the degree that insurers are going to be able to charge to the rate they believe those areas deserve to pay.” Laucher said that insurance companies may not decline to renew as many policies as they might have under previous state rules, but they could still avoid selling policies in some of the affected areas.

    Frazier, of the insurance trade group, voiced similar concerns. He said that another round of monster blazes on the scale of 2017 and 2018 could drive the insurance industry away from the state once again, despite the commissioners’ reforms. 

    “If we were to have a couple more unprecedented years, all bets are off,” he told Grist. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California overhauled its insurance system. Then Los Angeles caught fire. on Jan 8, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • People are flocking to Florida. Will there be enough water for them?

    While wading through wetlands in the headwaters of the Everglades, where tall, serrated grasses shelter alligators and water moccasins, agroecologist Elizabeth Boughton described one of Florida’s biggest environmental problems: There’s either too much water, or too little. 

    An intensifying climate, overexploitation of groundwater, and a development boom have catalyzed a looming water supply shortage — something that once seemed impossible for the rainy peninsula.

    “It’s becoming more of an issue that everyone’s aware of,” said Boughton, who studies ecosystems at the Archbold Biological Station, a research facility in Highlands County, Florida, that manages Buck Island Ranch. The ranch — a sprawling 10,500 acres of pasture lands and wildlife habitats across south-central Florida — both conserves water through land restoration while also draining it as a working cattle ranch. “You kind of take water for granted until you realize, ‘Oh my gosh, this is something that is in danger of being lost.’”

    • A woman in a hat walks under a ranch sign
    • A woman stands in a field of grass

    An entrance to Buck Island Ranch, a 10,500-acre working cattle farm in Highlands County, Florida (left). Agroecologist Elizabeth Boughton gestures to a grassy field of bluestems and sedges on Buck Island Ranch on December 16, 2024. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist

    Like many places worldwide, the dwindling freshwater availability in Florida is being exacerbated by a warming atmosphere. Sea levels in the state’s coastal regions have already risen dramatically in the last few decades, pushing salt water into the groundwater and creating an impotable brackish mixture that is costly to treat. A report released last summer by the Florida Office of Demographic Research found that the state may experience a water supply shortage as soon as this year, with the problem escalating in coming decades.

    Florida’s groundwater supply is the primary source of drinking water for roughly 90 percent of the state’s 23 million inhabitants, and is vital for agricultural irrigation and power generation. Public use by households, municipalities, and businesses accounts for the largest depletion of groundwater in Florida, while agriculture is responsible for at least a quarter of withdrawals. 

    Virtually all of Florida’s groundwater comes from the state’s expansive network of aquifers, a porous layer of sediment that underlies the peninsula. When it rains, water soaks into the ground and gets trapped in gaps in the rock formation — providing an underground reserve of fresh water that humans can tap into with wells and pumps. 

    But most Floridians live near large population centers — like Miami and Tampa — where the freshest aquifer water is too deep to access or too salty to be readily used. With nearly 900 people moving to Florida each day, the Sunshine State is only continuing to grow, fueling a thirsty rush for new housing developments. 

    Clayton Aldern / Grist

    The future of the state’s water has long looked bleak, and a ballooning population is ramping up an already-fraught situation. As leading policymakers push pro-development agendas and parcels of agricultural land are sold to the highest bidder, districts are grappling with political demands to advance water permits — often at the cost of conservation. The Florida Office of Demographic Research report found that the conservation, infrastructure, and restoration projects necessary to tackle the incoming water deficit will cost some $3.3 billion by 2040, with the state footing over $500 million of that bill. But according to Florida TaxWatch, a government-accountability nonprofit, current water projects and sources of funding aren’t coordinated or comprehensive enough to sustain the state’s population growth. 

    Global warming has changed the nature of rainfall in Florida, increasing the likelihood of extreme rain events in swaths of the state, but even torrential bouts of rain won’t replenish drained aquifers. Intensified hurricanes are primed to overwhelm wastewater systems, forcing sewage dumps that contaminate the water supply, while rising sea levels and floods further damage public water infrastructure. Higher temperatures that drive prolonged droughts also contribute to groundwater scarcity: Florida has experienced at least one severe drought per decade since the onset of the 20th century. 

    Such climate-borne crises are already playing out across the United States, and beyond. Roughly 53 percent of the nation’s aquifers are drying up as global water systems confront warming. Compared to places where groundwater is already severely depleted, like California, Mexico, and Arizona, Florida has the luxury of one of the highest-producing aquifers in the world, and more time to prepare for a dearth of supply. Still, adaptation will be necessary nearly everywhere as the Earth’s total terrestrial water storage, including groundwater, continues to decline. Record-breaking temperatures and crippling droughts wrought havoc on the world’s water cycle last year, according to the 2024 Global Water Monitor Report. 

    Sarah Burns, the planning manager for the city of Tampa, home to half a million people on the Gulf Coast, expects water supplies will continue to face a number of climate pressures like drought and rising sea levels. But one of the biggest factors in the city’s looming water crisis is population growth — and a hard-to-shake abundance mindset.

    “It’s all a challenging paradigm shift,” Burns said, noting that many Floridians take pride in lush, landscaped lawns, and an influx of new homes are coming to market with water-intensive irrigation systems pre-installed. This can be seen in Tampa, where roughly 18 percent of residents use 45 percent of the city’s water.

    Tampa already exceeds its 82 million-gallons-per-year limit that it can directly provide without paying for more from the regional provider, at a higher cost to residents. In November 2023, the Southwest Florida Water Management District instituted a once-a-week lawn-watering restriction for households in the 16 counties it oversees, including Tampa. In August 2024, the Tampa City Council voted to adopt the measure indefinitely — a move that has already saved them billions of gallons of water. 

    As newcomers flock to affordable housing within commuting distance of Tampa, once-rural areas are also feeling the squeeze. The nearby city of Zephyrhills — known for a namesake bottled water brand — has temporarily banned new developments after it grew too quickly for its water permit.

    “Water is the hidden problem that really forced our hand,” said Steven Spina, a member of the Zephyrhills City Council who proposed the restriction. “It is ironic that we’ve been known as the ‘City of Pure Water’ and then we’re in this predicament.”

    Perhaps nowhere in Florida is more at the crux of water issues than Polk County in the center of the state. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2023, more people moved to the former citrus capital than anywhere else in the nation, with subdivisions “springing up right and left.” The growth the county is seeing “has created a need to find additional water supplies,” said Eric DeHaven, the executive director of Polk Regional Water Cooperative. The entity was created in 2017 after Polk County’s worries became so acute it prompted more than a dozen local governments to assemble to protect their future water supplies.

    Between 2002 and 2015, Polk County’s farm bureau reported 100,000 acres — about a third of the county’s total agricultural land — had been converted for development. Florida farms are a crucial part of the U.S. food system, but struggles from extreme weather, citrus diseases, and economic issues are driving farmers out of the industry. By 2040, half of an estimated 1 million additional acres of developed land could take the place of farms. This would further magnify Florida’s water supply issues — in 2020, public utilities were estimated to have overtaken farming as the biggest drain on groundwater resources. 

    A man walks through an orange grove
    A farmworker checks the irrigation lines in an orange grove in Polk County, Florida, in 2022. Paul Hennessy / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

    “Imagine if you own this land,” said Boughton, the agroecologist. Farmers are hard-pressed to refuse offers as high as six figures per acre from developers, she noted. ”There’s so much pressure from urban development … that opportunity is hard to pass up.” 

    “Things are definitely changing because of climate change, but it’s also because of this,” said Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson, gesturing to new houses built across the road from her home in Columbia County, in the north of the state. As the founder of the nonprofit Our Santa Fe River, Malwitz-Jipson has spent the last two decades fighting to save the crystal-blue springs that feed it. 

    Collectively, the state’s springs have lost over a third of their historic flow levels, while 80 percent are severely polluted. Last year, Blue Springs, a locally beloved landmark, collapsed entirely. Because these springs are directly connected to the aquifer, says Malwitz-Jipson, such signs are omens of declining groundwater health. 

    A woman with long grey hair stands next to the trunk of a grey tree with cypress roots sticking out of the water and points to a dark line that is visible horizontally across the trunk.
    Local water-conservation activist Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson points to watermarks on a tree on the banks of the Santa Fe River near her home in Florida. Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist

    It wasn’t long ago that she devoted years to try and prevent the renewal of a controversial 1 million-gallons-per-day groundwater permit for bottled water for BlueTriton — formerly a subsidiary of Nestlé — in nearby Ginnie Springs. When the effort failed, she switched gears and now advocates for adding conservation conditions to water-use permits. A 2019 report from the Florida Springs Institute found that restoring springs to 95 percent of their former flow levels would require curbing regional groundwater extractions by half.

    Matt Cohen, a hydrologist who leads the University of Florida’s Water Institute, says the “devil is in the details” when it comes to permitting. “It’s very much where the implementation of those kinds of sustainability measures would be realized,” Cohen said, adding that state water management district authorities often convince applicants to use “substantially less” water. Other measures include offering alternatives to groundwater, like using reclaimed wastewater and surface water supplies.

    Coordinating such conservation efforts across Florida’s five water management districts and 67 counties will take a concerted statewide approach. In November, the state unveiled its 2024 Florida Water Plan — which includes expanding conservation of agricultural lands, and investing millions into infrastructure and restoration projects, such as Buck Island Ranch — among other measures.  

    Still, in the face of the population boom, advocates like Malwitz-Jipson wonder if it will be enough. “I don’t know why the state of Florida keeps issuing all these permits,” she said. “We are not ready, y’all. We do not have enough water for this.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline People are flocking to Florida. Will there be enough water for them? on Jan 8, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Traditional weather forecasting is slow and expensive. AI could help.

    Every day, meteorologist Hannah Wangari takes the free graphs and maps produced by the five forecasting models she subscribes to and interprets what she sees. “What’s the likelihood of rain in different parts of the country?” she might wonder. “How much of it is likely to fall within the next 24 hours?” Answering such questions quickly and accurately is essential to the potentially life-saving work she and others do at the Kenya Meteorological Department.

    As climate change drives ever more frequent and intense extreme weather, the need for faster, more precise predictions will only grow. Heavy rain and floods wreaked havoc this year, killing hundreds and displacing countless more in the United States, Spain, central Europe, and a great swath of Africa, where over 7.2 million people have been affected. An estimated 267 people died in Kenya alone and another 278,000 were displaced as floods impacted 42 of the nation’s 47 counties last year. With torrential storms projected to intensify by 7 percent for each 1.8 degree Fahrenheit of warming, predicting precisely when and where such events will happen is key to saving lives and livelihoods.

    Yet that can be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. Traditional forecasting relies upon a method called numerical weather prediction. This physics-based technique, developed in the 1950s, requires multimillion–dollar supercomputers capable of solving complex equations that mimic atmospheric processes. The intensive number-crunching can take hours to produce a single forecast and is out of reach for many forecasters, particularly in the developing world, leaving them to rely upon data produced by others. 

    Tools driven by artificial intelligence are becoming a faster, and in many cases more accurate, alternative easily produced on a laptop. They use machine learning that draws from 40 years of open-source weather data to spot patterns and identify trends that can help predict what’s coming. “They’re using the past to train the model to basically learn the physics,” said computer scientist Amy McGovern, who leads the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography at the University of Oklahoma. 

    AI-powered methods developed by the likes of Google, Oxford University, and NVIDIA can provide accurate forecasts within minutes, giving governments more time to prepare and respond. “More frequent updates help agencies monitor rapidly evolving conditions like storm paths,” Dion Harris, who leads the Accelerated Data Center at NVIDIA, told Grist. “This improves decision-making for evacuation planning, infrastructure protection, and resource allocation.”

    Users like the government meteorologists in Nairobi can augment these models with local data on things like ground temperature and humidity and free satellite data to tailor forecasts to specific geographic areas. The Kenyan Meteorological Department is working with Oxford, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Google, and the World Food Programme on an AI model that improves the accuracy of rainfall forecasts. 

    Of the five traditional models the Kenya Meteorological Department uses, four provide only the free charts and maps Wangari studies so closely. Accessing forecast data requires paying a licensing fee or owning a supercomputer with which to run models. Instead, she and her colleagues analyze the open-source data they receive to ascertain what’s coming. The machine-learning model developed with Oxford allows them to assess actual forecasting data to determine the likelihood of extreme weather. “For the first time, we’re able to produce what you call probabilistic forecasts,” she said. “People are more likely to take action if you give them the probability of something happening.”

    “Now we can say things like, ‘This region is going to experience two inches of rain in the next 24 hours and there’s a 75 percent probability that this threshold will be exceeded,” she said.

    AI models only take minutes to produce a forecast, providing the ability to run many more of them and survey a wider range of possible outcomes. That allows authorities to play what McGovern calls “the what-if game” and say, “If this happens, we need to evacuate this area” or “If that happens, we might want to take this action.” They can anticipate the most likely scenario or prepare for the worst case by, say, preemptively evacuating people with disabilities. 

    The machine-learning method that Oxford developed and Wangari uses has proven more effective than other methods of forecasting rainfall. That is not unusual. Google’s GenCast, unveiled last month, outperformed traditional forecasting models on 97 percent of 1,320 metrics. Its predecessor, GraphCast, proved more accurate than the world’s premier conventional tool, run by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “AI produces much better results than the physics-based models,” said Florian Pappenberger, deputy director general of the European Center, which plans to launch its own AI model this year. It does so more quickly, too. GenCast produced 15-day forecasts within eight minutes, and NVIDIA claims its FourCastNet is 45,000 times faster than numerical weather prediction.

    AI has also proven more accurate in predicting hurricane tracks. GraphCast correctly predicted where Hurricane Lee, which raced through the North Atlantic in September 2023, would make landfall nine days before it hit Nova Scotia — and three days before traditional forecasting methods, a Google scientist told Financial Times. Two machine-learning models closely predicted Hurricane Milton’s track across the Gulf of Mexico, although they underestimated the storm’s wind gusts and barometric pressure, said Shruti Nath, a climate researcher on the Oxford project. However, these tools are expected to improve as errors are corrected and the models are fine-tuned.

    Of course, forecasts are only as useful as the anticipatory actions they lead to. Researchers developing them must work with local meteorologists and others with regional expertise to understand what they mean for communities and respond accordingly, Nath said.

    Questions remain about how well machine learning can predict edge cases like once-in-a-century floods that lie beyond the data sets used to train them. However, “they’re actually representing the extremes much better than many of us predicted initially,” Pappenberger said. “Maybe they have learned more physics than we assumed they would.” These tools also do not yet produce all the outputs that a forecaster typically uses, including cloudiness, fog, and snowfall, but Pappenberger is confident that will come in time.

    Users may also benefit from hybrid models, like Google’s NeuralGCM, which combine machine learning with physics, an approach that offers the benefits of AI, like speed, with the long-term forecasting ability and other strengths of numerical weather prediction.

    While the improved forecasts are meant to help respond to climate change, they also risk contributing to it. The data centers required to run AI consume so much energy that companies like Google and Microsoft are resorting to nuclear power plants to provide it. Still, the supercomputers needed to run numerical weather prediction are energy intensive as well, and GraphCast could be 1,000 times cheaper in terms of energy consumption.

    To realize the AI models’ potential to democratize forecasting, McGovern thinks cross-sector collaborations will be key. The computing power needed to train the models lies primarily with the industry, whereas academia — which writes a lot of the code and offers it on the public software platform GitHub — has the luxury of not having to provide quarterly reports, and the government, as the ultimate end user, knows what’s needed to save lives, she explained.

    For now, researchers and the private sector are working together closely to refine the technology. “There’s a lot of collaboration, a lot of copying from each other, and trying to improve based on what other people have produced,” said Pappenberger. Many of these tools are freely available to researchers, but their accessibility to others varies from no-cost to low-cost to a price dependent upon the features used or the purchase of specific hardware. Still, the models are cheaper than a supercomputer, and would allow entities like the Kenya Meteorological Department to quickly and easily create forecasts tailored to their local needs at a fraction of the cost of physics-based models.

    Crafting a forecast relevant to people in, say, Nairobi or Mombasa using conventional tools requires zooming in on the global maps to obtain more detail, then manually analyzing a lot of data. “With machine learning, you can produce a forecast for a specific point as long as you have the exact coordinates,” she said. That will make it a whole lot easier for her, and others doing similar work, to see what the weather has in store and, ultimately, save lives.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Traditional weather forecasting is slow and expensive. AI could help. on Jan 3, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Most Costly Climate Disasters Of 2024 Killed 2,000 People

    The most financially costly climate disasters around the world in 2024 produced $229 billion in damages and killed 2,000 people, according to Counting the Cost 2024: A year of climate breakdown, the most recent analysis of insurance payouts by nonprofit Christian Aid.

    Three-quarters of these calamities occurred in the United States, reported The Guardian.

    “Behind the billion-dollar figures are countless lost lives and livelihoods,” said Dr. Mariam Zachariah, a researcher for World Weather Attribution at Imperial College London, in a press release from Christian Aid.

    The post Most Costly Climate Disasters Of 2024 Killed 2,000 People appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • New York To Charge Biggest Emitters For Climate Damages Under New Law

    New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed the Climate Change Superfund Act, which requires major emitters, such as fossil fuel companies, to compensate for damages by helping to fund climate-resilient infrastructure projects.

    “By signing the Climate Change Superfund Act, Gov. Hochul is addressing the financial burden placed on New Yorkers by the fossil fuel companies,” Richard Schrader, director of New York Government Affairs at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said in a statement. “It’s a key example of what putting fiscal fairness and environmental justice front and center looks like.

    The post New York To Charge Biggest Emitters For Climate Damages Under New Law appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Faith organizations have a complex relationship to disaster relief

    On the second weekend after Hurricane Helene, Swannanoa Christian Church held its first Sunday service since the storm battered western North Carolina. The sanctuary was piled high with clothes, water, and food, so everyone gathered outdoors. Out in the yard, beneath a clear blue sky and uphill from devastation wrought by the flood, the congregation interspersed prayer with the testimonies of congregants who had pulled people from the water or been pulled from it themselves.

    After the service, as congregants lingered to chat or sort donations, Elder Gordon Dasher recounted his church’s mission following the storm. “Our goal is to be the kingdom of God here on Earth,” the pastor said. “We’re getting into the filth, getting dirty, getting sewage and mud on our feet and hands and helping people in the darkest moment of their life. That’s number one.

    “And number two, what we want to see come out of that is we want people to see at least a glimmer of a light to come on that says God is real, because here are his people right here, side by side with us in our suffering.”

    A group of people sit in folding chairs under a blue sky with mountains in the background. Their heads are bowed. A man in a blue shirt and glasses is standing with his head bowed.
    Gordon Dasher bows his head during a service at Swannanoa Christian Church. Katie Myers / Grist

    Dasher and his ministry in Swannanoa are part of a teeming community of faith-based organizations using their deep roots, vast networks of the faithful, and financial means to help in whatever way they can. Beyond the local congregations, Presbyterians, Catholics, Baptists, and many other other denominations rushed in to help, as they so often do after floods and hurricanes and wildfires everywhere. Almost three months later, the sight of church volunteers clearing away rubble, handing out water, or gathering in prayer remains as common as the sight of damaged homes and washed-out roads. 

    Those who descend on such places are eager to help, and many hope to realize their dreams of a different, better world. They often glimpse a chance to create from the wreckage an ideal based on their aspirations or ideologies. Right-wing militias see in post-disaster chaos ripe opportunities to recruit and fulfill their goal of undermining trust in the state. Those on the other end of the political spectrum often see a chance to build a more egalitarian society. Dozens have gathered each week at the anarchist bookstore in Asheville to read A Paradise Built in Hell, which explores how communities restructure and establish small utopias in the wake of disaster.

    But none of them match the people of faith in scale, ambition, or determination to do good. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship are well positioned to gather resources and mobilize quickly. In rural communities in particular, local churches are natural communal focal points, providing social structure and a trusted information network. 

    Many denominations, especially within Christianity, also feel divinely called to this work — they undertake it with the belief that they are building the Kingdom of God, a world they’re working toward in both the act of disaster relief and, for many, the act of proselytizing. This belief is particularly strong among the evangelically-driven Protestantism of the American South, where, in the aftermath of Helene, faith organizations have been on the ground doing both. 

    “Strangers, complete strangers, just showing up to help because they love Jesus has been really inspiring,” Dasher’s daughter Jessica said. 

    Churches and faith-based organizations can be nimble responders. As roads throughout the region became passable, churches opened their doors to receive donations and organized volunteers, some of whom came from as far as California, to deliver them.

    Their efforts have expanded beyond serving immediate needs like providing food and water and clothing to more ambitious efforts like repairing homes, donating campers and tiny cabins, and providing a bit of financial assistance. The decline in tourism has hit the city of Asheville hard, leaving Buncombe County with the highest unemployment in the state. Even before the county’s rent relief program got started, Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church was cutting thousand-dollar checks for residents desperate to avoid eviction.

    They’re so nimble, in fact, that federal and state relief agencies, mired in the bureaucracy of their work — and whose jobs do not include mucking out or repairing houses, but rather providing the money needed to do so — have come to lean on them. The Federal Emergency Management Agency directs disaster survivors to, and works alongside, long-term recovery groups, which is the government’s name for the churches, nonprofits, and businesses that provide the backbone of relief efforts. They are marshaled by what are called voluntary organizations active in disasters. In addition to providing and coordinating boots on the ground, they play key roles in long-term planning and recovery. Churches are so central to this work that the Obama administration established the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to train and prepare emergency management officials and congregants to collaborate in the field. (President Trump shuttered the program in 2017; President Biden resurrected it in 2021.)

    Jars of peanut butter, boxes of granola bars, and other food, are stacked in a messy pile in a gymnasium
    The Swannanoa First Baptist Church collects donations of food, water, and clothing for the community after Hurricane Helene. Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    Although most everyone in western North Carolina is grateful for the help, several people expressed reservations about depending so heavily upon the faithful. Others recalled being surprised when volunteers showed up eager to help but wanted to give thanks to God first.

    “They started out by holding a prayer circle, and I guess it made me uncomfortable,” said one resident of Zionville, which is about 100 miles from Asheville. This person, who did not want to give their name for fear of antagonizing those helping the community, is not opposed to prayer, but felt uncomfortable doing something so intimate with strangers. Still, they relented. “I was worried they weren’t gonna fill my driveway if I didn’t participate.” 

    The emphasis on faith and conversion can sometimes feel out of sync with people’s real needs. Michaela Curry, a flood survivor and volunteer in Watauga County, N.C., recalled church groups offering to cook meals for flood victims and leaving stacks of Bibles behind. “Generally people aren’t taking them,” she said. “It’s kind of this weird dynamic.”

    Curry has preferred to work with those who don’t place so great an emphasis on faith and proselytizing, and has made a particular point of avoiding Samaritan’s Purse. The organization, founded by the Rev. Billy Graham, makes clear in its foundational statement of faith, “we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.” That leaves Curry and others wondering if the group is truly interested in helping everyone.

    Such a question can be fraught, because in some rural counties, Samaritan’s Purse is essentially the only charitable organization providing vital help like rent relief assistance. 

    [Need help with rent or housing post-Helene? Grist has a guide for finding resources.]

    Shannon Daley, who leads U.S. disaster relief for the international organization, conceded that its volunteers must sign that statement of faith, but said they do not discriminate against anyone needing help. Still, they are, she said, “always wanting to share that message, and about how we can have a personal relationship with the Creator of the universe through his Son.”

    Helpers may be told not to pass judgement, but that’s not to say they don’t, said Valentine Reilly. She helps coordinate volunteer efforts in Trade, a small town in the easternmost corner of  Tennessee, and recalled instances in which she felt volunteers questioned the morality of some victims, or set to work without finding out what was needed. “These people are all coming out here to help,” she said. “They’re all coming out here to do good work. And that’s a valuable thing. But some groups do more good work than others.” 

    On a blustery afternoon in November, Sarah Ogletree made tea and reflected on her experience coordinating relief efforts among churches with different social values and priorities. Ogletree lives in Bakersville and has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of faith and environment — a role that has included bringing congregations throughout the region into the fight for climate justice.

    Ministries and churches have many reasons to feel called to serving others in times of crisis, she said. She pointed out that the Bible commands it in Matthew 25: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” It’s a verse that many denominations take as an instruction from Christ to help the poor and oppressed. 

    A blonde woman in jeans and a blue t-shirt stands in a bare forest in front of a pile of sticks and debris.
    Sarah Ogletree stands in front of downed trees by her house in Bakersville, N.C. Katie Myers / Grist

    “It’s that identification with those who are marginalized or who are in need. And I think different traditions within Christianity understand that passage differently,” she said. While some see their role as filling this directive through volunteering and community service, others see it as a way of bringing people to God. Some of the more evangelically minded organizations take the lessons a step further, believing that people are more reachable and more receptive to hearing the Gospel during a disaster — a point Fritz Wilson, who leads Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, has made in the past. “Meeting a family’s physical needs with practical help starts their healing process, which leads to a sense of hope that things will be better,” he has said. “This gives us the opportunity to share a different type of hope that is only found in a relationship with Jesus.”

    Ogletree has been working with Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mennonites and other denominations to secure money, building supplies, and other necessities for her neighbors while following her vision of Christian service that overcomes ideological and denominational boundaries in times of crisis. She sometimes worries that faith-based organizations focus too much on “the pitch” — evangelizing and converting —  to their detriment, alienating survivors who just want a roof over their head. “I wish more churches showed up in communities simply to be a loving presence,” she said.

    Even as a religious person, she’s not always sure how to navigate that post-disaster dynamic, recalling an instance in which an organization that arrived from out of town with supplies asked to pray before delivering them. “It felt like it was the currency with which this transaction was allowed … like, it’s free, but you gotta pray with me. And that felt unfair.” The prayer, she said, was sweet, but she found the encounter difficult to process because she knew the prayer was meant to comfort flood survivors, not surprise or shock them. 

    “Helpers that come into crisis situations, whether you are faith based or religious or not, you have a lot of power in that situation,” Ogletree said. “And you are dealing with people that have just been through something super traumatic.”

    Visible through a small window with the word Welcome above it, a woman stands in a kitchen behind an array of food including a loaf of bread, boxes of crackers, and Ziploc baggies.
    A volunteer packs lunches October 4, 2024, at Clyde First Baptist Church in Clyde, N.C. Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images

    Not all interactions are transactional, of course, and some people truly are there only to help. For many people in the region, the support of church volunteers and local parishes has anchored them in these hard times.

    Ogletree’s experiences working with churches in the wake of Helene has been largely positive. In helping people through their trauma, she’s found the kind of community she’s long dreamed of building, one that overcomes political fractures to assist people in need and meet them where they are. In the South and Appalachia, the church is not only an essential part of many peoples’ social life, but a trusted source of information and direction, making it particularly effective at disaster response. “They’re at the front lines,” Ogletree said. “People know where they are.” She dreams of ensuring churches have backup generators, solar power, even Expo markers and whiteboards, to be better prepared for next time. Because there’s always a next time.

    That’s a point Zach Dasher, pastor Gordon’s son, made back in September as he preached to congregants still reeling from the devastation Helene brought. It is not unusual in such times for people to struggle with faith, and he clearly hoped to set their minds at ease. “Why all the evil in the world,” he asked. “Why all the natural catastrophes and devastation. Where is God in that?”

    His answer provided congregants with a framework for understanding what had happened to them. “The kingdom of God is here,” he said. “Everything we build can be washed away. Everything can be gone, wind and water can wash it away, picking up whole houses and soil. But the kingdom is far more durable and eternal than that. The Kingdom of God cannot be shaken.”

    Before ending his sermon, he asked his flock to please treat volunteers from out of state with kindness and respect, and expressed hope that those with damaged homes would take time to rest and let the helpers do their work.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Faith organizations have a complex relationship to disaster relief on Dec 23, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • As Trump mulls his FEMA pick, a political land mine awaits in Florida

    Donald Trump owes a lot to his adopted home state of Florida. The state, which is the third-largest in the Electoral College, has delivered him increasingly large majorities in each of the past three elections. Since his victory in November, the president-elect has announced plans to remake the federal government in Florida’s image: His nominees for secretary of state, attorney general, chief of staff, and national security advisor are all from the Sunshine State.

    But Florida may also present Trump with one of his thorniest political challenges. He’ll have to oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has spent the past four years bringing down the hammer on Americans who live in disaster-prone regions like Florida’s populous coasts, rolling out a series of insurance hikes and enforcement actions that make it more expensive to live and rebuild in risky areas.

    This ongoing effort is a direct threat to the boom of cheap coastal development that has fueled the Sunshine State’s breakneck growth. Florida accounts for a huge share of the nation’s total risk from hurricanes and floods: It has more than $2 trillion in residential property, almost all of which is vulnerable to extreme winds or flooding, and it accounts for more than a third of all policies in the federal government’s public National Flood Insurance Program. FEMA is now raising premiums in that flood insurance program by around 18 percent per year in parts of the state — based on a formula developed during Trump’s first term — and it’s also penalizing Floridians who rebuild their homes in dangerous areas.

    In conservative Lee County, which lost more than 5,000 homes to Hurricane Ian in 2022, a backlash has reached a fever pitch. Last spring, FEMA accused the county and several of its cities, including Fort Myers Beach, of disregarding federal rules that require homeowners to elevate their homes when rebuilding after floods, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per home but lowers the amount that taxpayers will have to pay for future disaster relief in the area. Lee County towns allowed hundreds of homeowners to rebuild at ground level after Ian, according to FEMA, and in response the agency moved to take away their flood insurance discounts, which could raise average insurance costs by hundreds of dollars per year. County leaders accused the federal government of “revenge politics” and threatened to sue.

    As Trump takes office, he and his FEMA director will have to choose how to approach these kinds of conflicts, which are brewing in every place where the real estate market is premised on government-subsidized disaster relief. Trump could let the agency stay the course, which would save the federal government money on future disaster relief but place financial burdens on some of his most stalwart supporters. Or he could let Floridians off the hook, forgiving the dangerous redevelopment and siding with Republican state officials who want insurance relief.

    The president-elect has tried to politicize the disaster relief process in the past. During his first administration, he diverted FEMA funding to beef up immigration enforcement at the southern border; last month, an outgoing agency official said that he feared Trump would do so again on a larger scale in his second term. Trump also vowed earlier this year to deny wildfire relief money to California unless the drought-prone state delivers more irrigation water to farmers. But Trump’s first administration also tried to fix long-standing issues that were driving the National Flood Insurance Program into insolvency by designing the very premium hikes that now draw so much ire from Florida Republicans. 

    As of now, there’s little evidence about his intentions for his second term. The two members of congress who he’s reportedly considered to lead FEMA, Republican Garret Graves of Louisiana and Democrat Jared Moskowitz of Florida (who denies he’s interested in the job), are deeply engaged on disaster relief issues and currently represent constituencies who benefit heavily from subsidized disaster relief and flood insurance. Graves has blasted FEMA’s efforts to raise insurance premiums.

    Despite the uncertainty, current FEMA officials say they don’t believe Trump will tamper with the agency’s efforts to stop development in flood-prone areas, if only because those efforts help cut federal spending in the long run.

    “I think there’s been a shift in perspective since that last administration on investing in a way that’s built to last,” said Victoria Salinas, FEMA’s current head of resilience. “No taxpayer should want their money going into things that are clearly going to get damaged before their time is up.”

    The conflict in Fort Myers Beach was over exactly this issue: Homeowners wanted to rebuild houses primed for future damage, despite federal regulations that prohibited them from doing so without elevating them above potential floodwaters. Local politicians appeared happy to let them do so.

    “It’s very political,” said Bill Veach, a former Fort Myers Beach city council member who was in office during Hurricane Ian. “You’ve got people on the council who were elected at a time when people were tired of regulations, and so they kind of made an effort to be softer.”

    After the initial spat with Lee County in April, the Biden administration tried to smooth things over, restoring insurance discounts in almost every town in the county. But last month, the agency imposed harsh penalties on Fort Myers Beach, where the risky rebuilding was most egregious, and it has faced a torrent of criticism from Florida officials ever since. 

    The political divisions between the state and the feds only got worse in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, when a FEMA relief crew supervisor told her employees not to knock on the doors of homes with Trump lawn signs when distributing information about disaster aid. FEMA chief Deanne Criswell fired the employee and called her actions a “clear violation of FEMA’s core values,” but the incident created a frenzy among conservative politicians in Florida. The state’s attorney general sued the agency over the alleged bias, and Republican congressman Byron Donalds called for the agency to be “completely revamped.” The House of Representatives later called Criswell to testify about the incident. 

    Some town residents are hoping the incoming Trump administration will restore Fort Myers Beach’s insurance discount, as well as clean house at the agency.

    “I’ve worked with FEMA for about 20 years,” said Fred Mallone, a restaurant owner who also runs an emergency management business, at a Fort Myers Beach town council meeting earlier this week. “They’re all gonna get fired. So, don’t be scared of FEMA.”

    President Joe Biden walks with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell during a tour of the damage caused by Hurricane Milton in St Pinellas County, Florida. FEMA has faced criticism for raising flood insurance rates in vulnerable coastal areas.
    President Joe Biden walks with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell during a tour of the damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Pinellas County, Florida.
    Joe Raedle / Getty Images

    FEMA’s problems go well beyond Lee County. The Trump administration also inherits nationwide blowback around attempts to raise flood insurance premiums for the riskiest homes. The shift to a new system of higher premiums for riskier properties, known as Risk Rating 2.0, was planned under the first Trump administration. The administration also sought to end insurance coverage altogether for new homes in flood-prone areas, part of a long-standing campaign by conservatives to wind down government-subsidized flood insurance. The Project 2025 agenda, which Trump disavowed during the presidential campaign and re-avowed after winning election, proposes to end the National Flood Insurance Program altogether.

    But the politics of flood insurance have become scrambled since Trump’s first term. When the Biden administration rolled out Risk Rating 2.0, flood insurance rates started to soar in coastal states, rising to more than $10,000 a year for some households. A group of Republican state attorneys general, including those representing Florida and Louisiana, filed suit to block the program.

    As costs keep rising and coastal households feel the squeeze, Trump will face pressure from multiple directions. The conservative policymakers behind Project 2025 will pressure him to go even further than Risk Rating 2.0 and wind down federal flood insurance altogether, while coastal politicians in Florida and Louisiana will pressure him to roll back FEMA’s insurance rate hikes, effectively restoring taxpayer-funded subsidies to the program. The latter may align more closely with Trump’s own self-interest: The president’s Mar-a-Lago estate is a customer of the flood insurance program and stands to see its premiums shoot up under the new system. 

    But some FEMA experts doubt Trump will chart a drastic course in either direction.

    When it comes to flood insurance, the first Trump administration “was sort of just a period of neglect,” said Rebecca Elliott, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics who has studied the flood insurance program. “Whether you think that was benign neglect or malign neglect, I think is open to interpretation.” Either way, she said, the administration is unlikely to revoke Risk Rating 2.0, which would return FEMA to a system that the agency has admitted was prone to miscalculating insurance costs. 

    As for the more radical Project 2025 proposals to wind down subsidized flood coverage altogether, Elliott doubts they will find purchase, even in a very conservative administration. The program’s subsidized coverage helps prop up the value of floodplain homes in places like Florida, and as a result these homes are overvalued by as much as $237 billion, according to one estimate. Winding down the program would likely cause these home values to crater, and it would leave homeowners on their own to deal with flood damages, which now exceed $500 billion in the United States each year.

    “I think natural disasters are one of those areas where people kind of lose their free market religion as soon as they need help,” Elliott said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Trump mulls his FEMA pick, a political land mine awaits in Florida on Dec 20, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • New Congressional Reports Show How Dire the Climate Insurance Crisis Really Is

    Five hurricanes made landfall in the United States this year, causing half a trillion dollars in damages. Flooding devastated mountain towns along the East Coast. Scores of wildfires burned almost 8 million acres nationwide. As such events grow more common, and more devastating, homeowners are seeing their insurance premiums spike — or insurers ditch them all together.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Buildings ‘pancaked’ in Vanuatu as 7.3 magnitude quake strikes off capital Port Vila

    By Stefan Armbruster and Harry Pearl of BenarNews

    A strong 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Vanuatu today, US geologists said, severely damaging a number of buildings in the capital, crushing cars and briefly triggering a tsunami warning.

    Witnesses described a “violent shake” and widespread damage to Port Vila, located about 1900km northeast of the Australian city of Brisbane.

    The Pacific island nation is ranked as one of the world’s most at-risk countries from natural disasters and extreme weather events, including cyclones and volcanic eruptions.

    Michael Thompson, an adventure tour operator based in the capital, said the quake was “bigger than anything” he had felt in his 20 years living in Vanuatu.

    “I was caught in the office with my colleague,” he told BenarNews. “When we came outside, it was just chaos everywhere. There have been a couple of buildings that have pancaked.

    “You can hear noises and kind of muffled screams inside.”

    20241217 vanuatu earthquake Michael Thompson US embassy.jpg
    The building housing the US, British, French and New Zealand diplomatic missions in the capital Port Vila partially collapsed during the earthquaketoday. Image: Michael Thompson/Vanuatu Zipline Adventures/BenarNews

    Video footage taken by Thompson outside the US embassy showed the bottom floor of the building in downtown Port Vila had partially collapsed. Its windows are buckled and the foundations have been turned to rubble.

    “It looks dangerous’
    “We stood there yelling out to see if there was anyone inside the building,” Thompson said. “It looks really dangerous.”

    The building also hosts the British, French and New Zealand missions.

    Just down the main road from the embassy building, search and rescue teams were trying to force their way into a commercial building through the tin roof, Thompson said, but at the pace they were going it would be a “24 hour operation”.

    “We need help. We need medical evacuation and we need qualified rescue personnel. That’s the message,” he said.

    20241217 vanuatu earthquake Michael Thompson pancake 2.jpg
    A number of buildings in Port Vila’s CBD have sustained serious damage in the earthquake today. Image: Michael Thompson/Vanuatu Zipline Adventures/BenarNews

    The quake was recorded at a depth of 43km and centered 30km west of the capital Port-Vila, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).

    The US Tsunami Warning System cancelled an initial tsunami warning for coastal communities in Vanuatu within 300km of the epicenter.

    The quake hit the island nation not long after midday, coming into peak tourist season, when the streets of Port Vila were packed with people shopping and eating in restaurants, Thompson said.

    One dead body
    He had seen at least one dead body among the rubble.

    “The police are out trying to keep people back,” he said. “But it’s a pretty big situation here.”

    In other videos posted online people can be seen running through the streets of the capital past shop fronts that had fallen onto cars. Elsewhere, a cliff behind the container port in Port Vila appears to have collapsed.

    Dan McGarry, a Port Vila-based journalist, described the earthquake on social platform X as a “violent, high frequency vertical shake” that lasted about 30 seconds, adding the power was out around the city.

    Vanuatu, home to about 300,000 on its 13 main islands and many smaller ones, is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because it straddles the seismically active Pacific “Ring of Fire.”

    Vanuatu’s government declared a six-month national emergency early last year after it was hit by back-to-back tropical cyclones Judy and Kevin and a 6.5 magnitude earthquake within several days.

    Republished from BenarNews with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Climate takes its toll on the ‘cherry capital of the world’

    This coverage is made possible in part through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in northern Michigan.

    Traverse City is known as “the Cherry Capital of the World,” and the Wunsch family has been growing the small stone fruit for six generations. The farm that bears their name sits on about 1,000 acres in the middle of Old Mission Peninsula, a spit of land poking into a bay at the northern end of Lake Michigan. This region has long been considered a cherry haven where long rows of trees teem with red fruit. But as the planet warms, things are beginning to change.

    As he walked rows of dormant trees last month, pointing out sweet varieties like black pearls, skeenas and sweethearts, Raul Gomez, operations manager at Wunsch Farms, said volatile weather in recent years has taken a toll. 

    This season was particularly hard. An unusually mild winter followed by a warm, wet spring marked by torrential rain left a lot of the fruit rotting on the trees. That led to an explosion of fungi and pests. Disease like brown rot diminished the quality of several varieties, and the size of the harvest.

    “It’s getting more and more expensive to farm,” said Gomez. “You’re spending a lot more money getting to the finish line.”

    Everyone who works the land knows they’re at the mercy of the weather, but even by that measure this was a challenging year for Michigan’s cherry farmers. Growers throughout the state, which produces one-fifth of the nation’s sweet cherries and about 75 percent of its tart cherries, have struggled with mounting losses. By the time the season came to a close over the summer, as much as 75 percent of the state’s sweet cherry crop was lost. Although tart cherry production for northwest Michigan was up almost 40 percent over last year, the quality of the fruit declined.

    Many growers are adapting to the difficult market and changing climate, planting different varieties or embracing high-density orchards with trees packed more closely together, an approach that makes them easier to harvest while lowering costs and improving quality. For Isaiah Wunsch, CEO of the farm that bears his name, the key to survival is “not putting all of our eggs into one basket.”

    That approach isn’t a perfect solution for some of the financial issues that have pushed some to the cusp of bankruptcy, and state officials and the federal government have intervened. Earlier this fall, the Department of Agriculture approved Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s request for emergency assistance to cover crop losses through a federal disaster declaration. 

    But while such federal assistance can be helpful in the short term, Gomez said, “none of us really want to get to the point where it’s considered a disaster, and now we are.”

    Similar struggles are playing out on farms nationwide, with some regions, like the Midwest, facing the onset of an agricultural recession, said Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University. The downturn largely stems from extreme weather, rising labor and production costs, imbalances in global supply and demand, and declines in what growers earn and what they receive in disaster relief. This year has seen many farmers selling an array of commodities, including wheat, soybeans, and corn, at below break-even prices. Their finances have been further strained by increased price volatility. The latest federal forecast predicts farm income will decrease 4 percent over last year in what some deem the sector’s worst financial year since 2007. 

    That’s a key reason consumers are paying more at the supermarket, something President-elect Donald Trump made a centerpiece of his re-election campaign. Appearing at a September rally in northern Michigan, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance invited cherry farmer Ben LaCross to describe the industry’s financial hardships and hail Trump’s approach to regulations and trade. Vance denounced the cost of cherries as a “lose-lose proposition” for growers and consumers. The argument resonated: On average, voters in the nation’s most farming-dependent counties backed Trump by more than 77 percent, a big increase over 2020.

    Yet nowhere in the incoming administration’s messaging on the crippling economic landscape the nation’s small farmers must traverse has there been any discussion of the human-caused climate change shaping that terrain. Rather, Trump, who has called the crisis a “hoax,” has threatened to dismantle the Inflation Reduction Act, pledged to roll back emissions regulations, and promised to boost fossil fuel production.  

    A man stands in an orchard in November with a blue sky behind him
    Raul Gomez, the operations manager at Wunsch Farms, in November 2024. Izzy Ross / Grist

    Sara McTarnaghan, a resilience planning and disaster recovery researcher at the Urban Institute, said increasingly severe weather and other climate impacts will further test a “safety net is already strained and underperforming” as a warming world is mounting demand for government relief. Yet she sees “big threats” to many of these programs during Trump’s presidency. Many of those threats are laid out in Project 2025, a sweeping conservative policy blueprint, written by multiple veterans of Trump’s first term, that calls for cutting crop insurance subsidies, eliminating land conservation incentives, and other farm programs. 

    Still, it is not yet clear what the Trump agenda and his views on climate will mean for agricultural sector disaster relief, said McTarnaghan. This is because small-government politicians don’t hesitate to ask Washington for money when their constituents need help. “Even in red states, we see governors asking for presidential declarations, seeking federal assistance to recover from disasters, even in places where the talking point on a non-disaster day might be about reducing government spending,” she said. 

    Ultimately, any regression on climate action will end up requiring more funding to bail out growers. “Farmers are often at the front end of the climate challenge,” said Billy Hackett of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “You can’t stop that once-in-a-generation flood or fire or hurricane that’s becoming more and more frequent.”

    When disaster strikes, farmers look to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for help. The agency is, among other things, an essential provider of farm safety net programs like federal crop insurance and emergency crop subsidies, or disaster assistance aid. 

    Going into the next four years, Hackett is concerned about how the incoming presidential administration will prioritize helping small and historically overlooked farmers. The 2022 Emergency Relief Program, which allocated financial relief to producers impacted by wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters through the USDA, had a “streamlined” revenue-based relief aid application process option, noted Hackett, implemented by the Biden administration to “reach these uninsured farmers who they knew were historically left behind.” Small farmers in particular have long struggled to access afford costly crop insurance premiums, and experienced similar issues with eligibility and coverage when applying for federal disaster aid relief. Just 13 percent of the nation’s 1.9 million or so farms were enrolled in a crop insurance plan in 2022.

    Other supplemental disaster relief programs, such as the Wildfire, Hurricane, and Indemnity Program enacted in 2017 during the Trump administration, have been criticized for how “demanding and complicated” the application process was for uninsured small and historically excluded farmers, while only reaching benefiting larger, industrial farms, said Hackett.

    Though government bailouts for farmers hit historic highs during his first term because of losses incurred due to tariff fights and the pandemic, Trump has a history of trying to slash funding for crop insurance and may have better luck this time, given that he’ll have a Republican majority in both chambers and Project 2025 specifically calls for curbing subsidies for crop insurance and eliminating commodity payments, among other farmer safety nets. 

    That would harm growers like Leisa Eckerle Hankins, a fifth-generation Michigan cherry farmer whose family has relied upon crop insurance to offset devastating losses. Her family-run operation lost 97 percent of its sweet cherry harvest to a fungal brown rot infection brought on by rain last summer. “It was a straight loss,” she said. “We could not go in and shake the cherries on the tree.” 

    On top of everything else, returns for their harvests have been unreliable, and they’ve faced increasing competition from other market-dominating countries. “Every industry, everybody has struggles at times, and this is our struggle time,” Eckerle Hankins said. “And so we’re coming together to look at how we can change things.” 

    Editor’s note: Raul Gomez, who was interviewed for this story, is a member of Interlochen Public Radio’s Community Advisory Council. The council has no editorial control over stories.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate takes its toll on the ‘cherry capital of the world’ on Dec 17, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Report: Climate Crisis Accounts for a Third of Weather-Related Insurance Claims

    Insure Our Future, a coalition of environmental, consumer protection and other grassroots groups, issued its annual scorecard report this week, detailing how the climate crisis has accounted for over a third of weather insurance loss claims across the globe since the start of the century. Such weather-related disasters with direct ties to the climate crisis amounted to over $600 billion in…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 2 Months After Hurricane Helene, How Are Impacted Local Organizers Coping?

    “It’s been two months since the storm,” Asheville organizer Sarah Nuñez told me. “Two months that felt more like six.” In late September, Hurricane Helene triggered massive flooding across six states, killing at least 230 people as the storm gutted local infrastructure and swept away homes. 42 of those deaths occurred in Buncombe County, North Carolina, which is home to Asheville — a city…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 2 Months After Hurricane Helene, How Are Impacted Local Organizers Coping?

    “It’s been two months since the storm,” Asheville organizer Sarah Nuñez told me. “Two months that felt more like six.” In late September, Hurricane Helene triggered massive flooding across six states, killing at least 230 people as the storm gutted local infrastructure and swept away homes. 42 of those deaths occurred in Buncombe County, North Carolina, which is home to Asheville — a city…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Gaza Flooding Worsens Crisis for Displaced Families Amid Israel’s Assault

    Flooding induced by heavy rainstorms in recent days has compounded the humanitarian crisis facing Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, intensifying the already-high threat of disease as nearly two million displaced people struggle to survive Israel’s U.S.-backed assault. Save the Children, a humanitarian group working on the ground in Gaza, said Friday that torrential rainfall has…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mississippi River towns pilot new insurance model to help with disaster response

    This story was originally published by St. Louis Public Radio.

    Early on Election Day, highways in the St. Louis area were inundated with water. Over several days, intense storms battered Missouri, bringing six to 10 inches of rain — record-breaking amounts for November.

    The flash flooding killed at least five people, including two elderly poll workers whose vehicle was swept from a state highway.

    Mayors along the Mississippi River have watched for years as intensifying rain storms and flooding wreak havoc on their communities.

    Take Grafton, Illinois, which escaped Election Day flash flooding but suffered $160,000 to $170,000 in damages from a heavy rain event in July. The town’s main intersection was blocked with logs and debris, and the storm blew out a water line and left streets in need of repair.

    But Grafton never received a federal disaster declaration and was not eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Instead, it paid for road and water-line repairs through its Department of Public Works’ annual budget. As a result, the city could no longer purchase new trucks for snow plowing this year, as it had planned.

    “What it means is that we’ll limp through another year, keep the vehicles running,” said Grafton Mayor Michael Morrow, who oversees the $1.2 million annual budget for the small riverfront city of about 600.

    River communities have suffered repeated losses. But federal disaster funding can take weeks, months or even years to pay out. Traditional insurance programs are tied to property and require proof of loss for a payout, which can be burdensome and lengthy to assemble. 

    So this fall, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI) announced a new insurance pilot, with hopes of better helping river towns recover. 

    MRCTI, which represents 105 cities along the 10 mainstem states of the Mississippi River Basin, is working with Munich Re, a German multinational insurance company, to create the insurance product. 

    The resulting pilot will test a novel type of insurance pool — called parametric insurance — that is designed to rapidly fund emergency response after natural disasters such as flooding. 

    Pilot will test usefulness of new “parametric” insurance policies

    The likely cause of intensifying rainfall and floods is human-caused climate change, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a scientific report created every four years for the United States Congress and the President, to help explain the impacts, risks and vulnerabilities associated with a changing global climate.

    In 2019, communities in the Basin saw months of flooding, spanning across the Mississippi, Missouri and Arkansas rivers. Reported losses totaled almost $25 billion across at least 17 states, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

    The central U.S. is emerging as a new flash flooding hotspot, according to research published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment journal. With its new role as a hotspot comes more disaster damage – and need for insurance that addresses that.

    While conventional indemnity insurance requires insured owners to prove specific losses by amassing evidence and presenting pre-storm documentation, parametric insurance pays out quickly after agreed-upon “triggers” – such as wind speeds or river heights – reach a certain level. 

    A sign that says Illinois 3 jct on a small town street is surrounded by flood waters
    Workers shore up a temporary levee across Main Street in Grafton, Ill., on May 29, 2019. Brent Jones / St. Louis Public Radio

    For the MRCTI pilot, Munich Re has suggested using watershed data from the U.S. Geological Survey to determine the best gauges along the river to measure flood depth. Once the river flooding reaches a certain depth, the payout would be triggered. 

    Getting that trigger right is key, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, chief executive officer of Climate Resilience for All, a nonprofit focused on climate adaptation.

    “You want to have sufficient understanding of how you set the triggers at a certain place and why,” she said. “There’s a lot of engagement necessary to get everybody on the same page about what the product is, how it works, what the trigger should be.”

    The goal of Munich Re’s pilot program is to demonstrate in real-time how a parametric insurance payout policy would function in current insurance-market conditions and how swift payouts could better assist a city’s disaster response in the immediate days following a flood.

    First, Munich Re will develop a mock-up of the insurance policy for one hazard – flooding – with the understanding that multiple hazards, like intense heat, or drought, could be added later, said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of MRCTI, and, as of November 6, a newly elected state representative for Missouri District 105. 

    The mock-up would calculate a range of premium costs and theoretical payout options that would be available for cities of varying sizes along the river. But the pilot won’t cost the cities a cent – and it won’t pay them anything either, until the pilot moves into implementation. It’s unclear which entities will ultimately foot the bill of the pilot and eventual product because it’s so early in development.

    When Munich Re moves into implementation, individual city governments would hold the policies and receive payouts. Wellenkamp hopes to convince larger corporations that rely on a healthy and functioning Mississippi River hydrology to pick up the tab on the premiums, he said. 

    Quick payouts could take burdens off cities

    “In the first 24 to 72 hours after a disaster event, very little money can help a whole heck of a lot,” Wellenkamp said. “We use that time for evacuations and to move people out of additional harm’s way in the aftermath.”

    But soon after the initial emergency response, municipalities start to look for funds for longer-term cleanup and repair. Under the current paradigm, that money can be hard to tap.  

    In the spring of 2019, major flooding on the Mississippi inundated many communities, including Grafton, where the downtown partially closed and people were forced to evacuate. 

    The Trump administration didn’t declare a major disaster until September of that year, months after flood waters had receded. It took until 2022 for federal money to reach Grafton, Morrow said.

    “The former administration went through that flood,” Morrow said. “I’m the mayor now and I was getting some of the money that they had put in years ago.”

    That wait places stress on a city’s finances, especially smaller ones like Grafton, Morrow added. 

    Traditional insurance doesn’t always help either. Grafton has a flood policy but it only covers property owned by the city. Residents and businesses in the community would need to take out their own flood protection. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which underwrites many flood insurance policies, has various coverage restrictions. For example, NFIP doesn’t cover roads or wastewater infrastructure. 

    The policies also require proof of loss before issuing a check because they cover specific damage, like to a particular building or its contents. This “proof” can take days to document, and longer to process, which delays how fast a local government can begin repairs. Without proper pre-storm documentation, damage can sometimes be nearly impossible to prove.

    Parametric insurance – which works with measurable triggers and isn’t tied to documentable losses – could ease the process. 

    Cities from the headwaters to the mouth of the Mississippi could buy into the policy, creating a pool that spreads out the risk that any individual community faces. 

    “Not every city is going to flood every year, but the flooding will impact at least one section of the river,” said Raghuveer Vinukollu, head of climate insights and advisory for  Munich Re in the U.S.

    The insurance pool would protect a town from the risk of ruin, and a more timely payout would increase the town’s resiliency through swift reinvestment in its infrastructure, he added.

    Parametric insurance in the Mississippi Delta and beyond

    For flooding on rivers, this kind of insurance risk pool is new territory, Vinukollu said. As climate risks become more extreme, the insurance industry is working with a number of communities to address their evolving needs, he said.

    While parametric insurance is still developing, one early example stands out to Vinukollu—the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF).

    CCRIF pools risk for Caribbean countries, which face hurricane risks each year. By pooling risk together each island can receive a larger payout than if it had taken out an individual policy. 

    In July, a mere 14 days after Hurricane Beryl devastated 90 percent of buildings and agriculture on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, the government of Grenada received its first payout from CCRIF to fund disaster recovery. 

    The tropical cyclone policy paid more than $42 million to Grenada, the largest single payout from CCRIF since its inception in 2007.

    In the Mississippi River Basin, Vinukollu hopes to apply this kind of shared risk pool to insure cities at risk for inland flooding. 

    “The triggers are different, the perils are different, but the concept is the same,” said Vinukollu.

    Given its position near the end of the Mississippi River, New Orleans is no stranger to the devastating impacts of extreme weather. Several city-run institutions, such as NOLA Public Schools, have taken out parametric insurance policies to protect important infrastructure. 

    One of the first tests of these policies came in September when Hurricane Francine‘s storm surge, rain and winds pelted southern Louisiana. 

    But NOLA Public Schools did not receive a payout from its policy with Swiss Re. 

    While wind speeds were high, they were not high enough to meet the policy’s triggers of more than 100 miles per hour for one minute.

    New Orleans is more likely to experience repetitive, severe losses from named storms than a city in the upper Basin, such as Minneapolis, so cities closer to the Gulf Coast may end up paying higher premiums once the policy officially rolls out, said Wellenkamp, of MRCTI.

    Cities that choose to cover more hazards or lower-level disasters may pay higher premiums, because it could result in more frequent payouts, Wellenkamp said. Ultimately, municipalities could still end up footing the bill for events like the July flooding in Grafton or the Election Day storms in St. Louis.

    McLeod argues communities shouldn’t expect payouts from parametric insurance all that often. “Just by the nature of the product it shouldn’t [pay every year],” she said. “Insurance is for the worst of the worst.”

    Munich Re advises that parametric insurance works best to complement – not replace – traditional insurance policies. But company officials believe that these new policies offer the chance for insurance to adapt to changing risk landscapes, as weather events become more extreme.

    Despite its potential to facilitate faster disaster response, parametric insurance is no silver bullet, said McLeod, of Climate Resilience for All. 

    The best solution to her is reducing the underlying risk from climate change. 

    “The big picture is it’s a really important tool in financing and managing the risks of climate change, and we need every tool,” she said. 

    But more than any new financial tool, McLeod said, the most effective financial step would be addressing the root causes of climate change, and building – or rebuilding – more natural protections, like wetlands.

    “You’ve got to reduce the risk [or] you won’t be able to afford the insurance on it,” she said. “It’s not insurance if you know this thing is going to happen.”

    The Lens’ Marta Jewson contributed reporting to this story.

    This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri. Disclosure: both the Desk and MRCTI receive funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Support our independent reporting network with a donation. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mississippi River towns pilot new insurance model to help with disaster response on Nov 23, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Rural water utilities in North Carolina are still reeling from Helene

    The most exciting part of the day at Spruce Pine Montessori School is when the truck arrives to empty the porta-johns. At that point in the afternoon, the kids abandon their toy dinosaurs and monkey bars, throw up their hands, and yell in excitement as they run to watch the truck do its work. It’s lucky that they find something to be so joyful about, Principal Jennifer Rambo said on a recent sunny afternoon, because things have been a mess for the past seven weeks.

    The flooding that devastated western North Carolina during Hurricane Helene laid waste to communities all around the region, spitting up great torrents of mud and washing away homes, cars, and people. The landscape along the creeks and mountainsides has been forever changed. 

    A woman with glasses washes her hands inside a large room
    Jennifer Rambo washes her hands at one of the portable sinks the school installed at a cost of $600. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    Beyond the fallen trees, sliding hillsides, and damaged buildings, Helene took out critical infrastructure, like internet and electricity, water, and sewer. Everyone would have liked more time to get things in order, but working families were desperate for childcare and the desire to resume classes was too great. “We had to get open,” Rambo said. “The kids needed some routine and structure and consistency, and families needed to go back to work.”

    Although folks in Spruce Pine were told Thursday they could finally stop boiling water before using it, the school still can’t flush its toilets because the sewers remain a mess. In addition to two portable toilets (and special seats so the smaller children wouldn’t fall in), it has had to buy water by the barrel and spend $600 to install portable hand-washing sinks. The bills continue adding up: $360 per week for the johns and $350 every time they need emptying. Everyone has had to adjust to these changes and more, even as they’ve dealt with similar problems at home.

    a white child-size potty chair inside a porta potty
    The two portable toilets at Spruce Pine Montessori School needed seats designed to ensure the youngsters didn’t fall in. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    It’s been that way everywhere. The storm killed 103 people throughout western North Carolina and surrounding areas. Many more were injured. All told, the wind and the water damaged as many as 126,000 homes, and dozens of roads and bridges simply washed away.

    Helene also decimated more than two dozen water utilities. For weeks after the storm, people had to boil anything that wasn’t poured from a bottle, and many of them drew from creeks and ponds just to flush their toilets. Folks in Asheville, where taps ran dry for three weeks, were told just this week that their water is safe to drink without boiling it first, but thousands of people served by 16 utilities still deal with sketchy water, low pressure, and other frustrations. In an effort to make their lives a little easier, officials dipped into a $273 million relief package to dot this end of North Carolina with 650 portable toilets and 15 “community care stations” with showers and washing machines.

    Asheville was lucky enough to have upgraded its reservoir last year, something that prevented even worse flooding and allowed the region’s largest city and the communities that rely upon it for water to recover sooner than they otherwise might have. But for towns like Spruce Pine, the financial and engineering challenges of repairing their water systems are as formidable as the hurricane that broke them.

    An aerial shot of a storm-damaged downtown covered in mud
    Residents and business owners in Spruce Pine haul away some of the debris and mud that inundated downtown.
    Steve Exum / Getty Images

    The water that flows into the North Fork Reservoir, which serves Asheville and the towns of Black Mountain and Swannanoa, always ran clear and clean from its headwaters high in Pisgah National Forest. But mud and debris have turned it murky brown and damaged much of the equipment needed to pump it. Crews have worked around the clock to set things right, reconnecting pipelines in record time and drawing muck from the lake.

    Repairing municipal water systems leveled by a storm that washed away distribution lines, overwhelmed intakes, and inundated treatment plants is no easy feat. The challenge is acute in mountain communities, where geography is a hassle. Much of the infrastructure required to draw, treat, and distribute water often sits alongside reservoirs, placing them squarely in a floodplain when the torrent arrives and increasing the likelihood of damage. Reaching anything needing attention can take days or even weeks because the lines that carry water to customers meander through valleys, over ridgelines, and along roadways, many of which remain impassable. Spruce Pine Water & Sewer has restored service to 90 percent of its 2,000 or so customers, but can’t do much for the rest of them until the roads are fixed.

    The sewer system remains a mess too. Town manager Darlene Butler has asked residents to conserve water as she works with county officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to erect a temporary treatment facility. The equipment is only now arriving and will, at best, be a Band-Aid for a multi-year fix. “We had a lot of damage there, so we’re trying to encourage people not to use a lot of water and put it into our sewer system,” she said.

    A woman sits an a desk covered in stacks of paper
    Darlene Butler, the town manager of Spruce Pine, has had to ask residents to conserve water while crews scramble to erect a temporary treatment plant. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    A lot of these utilities struggled even before Helene. In many Appalachian towns, the companies that once paid to maintain water and sewer systems have shut down or moved on, and shrinking populations generate less revenue to keep things shiny and new. This is endemic throughout Appalachia. Residents in McDowell County, West Virginia — where one-third of families live in poverty — have for example given up on the often discolored water that flows from their taps and buy it by the case instead. Pipes in Martin County, Kentucky lose about 64 percent of what flows through them, a problem that started 24 years ago when a toxic coal slurry spill damaged them. The burden of these failures falls on customers who must adapt to the situation even as their rates climb. (Rates in Martin County, North Carolina, to offer one example, are among the nation’s highest.)

    Yet other systems, particularly those in tourist towns, struggle to keep up with rapidly growing populations. The challenges are compounded by the difficulty of running new lines in the mountains and maintaining the complex pumps needed to maintain pressure over ridgelines. “This is a really, really great place to live,” said Clay Chandler, Asheville’s water resources information officer. “It’s beautiful. The people are amazing. But, man, it makes it hard to operate a water system.”

    A pipe runs in the exposed gap underneath a damaged road
    A broken water main lies alongside Lytle Cove Road in Swannanoa. Many roads remain impassable, hindering efforts to restore water.
    Steve Exum / Getty Images

    Spruce Pine’s system is so old that Butler has no idea when its pipes were laid, though she guesses it was 60 years ago. The pump station, recently upgraded with money from the American Rescue Plan, was built in 1967. It has seen overhauls as things broke, but rural utilities rarely make wholesale improvements because they are expensive and disruptive. “I think, like most small towns, we’ve struggled for the funds to be proactive instead of reactive,” Butler said.

    Even as communities deal with the aftermath of so much deferred maintenance, others are facing the inescapable fact that rebuilding on a floodplain may no longer make sense. Spruce Pine is banking on hazard mitigation funding from FEMA and help from federal officials to move its wastewater treatment plant to higher ground.

    The work needed to fully, and permanently, restore water and sewer service in these communities will by most estimates take two to four years and cost many millions of dollars. Meanwhile, crews continue playing whack-a-mole as aging lines break. Another one gave way in rural Yancey County last week, sending a geyser dozens of feet into the air. 

    About 2,000 people live in Spruce Pine, a busy place with water-intensive businesses that have been impacted by the disruption. There’s the mine that produces some of the purest quartz in the world and sent heavy equipment to help restore service. There are the restaurants and kitschy attractions that drive a burgeoning tourism industry. And then there are the two state prisons, each of which holds about 800 people (who were relocated after spending a week in flooded cells) and, like prisons everywhere, burden the local water and sewer systems.

    The ongoing crisis also has made providing basic services a challenge. Blue Ridge Regional Hospital, which serves three counties, has long had a standby power supply but scrambled to cope with losing water. Trucks haul in what’s needed, and enormous bladders collect what’s been used. “We had backup generators to supply the hospital in case of an emergency,” said Alex Glover, chair of the hospital’s board of directors. “But we never dreamed we would lose water and sewage capabilities, and we lost them all at once.”

    With water in short supply, the volunteer fire department banned burning the yard waste, brush, and other debris people have been clearing for weeks. “If we had a big fire and we needed to take several thousand gallons or more out of the system, we don’t really know for sure how long that supply would hold up,” said firefighter Chris Westveer.

    two people stand near a firetruck
    Firefirghters Chris Westveer and his wife Barbara at the station house in Spruce Pine.
    Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    The department has experienced some close calls. Westveer recalled one frightening night when wiring in a damaged home sparked a fire. The road had been washed away, forcing crews to approach on an all-terrain vehicle. With no water on tap, they drew what they needed from a river and hoped the wind wouldn’t spread the flames beyond their ability to fight them.

    Such strains on public services, already scarce throughout mountain communities, compound the stress felt by those who have gone nearly two months without reliable water. People in Banner Elk, a community of 1,000 or so that had to rebuild a road before it could repair water and sewer lines, couldn’t flush their toilets for a month. County officials worried that the raw sewage would flow into the Elk River. Meredith Olan, director of the Banner House history museum, has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do the dishes. “I’m very adept at carrying buckets now,” she said ruefully. Anyone wanting to take a shower had to rely upon the goodwill of friends with wells to draw from. But even that was no guarantee. Some were inundated with floodwaters and might have been contaminated with E. coli and other pathogens, and the electric pumps that pull water from the depths aren’t any good when the power is out. 

    A woman stands near large stacks of bottled water
    Meredith Olan, who leads the Banner House history museum in Banner Elk, stands next to some of the drinking water available in town. She has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do her dishes. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    Even as these communities work nonstop to restore service, local and state officials are looking ahead to the next big storm. Members of the state Water Infrastructure Authority, a body tasked with financial planning for the state’s water and sewer utilities, gathered last month to ponder updates to North Carolina’s water infrastructure master plan. The document, created in 2017, explored ways of ensuring the financial stability of water utilities. Members of the panel, which includes several utility directors, a water engineer, and the head of the state Division of Water Infrastructure, acknowledged that local officials often have little idea how water and wastewater work and need help navigating the aftermath of a disaster and applying for grants to recover from it. 

    Experts on the subject said consolidating the region’s patchwork of small systems may be the key to rebuilding and maintaining them. Some are doing just that. Four counties in southwestern Virginia are working together to install dozens of miles of water lines. Such efforts are easier among towns that are close together, like Mars Hill and Weaverville. These small towns, which are rapidly becoming suburbs of Asheville, have linked their water systems so they can ensure there’s enough to supply new housing. That connection allowed Weaverville to quickly buy and move water when the flood knocked out its municipal system. A similar arrangement proposed for nearby Marshall would cost about $15 million.

    Teamwork can provide a backup supply of water, reduce maintenance costs, and allow small utilities to share these essential resources and collaborate on, rather than compete for, grant applications. Such efforts will grow increasingly important as development and a warming world further burden these systems. “I think the fiefdom of water supply has to change for everyone to thrive in an era of climate catastrophe,” said Will Harlan, the Southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity and a resident of Barnardsville, another community not far from Asheville.

    Even if a physical collaboration isn’t possible, an organizational one might be. “If you’ve got three tiny towns and nobody can afford to hire a public works or public utilities director, the three of y’all go in together and hire a qualified utilities director,” one member of the master plan committee said during a public conference call. 

    An excavator works near a black tarp and a stop sign
    Repairing all of the damage the region’s water systems sustained could take many years and cost many millions of dollars. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    Barring any changes, the region is at risk of simply rebuilding what it has, only to watch it all wash away in the next big flood, said Francis de los Reyes. He is an engineering professor at North Carolina State University who focuses on sanitation systems. He’d like to see communities move their water infrastructure to higher ground, as Spruce Pine is doing, and relocate flood-prone neighborhoods, as is happening in eastern Kentucky. “Your choices are mitigation, adaptation, or staying in fight-or-flight,” de los Reyes said. 

    But it takes more than a collaborative spirit and skilled leadership to repair a water system and harden it against future disasters. It requires communities to pool resources or seek federal support because they do not have the millions of dollars that work requires. Even before Helene struck, the bipartisan infrastructure law set aside $603 million to help North Carolina replace old pipes and other hardware. The fate of that money remains in question, however, because President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to undo much of the Biden administration’s climate work.

    Back at Spruce Pine Montessori School, Jennifer Rambo is trying not to let uncertainty about the future get to her. It’s hard enough dealing with the present. Beyond the weeks without potable water, she is grappling with spotty internet access and electricity, and an inescapable sense of loss. In the days after Helene, she spent much of her time trying to determine if people were still alive. Her voice wavered as she said more or less the same words that so many in her community, and others like it, have echoed over the past two months: “Nobody was prepared.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural water utilities in North Carolina are still reeling from Helene on Nov 22, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Rural water utilities in North Carolina are still reeling from Helene

    The most exciting part of the day at Spruce Pine Montessori School is when the truck arrives to empty the porta-johns. At that point in the afternoon, the kids abandon their toy dinosaurs and monkey bars, throw up their hands, and yell in excitement as they run to watch the truck do its work. It’s lucky that they find something to be so joyful about, Principal Jennifer Rambo said on a recent sunny afternoon, because things have been a mess for the past seven weeks.

    The flooding that devastated western North Carolina during Hurricane Helene laid waste to communities all around the region, spitting up great torrents of mud and washing away homes, cars, and people. The landscape along the creeks and mountainsides has been forever changed. 

    A woman with glasses washes her hands inside a large room
    Jennifer Rambo washes her hands at one of the portable sinks the school installed at a cost of $600. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    Beyond the fallen trees, sliding hillsides, and damaged buildings, Helene took out critical infrastructure, like internet and electricity, water, and sewer. Everyone would have liked more time to get things in order, but working families were desperate for childcare and the desire to resume classes was too great. “We had to get open,” Rambo said. “The kids needed some routine and structure and consistency, and families needed to go back to work.”

    Although folks in Spruce Pine were told Thursday they could finally stop boiling water before using it, the school still can’t flush its toilets because the sewers remain a mess. In addition to two portable toilets (and special seats so the smaller children wouldn’t fall in), it has had to buy water by the barrel and spend $600 to install portable hand-washing sinks. The bills continue adding up: $360 per week for the johns and $350 every time they need emptying. Everyone has had to adjust to these changes and more, even as they’ve dealt with similar problems at home.

    a white child-size potty chair inside a porta potty
    The two portable toilets at Spruce Pine Montessori School needed seats designed to ensure the youngsters didn’t fall in. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    It’s been that way everywhere. The storm killed 103 people throughout western North Carolina and surrounding areas. Many more were injured. All told, the wind and the water damaged as many as 126,000 homes, and dozens of roads and bridges simply washed away.

    Helene also decimated more than two dozen water utilities. For weeks after the storm, people had to boil anything that wasn’t poured from a bottle, and many of them drew from creeks and ponds just to flush their toilets. Folks in Asheville, where taps ran dry for three weeks, were told just this week that their water is safe to drink without boiling it first, but thousands of people served by 16 utilities still deal with sketchy water, low pressure, and other frustrations. In an effort to make their lives a little easier, officials dipped into a $273 million relief package to dot this end of North Carolina with 650 portable toilets and 15 “community care stations” with showers and washing machines.

    Asheville was lucky enough to have upgraded its reservoir last year, something that prevented even worse flooding and allowed the region’s largest city and the communities that rely upon it for water to recover sooner than they otherwise might have. But for towns like Spruce Pine, the financial and engineering challenges of repairing their water systems are as formidable as the hurricane that broke them.

    An aerial shot of a storm-damaged downtown covered in mud
    Residents and business owners in Spruce Pine haul away some of the debris and mud that inundated downtown.
    Steve Exum / Getty Images

    The water that flows into the North Fork Reservoir, which serves Asheville and the towns of Black Mountain and Swannanoa, always ran clear and clean from its headwaters high in Pisgah National Forest. But mud and debris have turned it murky brown and damaged much of the equipment needed to pump it. Crews have worked around the clock to set things right, reconnecting pipelines in record time and drawing muck from the lake.

    Repairing municipal water systems leveled by a storm that washed away distribution lines, overwhelmed intakes, and inundated treatment plants is no easy feat. The challenge is acute in mountain communities, where geography is a hassle. Much of the infrastructure required to draw, treat, and distribute water often sits alongside reservoirs, placing them squarely in a floodplain when the torrent arrives and increasing the likelihood of damage. Reaching anything needing attention can take days or even weeks because the lines that carry water to customers meander through valleys, over ridgelines, and along roadways, many of which remain impassable. Spruce Pine Water & Sewer has restored service to 90 percent of its 2,000 or so customers, but can’t do much for the rest of them until the roads are fixed.

    The sewer system remains a mess too. Town manager Darlene Butler has asked residents to conserve water as she works with county officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to erect a temporary treatment facility. The equipment is only now arriving and will, at best, be a Band-Aid for a multi-year fix. “We had a lot of damage there, so we’re trying to encourage people not to use a lot of water and put it into our sewer system,” she said.

    A woman sits an a desk covered in stacks of paper
    Darlene Butler, the town manager of Spruce Pine, has had to ask residents to conserve water while crews scramble to erect a temporary treatment plant. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    A lot of these utilities struggled even before Helene. In many Appalachian towns, the companies that once paid to maintain water and sewer systems have shut down or moved on, and shrinking populations generate less revenue to keep things shiny and new. This is endemic throughout Appalachia. Residents in McDowell County, West Virginia — where one-third of families live in poverty — have for example given up on the often discolored water that flows from their taps and buy it by the case instead. Pipes in Martin County, Kentucky lose about 64 percent of what flows through them, a problem that started 24 years ago when a toxic coal slurry spill damaged them. The burden of these failures falls on customers who must adapt to the situation even as their rates climb. (Rates in Martin County, North Carolina, to offer one example, are among the nation’s highest.)

    Yet other systems, particularly those in tourist towns, struggle to keep up with rapidly growing populations. The challenges are compounded by the difficulty of running new lines in the mountains and maintaining the complex pumps needed to maintain pressure over ridgelines. “This is a really, really great place to live,” said Clay Chandler, Asheville’s water resources information officer. “It’s beautiful. The people are amazing. But, man, it makes it hard to operate a water system.”

    A pipe runs in the exposed gap underneath a damaged road
    A broken water main lies alongside Lytle Cove Road in Swannanoa. Many roads remain impassable, hindering efforts to restore water.
    Steve Exum / Getty Images

    Spruce Pine’s system is so old that Butler has no idea when its pipes were laid, though she guesses it was 60 years ago. The pump station, recently upgraded with money from the American Rescue Plan, was built in 1967. It has seen overhauls as things broke, but rural utilities rarely make wholesale improvements because they are expensive and disruptive. “I think, like most small towns, we’ve struggled for the funds to be proactive instead of reactive,” Butler said.

    Even as communities deal with the aftermath of so much deferred maintenance, others are facing the inescapable fact that rebuilding on a floodplain may no longer make sense. Spruce Pine is banking on hazard mitigation funding from FEMA and help from federal officials to move its wastewater treatment plant to higher ground.

    The work needed to fully, and permanently, restore water and sewer service in these communities will by most estimates take two to four years and cost many millions of dollars. Meanwhile, crews continue playing whack-a-mole as aging lines break. Another one gave way in rural Yancey County last week, sending a geyser dozens of feet into the air. 

    About 2,000 people live in Spruce Pine, a busy place with water-intensive businesses that have been impacted by the disruption. There’s the mine that produces some of the purest quartz in the world and sent heavy equipment to help restore service. There are the restaurants and kitschy attractions that drive a burgeoning tourism industry. And then there are the two state prisons, each of which holds about 800 people (who were relocated after spending a week in flooded cells) and, like prisons everywhere, burden the local water and sewer systems.

    The ongoing crisis also has made providing basic services a challenge. Blue Ridge Regional Hospital, which serves three counties, has long had a standby power supply but scrambled to cope with losing water. Trucks haul in what’s needed, and enormous bladders collect what’s been used. “We had backup generators to supply the hospital in case of an emergency,” said Alex Glover, chair of the hospital’s board of directors. “But we never dreamed we would lose water and sewage capabilities, and we lost them all at once.”

    With water in short supply, the volunteer fire department banned burning the yard waste, brush, and other debris people have been clearing for weeks. “If we had a big fire and we needed to take several thousand gallons or more out of the system, we don’t really know for sure how long that supply would hold up,” said firefighter Chris Westveer.

    two people stand near a firetruck
    Firefirghters Chris Westveer and his wife Barbara at the station house in Spruce Pine.
    Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    The department has experienced some close calls. Westveer recalled one frightening night when wiring in a damaged home sparked a fire. The road had been washed away, forcing crews to approach on an all-terrain vehicle. With no water on tap, they drew what they needed from a river and hoped the wind wouldn’t spread the flames beyond their ability to fight them.

    Such strains on public services, already scarce throughout mountain communities, compound the stress felt by those who have gone nearly two months without reliable water. People in Banner Elk, a community of 1,000 or so that had to rebuild a road before it could repair water and sewer lines, couldn’t flush their toilets for a month. County officials worried that the raw sewage would flow into the Elk River. Meredith Olan, director of the Banner House history museum, has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do the dishes. “I’m very adept at carrying buckets now,” she said ruefully. Anyone wanting to take a shower had to rely upon the goodwill of friends with wells to draw from. But even that was no guarantee. Some were inundated with floodwaters and might have been contaminated with E. coli and other pathogens, and the electric pumps that pull water from the depths aren’t any good when the power is out. 

    A woman stands near large stacks of bottled water
    Meredith Olan, who leads the Banner House history museum in Banner Elk, stands next to some of the drinking water available in town. She has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do her dishes. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    Even as these communities work nonstop to restore service, local and state officials are looking ahead to the next big storm. Members of the state Water Infrastructure Authority, a body tasked with financial planning for the state’s water and sewer utilities, gathered last month to ponder updates to North Carolina’s water infrastructure master plan. The document, created in 2017, explored ways of ensuring the financial stability of water utilities. Members of the panel, which includes several utility directors, a water engineer, and the head of the state Division of Water Infrastructure, acknowledged that local officials often have little idea how water and wastewater work and need help navigating the aftermath of a disaster and applying for grants to recover from it. 

    Experts on the subject said consolidating the region’s patchwork of small systems may be the key to rebuilding and maintaining them. Some are doing just that. Four counties in southwestern Virginia are working together to install dozens of miles of water lines. Such efforts are easier among towns that are close together, like Mars Hill and Weaverville. These small towns, which are rapidly becoming suburbs of Asheville, have linked their water systems so they can ensure there’s enough to supply new housing. That connection allowed Weaverville to quickly buy and move water when the flood knocked out its municipal system. A similar arrangement proposed for nearby Marshall would cost about $15 million.

    Teamwork can provide a backup supply of water, reduce maintenance costs, and allow small utilities to share these essential resources and collaborate on, rather than compete for, grant applications. Such efforts will grow increasingly important as development and a warming world further burden these systems. “I think the fiefdom of water supply has to change for everyone to thrive in an era of climate catastrophe,” said Will Harlan, the Southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity and a resident of Barnardsville, another community not far from Asheville.

    Even if a physical collaboration isn’t possible, an organizational one might be. “If you’ve got three tiny towns and nobody can afford to hire a public works or public utilities director, the three of y’all go in together and hire a qualified utilities director,” one member of the master plan committee said during a public conference call. 

    An excavator works near a black tarp and a stop sign
    Repairing all of the damage the region’s water systems sustained could take many years and cost many millions of dollars. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

    Barring any changes, the region is at risk of simply rebuilding what it has, only to watch it all wash away in the next big flood, said Francis de los Reyes. He is an engineering professor at North Carolina State University who focuses on sanitation systems. He’d like to see communities move their water infrastructure to higher ground, as Spruce Pine is doing, and relocate flood-prone neighborhoods, as is happening in eastern Kentucky. “Your choices are mitigation, adaptation, or staying in fight-or-flight,” de los Reyes said. 

    But it takes more than a collaborative spirit and skilled leadership to repair a water system and harden it against future disasters. It requires communities to pool resources or seek federal support because they do not have the millions of dollars that work requires. Even before Helene struck, the bipartisan infrastructure law set aside $603 million to help North Carolina replace old pipes and other hardware. The fate of that money remains in question, however, because President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to undo much of the Biden administration’s climate work.

    Back at Spruce Pine Montessori School, Jennifer Rambo is trying not to let uncertainty about the future get to her. It’s hard enough dealing with the present. Beyond the weeks without potable water, she is grappling with spotty internet access and electricity, and an inescapable sense of loss. In the days after Helene, she spent much of her time trying to determine if people were still alive. Her voice wavered as she said more or less the same words that so many in her community, and others like it, have echoed over the past two months: “Nobody was prepared.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural water utilities in North Carolina are still reeling from Helene on Nov 22, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Climate change made all of this year’s Atlantic hurricanes so much worse

    Like wildfires chewing through dried-out forests, hurricane after hurricane fed on extra-hot ocean water this summer and fall before slamming into communities along the Gulf Coast, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damages and killing more than 300 people. The warmer the sea, the more potent the hurricane fuel, and the more energy a storm can consume and turn into wind. 

    Human-made climate change made all of this season’s 11 hurricanes — from Beryl to Rafael — much worse, according to an analysis released on Wednesday from the nonprofit science group Climate Central. Scientists can already say that 2024 is the hottest year on record. By helping drive record-breaking surface ocean temperatures, planetary warming boosted the hurricanes’ maximum sustained wind speeds by between 9 and 28 miles per hour.

    That bumped seven of this year’s storms into a higher category on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, including the two Category 5 storms, Beryl and Milton. “Our analysis shows that we would have had zero Category 5 storms without human-caused climate change,” said Daniel Gilford, climate scientist at Climate Central, on a press call. “There’s really this impact on the intensity of the storms that we’re experiencing in the real world on a day-to-day basis.”

    In a companion study also released Wednesday, Climate Central found that between 2019 and 2023, climate change accelerated hurricane wind speeds by an average of 18 mph. More than 80 percent of the hurricanes in that period were made significantly more intense by global warming, the study found. 

    That’s making hurricanes more dangerous than ever. An 18 mph boost in wind speeds might not sound like much, but that can mean the difference between a Category 4 and a Category 5, which packs sustained winds of 157 mph or higher. Hurricanes have gotten so much stronger, scientists are considering modifying the scale. “The hurricane scale is capped at Category 5, but we might need to think about: Should that continue to be the case?” said Friederike Otto, a climatologist who cofounded the research group World Weather Attribution, on the press call. “Or do we have to talk about Category 6 hurricanes at some point? Just so that people are aware that something is going to hit them that is different from everything else they’ve experienced before.”

    Hurricanes need a few ingredients to spin up. One is fuel: As warm ocean waters evaporate, energy transfers from the surface into the atmosphere. Another is humidity, because dry air will help break up a storm system. And a hurricane also can’t form if there’s too much wind shear, which is a change in wind speed and direction with height. So even if a hurricane has high ocean temperatures to feed on, that’s not necessarily a guarantee that it will turn into a monster if wind shear is excessive and humidity is minimal. 

    Climate Central

    But during this year’s hurricane season — which runs through the end of November — those water temperatures have been so extreme that the stage was set for catastrophe. As the storms were traveling through the open Atlantic, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico, they exploited surface temperatures made up to 800 times more likely by human-caused planetary warming, according to the Climate Central analysis. Four of the most destructive hurricanes — Beryl, Debby, Helene, and Milton — had their wind speeds increased by an average of 17 mph, thanks to climate change. In early November, Hurricane Rafael managed to jump from Category 1 to Category 3.

    Climate Central’s companion study, published in the journal Environmental Research: Climate, looked at the five previous years and found that climate change boosted three hurricanes — Lorenzo in 2019, Ian in 2022, and Lee in 2023 — to Category 5 status. That isn’t to say climate change created any of these hurricanes, just that the additional warming from greenhouse gas emissions exacerbated the storms by raising ocean temperatures. Scientists are also finding that as the planet warms, hurricanes are able to dump more rain. In October, World Weather Attribution, for instance, found that Helene’s rainfall in late September was 10 percent heavier, making flooding worse as the storm marched inland.

    All that supercharging might have helped hurricanes undergo rapid intensification, defined as an increase in wind speed of at least 35 mph within 24 hours. Last month, Hurricane Milton’s winds skyrocketed by 90 mph in a day, one of the fastest rates of intensification that scientists have ever seen in the Atlantic basin. In September, Hurricane Helene rapidly intensified, too. 

    This kind of intensification makes hurricanes particularly dangerous, since people living on a stretch of coastline might be preparing for a much weaker storm than what actually makes it ashore. “It throws off your preparations,” said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist who studies hurricanes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who wasn’t involved in the new research. “It means you have less time to evacuate.”

    Researchers are also finding that wind shear could be decreasing in coastal areas due to changes in atmospheric patterns, removing the mechanism that keeps hurricanes in check. And relative humidity is rising. Accordingly, scientists have found a huge increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore in recent years.

    The hotter the planet gets overall, and the hotter the Atlantic Ocean gets specifically, the more monstrous hurricanes will grow. “We know that the speed limit at which a hurricane can spin is going up,” Gilford said, “and hurricane intensities in the real world are responding.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change made all of this year’s Atlantic hurricanes so much worse on Nov 20, 2024.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by msimon.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.