Meteorological fall starts on the first of September. Fall is one of my favorite times of year. It brings crisp air and college football (Go Dawgs!).
The big negative is that it also represents the most active part of the Atlantic hurricane season. Though hurricane season kicks off on June 1, activity usually ramps up in August and peaks in the second week of September. Complex physics related to specific heat explain the lag between the start of the season and its peak, but I won’t bore you with a physics lesson.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
I established that context because Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton fundamentally changed lives throughout the Southeast. People are suffering. Personal property has been damaged. Hardworking farm communities have suffered losses. As a native son of Georgia, I have a strong feeling of despair. As someone with 30 years of expertise in weather and climate, it is gut-wrenching to know what is coming in advance with storms like these. It has also been challenging to watch misinformation and disinformation flying around like debris.
It is not unusual for hurricanes to happen in the fall. Though not as common, there are several instances in which hurricanes have moved from west to east in the Gulf of Mexico. Many hurricane seasons also feature back-to-back storms. In fact, I recently coauthored a report for the National Academies about compound disasters in the Gulf Region during 2020 and 2021. Hurricanes crisscrossed that region like a diabolical game of Tic-Tac-Toe. The report highlighted the challenges associated with managing and responding when multiple weather events, societal or economic vulnerabilities, infrastructure, and policy pose challenges.
But something is different this time.
Hold your cup on this next one. Claims are ricocheting around social media that people are “sending hurricanes.”
Hurricanes are not intelligent. They do not have political agendas. They are a part of the natural fabric of the Earth system. It is amusing to see eclectic claims out there. Ironically, I used to have people say, “Humans cannot change the weather or climate.”
We cannot manufacture, control or steer hurricanes. Given the destruction and despair that extreme weather events cause to families and society, I wish we could. We all probably know people whose lives were upended by a hurricane, tornado, flood or drought. It would be great to have a technology to spare pecan farmers from losing trees, limit loss of life in Georgia or the Carolinas, or prevent catastrophic flooding in Appalachia. Weather disasters affect everyone, but the most socioeconomically disadvantaged communities take on a disproportionate amount of the burden.
Storms such as Helene and Milton are anomaly events. Individually and collectively, people have less context for these types of events, so they seek explanations that align with level of comprehension, personal biases or circumstances. People often search for a soothing elixir of rationalization. Psychologists define this tendency as “belief bias.”
Without dating myself too much, I remember when major hurricanes (Category 3 to 5) such as Camille or Andrew were more isolated. Rapid intensification, which is defined as a storm gaining 35 mph or more of wind speed in less than one day, was also quite infrequent. The past decade has featured years with multiple major hurricanes or rapid intensification episodes. Hurricane Milton went from Category 1 to Category 5 hurricane in less than 48 hours.
Yes, hurricanes occur naturally. Yes, climate changes naturally. However, there is a human steroid on top of the natural variability. Grass grows naturally, too, but when we fertilize the soil, it grows differently. The science of climate change is complex and requires thinking beyond cumulus clouds and cold fronts. Some people find conspiracies or fringe perspectives to be more relatable or comforting than graphs, a geeky lecture or a seemingly overwhelming problem. A study published by the American Psychological Society also linked perceived threats, antagonism, intuition or motivations to why conspiracy theories thrive.
Unfortunately, warnings buried in obscure scientific journals predicted the weather scenarios playing out today.
Studies published by scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S.-led National Climate Assessment confirm that climate change is now affecting hurricanes, floods, droughts and heat waves. This new branch of climate science is called attribution. Rapid attribution studies have already identified potential connections between abnormally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the two recent hurricanes. Though my scientific training allows me to clearly see climate change-DNA in Helene and Milton, the scientific vetting processes should not be dismissed because of bias or emotion.
The Food and Drug Administration plays an important role in ensuring our food and medicine are safe for consumption. Would you take a headache remedy mixed up by a 12-year-old who raided the medicine and cleaning solution cabinets just because he claimed its efficacy on social media? Probably not. The peer-review process in science is our “FDA approval process” to ensure that scientific theories, data analyses and results are credible. That process has its issues, but it is certainly more reliable than a X post or unsubstantiated YouTube video.
Most disaster movies always start with a scientist trying to warn everybody before it is too late. It’s well past time to listen to the scientists who are sounding the alarms.
James Marshall Shepherd is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor and the director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia. He also serves as an associate dean in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he served as president of the American Meteorological Society.
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