Reason Roundup

Liz Wolfe | 10.10.2024 9:30 AM

Three million Americans without power this morning: Hurricane Milton made landfall overnight close to Siesta Key, Florida, as a Category 3 storm with maximum wind speeds of 120 mph.

Fatalities have already been reported due to tornadoes that formed as a result of the storm. The hurricane has now weakened to a Category 1, but millions are without power this morning with plenty of property damaged sustained. Milton will now be making its way toward Florida's east coast, but flash flood and storm surge warnings remain in effect for large parts of the state.

So far, the storm has destroyed the roof of a stadium in St. Petersburg, where emergency workers were sheltering, and flooded Tampa's Hillsborough River, but it's looking like the worst of the storm narrowly missed Tampa, thus sparing it even worse storm surges.

Why are these hurricanes so destructive? Many environmentalists will tell you that storms like Helene and Milton are getting more frequent; climate skeptics, meanwhile, will point to this year's storm season and rightfully note that we haven't seen a huge spike in frequency of hurricanes over the last few years. But arguing over that specific point alone would probably be wrong, because climate change is affecting several different factors. For example, "global heating made both of these storms more powerful than they had to be," writes Mark Gongloff for Bloomberg:

"On the morning before Milton's landfall, the research group World Weather Attribution released a report estimating climate change had made the sea surface temperatures fueling Helene 200 to 500 times more likely. The extra energy provided by this heat jacked up wind speeds and the rainfall that flooded supposed climate havens in the Appalachian Mountains hundreds of miles from shore.…[Milton] passed through hot Gulf........

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