As Hurricane Milton buries the needle on our current hurricane severity scale, no exchange on the internet better sums up the way we got to this devasting new reality than the one on Travis Herzog’s Facebook page. The veteran meteorologist at ABC13 in Houston felt the need to address accusations that Milton was the result of a weather control machine, an idea pushed by several elected Republican leaders.
“Hurricane Milton’s wind field is currently releasing 23 terajoules of energy,” it reads. “How much energy is that? It’s more than the entire energy consumed by all of mankind every second across the globe. It’s equivalent to releasing all the energy from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima every 3 seconds. And that’s just the energy from the wind! The heat energy released every second by a hurricane is roughly 4 times the amount of the wind energy! We can’t control something with this much energy, and we certainly can’t create something with this much energy.”
Herzog is wrong about one thing: we can create it, and we did.
Climate scientists for decades have been warning the Gulf Coast states that warming seas could and would lead to more intense Atlantic cyclones. The Gulf of Mexico is nearly two degrees Celsius warmer than it has historically been. That warmth has helped make this hurricane season unusually active and, in Milton’s case, extremely brutal.
There is zero argument among climate scientists that the Earth is warming and humanity’s pollution is the main culprit. Even events like Winter Storm Uri, which crippled the Texas electrical grid and left the Lone Star State in a frozen hell for nearly a week, have their source in how climate change disrupts the polar vortex. Less powerful vortex means more cold snaps further south.
Milton is also the perfect example of a recent phenomenon: the rapid increase in intensity. Over the past two decades, Atlantic storms have gotten much more powerful very fast, lessening the predictability. In 2023, Otis went from a tropical storm to a category five hurricane in less than 36 hours.
Climate change denial remains a large part of mainstream Republican politics. Current GOP nominee Donald Trump has gone on record calling it a hoax and dismissing disasters like California wildfires with half-baked conspiracy theories. His running mate, Sen. J. D. Vance, would not admit that manmade climate change is real during his debate with Gov. Tim Walz.
In Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz said that carbon emissions actually made the planet greener in 2015, and later voted against President Joe Biden’s massive environmental protection package. Meanwhile, Governor Greg Abbott has waged a bizarre war on the finances of companies that put money into renewable energy, claiming that it discriminates against oil and gas companies.
As Republican leadership continues to downplay the severity and cause of climate change, their constituents turn to fantasies like weather rays to explain why something like Milton happens. It’s an escapism enabled by their leaders refusing to address a slow motion apocalypse that is devastating entire states this week.
Meteorologists like Herzog can explain all they want, but until there is a shared reality from America’s political leadership, the bill of climate change is going to keep coming due as it is in Florida right now.
