This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Florida’s department of environmental protection has fired a whistleblower who exposed and sank governor Ron DeSantis’ secretive plan to pave over environmentally sensitive state parks and build lucrative hotels, golf courses, and pickleball courts.

James Gaddis, who worked for the agency for two years as a cartographer, was terminated for “conduct unbecoming a public employee,” according to a letter he received on Saturday.

His leaking of the proposals sparked a furious backlash that united Republicans with Democrats and environmental advocates, and forced DeSantis into a humiliating climbdown last week in which he admitted the plans were “half-baked” and were “going back to the drawing board.”

“I was directed to create nine maps depicting shocking and destructive infrastructure proposals.”

Speaking with the Tampa Bay Times on Monday, Gaddis said preservation of the state parks was more important to him than his position. “It was the absolute flagrant disregard for the critical, globally imperiled habitat in these parks,” he said. “This was going to be a complete bulldozing of all of that habitat. The secrecy was totally confusing and very frustrating. No state agency should be behaving like this.”

News of his firing came as two Democratic state representatives pressed the agency about who was involved in drawing up plans that appeared to include no-bid contracts destined for mysteriously pre-chosen developers outside the requirements of Florida law.

“Firing a cartographer who had clear concerns about the process of this plan and the lack of transparency around it is 100 percent retaliatory,” said Anna Eskamani, who wrote a joint letter to Shawn Hamilton, secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) with fellow state congresswoman Angie Nixon.

“We want to not only hold the department accountable,” she said, “but our motivation is to learn more about how this happened in such a secretive way. Were they using a specific legislative process? Were there conversations that were meant to be public that weren’t?”

“Our intention is to prevent this from ever happening again, and that requires a better understanding of how it happened in the first place.”

The hastily drawn proposals would have paved over thousands of acres of preserved land, Gaddis wrote.

The DEP did not immediately return a request for comment from the Guardian. In a statement to the Tampa Bay Times, a DEP spokesperson, Alex Kuchta, said the agency “would not comment on personnel matters.”

Kuchta was previously one of several DeSantis administration officials publicly defending or promoting the plans before the governor attempted on Wednesday to distance himself from them.

“It was not approved by me, I never saw that. It was intentionally leaked to a left-wing group to try and create a narrative,” DeSantis told reporters. Political analysts, meanwhile, called the episode “a totally self-inflicted political wound.”

In a document he said he created in his own time, and which he sent to the Times, Gaddis explained how the proposals affecting nine state parks, and featuring 350-room hotels and the paving of thousands of acres of preserved land for recreation facilities, were drawn up in barely two weeks at the beginning of the month.

“I was directed to create nine maps depicting shocking and destructive infrastructure proposals, while keeping quiet as they were pushed through an accelerated and under-the-radar public engagement process,” Gaddis wrote on a GoFundMe page he set up following his dismissal.

He said the DEP planned to hold short-notice, hour-long meetings at the nine parks simultaneously to announce the plans and minimize public comment.

Other reasons given in the letter for Gaddis’s termination were “violation of law or department rules, negligence and misconduct,” as well as providing “inaccurate” information. The letter did not specify what information Gaddis gave that was deemed to be inaccurate.

Gaddis spoke with a DEP attorney last week and admitted he was the author of the document that the Times used to break the story. He said he wrote it on his agency-issued laptop at home and worked on it alone. “I’ve taken sole responsibility for this,” said Gaddis, a single father with an 11-year-old daughter.

By Tuesday afternoon, Gaddis’s GoFundMe appeal, entitled “an ethical whistleblower’s new start,” had surpassed $63,000, more than six times its initial target.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Florida’s department of environmental protection has fired a whistleblower who exposed and sank governor Ron DeSantis’ secretive plan to pave over environmentally sensitive state parks and build lucrative hotels, golf courses, and pickleball courts.

James Gaddis, who worked for the agency for two years as a cartographer, was terminated for “conduct unbecoming a public employee,” according to a letter he received on Saturday.

His leaking of the proposals sparked a furious backlash that united Republicans with Democrats and environmental advocates, and forced DeSantis into a humiliating climbdown last week in which he admitted the plans were “half-baked” and were “going back to the drawing board.”

“I was directed to create nine maps depicting shocking and destructive infrastructure proposals.”

Speaking with the Tampa Bay Times on Monday, Gaddis said preservation of the state parks was more important to him than his position. “It was the absolute flagrant disregard for the critical, globally imperiled habitat in these parks,” he said. “This was going to be a complete bulldozing of all of that habitat. The secrecy was totally confusing and very frustrating. No state agency should be behaving like this.”

News of his firing came as two Democratic state representatives pressed the agency about who was involved in drawing up plans that appeared to include no-bid contracts destined for mysteriously pre-chosen developers outside the requirements of Florida law.

“Firing a cartographer who had clear concerns about the process of this plan and the lack of transparency around it is 100 percent retaliatory,” said Anna Eskamani, who wrote a joint letter to Shawn Hamilton, secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) with fellow state congresswoman Angie Nixon.

“We want to not only hold the department accountable,” she said, “but our motivation is to learn more about how this happened in such a secretive way. Were they using a specific legislative process? Were there conversations that were meant to be public that weren’t?”

“Our intention is to prevent this from ever happening again, and that requires a better understanding of how it happened in the first place.”

The hastily drawn proposals would have paved over thousands of acres of preserved land, Gaddis wrote.

The DEP did not immediately return a request for comment from the Guardian. In a statement to the Tampa Bay Times, a DEP spokesperson, Alex Kuchta, said the agency “would not comment on personnel matters.”

Kuchta was previously one of several DeSantis administration officials publicly defending or promoting the plans before the governor attempted on Wednesday to distance himself from them.

“It was not approved by me, I never saw that. It was intentionally leaked to a left-wing group to try and create a narrative,” DeSantis told reporters. Political analysts, meanwhile, called the episode “a totally self-inflicted political wound.”

In a document he said he created in his own time, and which he sent to the Times, Gaddis explained how the proposals affecting nine state parks, and featuring 350-room hotels and the paving of thousands of acres of preserved land for recreation facilities, were drawn up in barely two weeks at the beginning of the month.

“I was directed to create nine maps depicting shocking and destructive infrastructure proposals, while keeping quiet as they were pushed through an accelerated and under-the-radar public engagement process,” Gaddis wrote on a GoFundMe page he set up following his dismissal.

He said the DEP planned to hold short-notice, hour-long meetings at the nine parks simultaneously to announce the plans and minimize public comment.

Other reasons given in the letter for Gaddis’s termination were “violation of law or department rules, negligence and misconduct,” as well as providing “inaccurate” information. The letter did not specify what information Gaddis gave that was deemed to be inaccurate.

Gaddis spoke with a DEP attorney last week and admitted he was the author of the document that the Times used to break the story. He said he wrote it on his agency-issued laptop at home and worked on it alone. “I’ve taken sole responsibility for this,” said Gaddis, a single father with an 11-year-old daughter.

By Tuesday afternoon, Gaddis’s GoFundMe appeal, entitled “an ethical whistleblower’s new start,” had surpassed $63,000, more than six times its initial target.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The poignancy was unmistakable: Prognosticators at Colorado State University amended their already miserable seasonal tropical cyclone forecast on Monday precisely as Hurricane Beryl was filling Houston’s streets with floodwater and knocking out power to more than 2m homes and businesses.

“A likely harbinger of a hyperactive season” was how CSU researchers characterized Beryl, which set numerous records on the way to its Texas landfall, including the earliest category 5 hurricane, strongest ever June storm, and most powerful to strike the southern Windward Islands.

In the Caribbean, the storm caused almost unprecedented destruction, and killed dozens from Grenada to the United States.

With the six-month Atlantic hurricane season only six weeks old, and a monster storm such as those only usually seen in the later, peak months already in the books, climate scientists fear for what’s to come.

Climate change has “got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended.”

They also warn that nobody should be surprised about the eye-popping start to the 2024 season, or the rapid intensification of Beryl from a modest tropical storm into a deadly 165 mph cyclone, because of “crazy” ocean heat that acts like rocket fuel for developing hurricanes.

“It’s a big wake-up call, certainly for folks in the US and throughout the Caribbean, that a greater risk for more extreme hurricanes is certainly there, and with warmer waters into the late spring we’re getting an earlier start to the hurricane season,” Brett Anderson, senior climate scientist with AccuWeather, told the Guardian.

“We’re seeing these types of storms developing very quickly, more so than 20 to 30 years ago, with all that warm water in place. Science has become really good with computer models forecasting the tracks of these storms, but intensity is still a challenge. Rapid intensification certainly we’re very concerned about, especially when these things get closer to the coast.”

It’s an old adage in hurricane season that it only takes one storm to make it an active season. On Monday, the team at Colorado state, one of the most respected in the forecasting business, predicted even more of them.

They now expect six major hurricanes with sustained wind speed above 111mph, and 12 hurricanes overall, before the season ends on November 30.

In April, they predicted five major hurricanes from 11, both scenarios matching the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction in May of a season well above the average of seven hurricanes and three major cyclones.

The meteorologists are confident that the alphabetical list of 21 names allocated when a disturbance becomes at least a 39 mph tropical storm will be depleted this year for only the fourth time since 2005. Previously that had not happened since the naming convention began in 1950.

“We’re at well over a year now, probably 15 or so months of record breaking or close to record breaking ocean heat, and when I say close I mean comparing 2024 with 2023, so well above any previous year,” said Brian McNoldy, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.

“When a hurricane comes in and knocks out power for days to areas and knocks out the supply chain, all of that’s going to have a downstream impact.”

“Obviously we have climate change acting on everything, it’s got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended. There are other things going on,” he said. “Last year, yes, we had these record-smashing warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic, but we also started to get a stronger El Niño as the year went on, and all things being equal El Niño acts to reduce Atlantic hurricane activity.

“It probably did to some degree, but thanks to the ocean temperatures being so warm it ended up being an above average hurricane season anyway.”

Beryl, meanwhile, reinforced one often overlooked aspect of a coastal hurricane strike, the spawning of tornados and flooding far inland that can be equally as destructive and deadly. Beryl’s reach extended as far as New England, and caused fatalities in Texas, Louisiana, Vermont. AccuWeather’s initial estimate of economic loss in the US is up to $32 billion.

“People need to be prepared for these kinds of storms,” said Matt Marshall, AccuWeather’s senior director for strategic projects. “More die from water than wind in a hurricane, but people track storms by the wind speed. We use a real impact scale for wind, storm surge intensity, how much rain is going to fall and therefore how much flooding there’s going to be from rain, and it uses the overall economic impact expected by the storm to capture how much damage there’s going to be overall.”

“We anticipated extended power outages in Texas,” he said. “We anticipated the flooding rain coming up through the Great Lakes and into New England, we anticipated the potential tornado outbreak to the east and north of the storm track so things are pretty well aligned with what we forecast.”

As the frequency and intensity of storms continue to escalate, Marshall added, so will the cost: “They’re causing more damage, the cost of materials has gone up, the cost of supply chains is going up. So when a hurricane comes in and knocks out power for days to areas and knocks out the supply chain, all of that’s going to have a downstream impact.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The poignancy was unmistakable: Prognosticators at Colorado State University amended their already miserable seasonal tropical cyclone forecast on Monday precisely as Hurricane Beryl was filling Houston’s streets with floodwater and knocking out power to more than 2m homes and businesses.

“A likely harbinger of a hyperactive season” was how CSU researchers characterized Beryl, which set numerous records on the way to its Texas landfall, including the earliest category 5 hurricane, strongest ever June storm, and most powerful to strike the southern Windward Islands.

In the Caribbean, the storm caused almost unprecedented destruction, and killed dozens from Grenada to the United States.

With the six-month Atlantic hurricane season only six weeks old, and a monster storm such as those only usually seen in the later, peak months already in the books, climate scientists fear for what’s to come.

Climate change has “got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended.”

They also warn that nobody should be surprised about the eye-popping start to the 2024 season, or the rapid intensification of Beryl from a modest tropical storm into a deadly 165 mph cyclone, because of “crazy” ocean heat that acts like rocket fuel for developing hurricanes.

“It’s a big wake-up call, certainly for folks in the US and throughout the Caribbean, that a greater risk for more extreme hurricanes is certainly there, and with warmer waters into the late spring we’re getting an earlier start to the hurricane season,” Brett Anderson, senior climate scientist with AccuWeather, told the Guardian.

“We’re seeing these types of storms developing very quickly, more so than 20 to 30 years ago, with all that warm water in place. Science has become really good with computer models forecasting the tracks of these storms, but intensity is still a challenge. Rapid intensification certainly we’re very concerned about, especially when these things get closer to the coast.”

It’s an old adage in hurricane season that it only takes one storm to make it an active season. On Monday, the team at Colorado state, one of the most respected in the forecasting business, predicted even more of them.

They now expect six major hurricanes with sustained wind speed above 111mph, and 12 hurricanes overall, before the season ends on November 30.

In April, they predicted five major hurricanes from 11, both scenarios matching the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction in May of a season well above the average of seven hurricanes and three major cyclones.

The meteorologists are confident that the alphabetical list of 21 names allocated when a disturbance becomes at least a 39 mph tropical storm will be depleted this year for only the fourth time since 2005. Previously that had not happened since the naming convention began in 1950.

“We’re at well over a year now, probably 15 or so months of record breaking or close to record breaking ocean heat, and when I say close I mean comparing 2024 with 2023, so well above any previous year,” said Brian McNoldy, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.

“When a hurricane comes in and knocks out power for days to areas and knocks out the supply chain, all of that’s going to have a downstream impact.”

“Obviously we have climate change acting on everything, it’s got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended. There are other things going on,” he said. “Last year, yes, we had these record-smashing warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic, but we also started to get a stronger El Niño as the year went on, and all things being equal El Niño acts to reduce Atlantic hurricane activity.

“It probably did to some degree, but thanks to the ocean temperatures being so warm it ended up being an above average hurricane season anyway.”

Beryl, meanwhile, reinforced one often overlooked aspect of a coastal hurricane strike, the spawning of tornados and flooding far inland that can be equally as destructive and deadly. Beryl’s reach extended as far as New England, and caused fatalities in Texas, Louisiana, Vermont. AccuWeather’s initial estimate of economic loss in the US is up to $32 billion.

“People need to be prepared for these kinds of storms,” said Matt Marshall, AccuWeather’s senior director for strategic projects. “More die from water than wind in a hurricane, but people track storms by the wind speed. We use a real impact scale for wind, storm surge intensity, how much rain is going to fall and therefore how much flooding there’s going to be from rain, and it uses the overall economic impact expected by the storm to capture how much damage there’s going to be overall.”

“We anticipated extended power outages in Texas,” he said. “We anticipated the flooding rain coming up through the Great Lakes and into New England, we anticipated the potential tornado outbreak to the east and north of the storm track so things are pretty well aligned with what we forecast.”

As the frequency and intensity of storms continue to escalate, Marshall added, so will the cost: “They’re causing more damage, the cost of materials has gone up, the cost of supply chains is going up. So when a hurricane comes in and knocks out power for days to areas and knocks out the supply chain, all of that’s going to have a downstream impact.”