This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

When Miguel Zablah bought his five-bedroom home in Miami’s leafy Shenandoah neighborhood in June of 2020, he said he paid $7,000 a year for homeowner’s insurance. 

The house, built in 1923, sits on high ground and has survived a century of famously volatile South Florida weather. But in just four short years, Zablah said his homeowner’s insurance premium has more than doubled to $15,000 a year. Quotes for next year’s premiums are looking even worse. 

“Some insurance companies are now quoting me at $20,000, $25,000 on my house, which is ridiculous,” said Zablah, who works in private equity. The premium increases are so steep that he’s considering just paying off his mortgage—and foregoing the insurance that his lender requires him to carry. “I’m very grateful that I’m in a good position,” he added. 

Zablah’s premium increases are a symptom of a broader insurance crisis plaguing real estate markets across America. Experts say it’s fueled, in large part, by the disastrous effects of human-caused climate change. 

Flooding is more frequent. Higher temperatures stoke stronger hurricanes. Wildfires burn more acres. And Americans have spent generations moving to sunny places that are often the most in harm’s way, including Florida, Texas, and California. 

In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t get coverage. 

So, the cost of insuring homes against natural disasters is spiking along with atmospheric temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.

Now, new research shows that higher insurance premiums like the one Zablah is paying significantly increase the probability of people falling behind on their mortgages—or motivate them to pay the debt off early. The outcomes spell trouble for banks, and for homeowners. 

How significant is the increase in mortgage trouble? A $500 spike in annual insurance premiums was linked to a 20 percent higher mortgage delinquency rate.

That figure was extracted from findings in a recent study, which will be expanded and then undergo peer review, according to Shan Ge, an assistant professor of finance at New York University and one of the paper’s authors.

“What we found, which is the first in the literature, is that as insurance premiums go up, we have seen an increase in delinquency of mortgages,” Ge said. The research adds to a growing body of scientific literature proving that the climate crisis is also a housing crisis.

It’s a crisis with a brutal, but important side effect: Higher premiums may convince people in vulnerable areas like Miami to move out of harm’s way. 

“The market is clearly adapting, and there will be winners and losers…but ultimately there should be more winners to the extent that it sends signals and people get out of the way,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University who was not involved in the study. 

Zablah also heads the board of the Brickell Roads condominium association in Miami, where he owns an investment property. The effects of climate change are felt there too.

Brickell Roads residents had been paying $350 a month in condo fees in 2022. But then Weston Insurance, the carrier of the association’s windstorm policy, went bust. 

It was the fifth Florida insurance carrier to fold that year in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the Southeast United States, causing an estimated $112 billion in damage. It was the most expensive storm ever in Florida and third most expensive in US history. 

As the association scrambled to find a replacement policy, it confronted a stark reality: Monthly condo fees would more than triple under their new insurance policy. On October 1, 2023, it raised the condo fee at Brickell Roads to $1,000 a month. (The board has since found another insurance carrier and hopes to lower the fee to $700 a month, according to Zablah.) 

“In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their policies.” 

Climate change has blown a hole through insurance markets across the United States. In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t find companies willing to insure their homes. 

In California, that state’s Department of Insurance has barred carriers from not renewing policies in certain fire-prone zip codes, essentially forcing the companies to insure properties there. And in Florida, a volatile mix of fraud, litigation, floods, and hurricanes has left homeowners like those in Brickell Roads scrambling for coverage. 

One major reason for the spike in insurance prices is a rise in the cost of the insurance coverage that insurance companies purchase for themselves, known as reinsurance. Globally, reinsurers raised prices for property insurers by 37 percent in 2023. (Prices stabilized somewhat in 2024.)

Insurers have passed those costs on to customers, said industry analyst Cathy Seifert during a Bloomberg TV appearance on November 4. “The insurance industry will leverage climate change into pricing strength,” she said. 

Analysts and scholars who study the nexus between climate change and housing had long theorized that higher insurance rates would negatively affect property markets. 

An August 2024 report by the Congressional Budget Office noted that in 2023, 30 percent of losses from natural disasters went uninsured. Those losses further constrict an already tight supply of housing. Researchers have also found that higher insurance rates affect the availability of affordable housing. It turns out, housing markets might be more sensitive to premium spikes than many thought.

Using a dataset that links insurance policies with mortgages for 6.7 million borrowers, Ge and two other researchers established that spikes in insurance premiums led a significant number of borrowers to either pay off their mortgages early or fall behind. Obviously, many homeowners can’t afford to accelerate their mortgage payoff.

The researchers found that the effect of premium increases on mortgage delinquency is twice as large for borrowers with a high loan-to-value ratio, meaning they owe a lot of money on their homes compared to the home’s value.

“This is how many people across the country are beginning to directly experience how climate change is changing our world and the cost it’s going to have,” said Moira Birss, a research fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. “In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their (insurance) policies.” 

Conversely, the NYU study found that people who took out jumbo mortgages—large loans for expensive houses that regular loans won’t cover—were three times less likely to end up falling behind on payments. Because more than two-thirds of mortgages are backed by the federal government, it’s taxpayers who could be left holding the bag from rising climate-caused delinquencies.

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg.” said Wayne Pathman, a Miami-based land use attorney who has spent years working on resilience issues in the region. “I think it is going to get a lot worse.”

Pathman says he is seeing similar premium increases in the commercial property insurance market—and is also witnessing owners of office buildings consider choices similar to that of Zablah, the homeowner. 

Pathman recounted how one of his clients, a hotel operator, handled a looming increase in his insurance premiums. He paid off the mortgage on the building and decided to forego the $1-million-a-year premiums for windstorms. 

So next time a hurricane blows in, he’ll be on his own.

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

When Miguel Zablah bought his five-bedroom home in Miami’s leafy Shenandoah neighborhood in June of 2020, he said he paid $7,000 a year for homeowner’s insurance. 

The house, built in 1923, sits on high ground and has survived a century of famously volatile South Florida weather. But in just four short years, Zablah said his homeowner’s insurance premium has more than doubled to $15,000 a year. Quotes for next year’s premiums are looking even worse. 

“Some insurance companies are now quoting me at $20,000, $25,000 on my house, which is ridiculous,” said Zablah, who works in private equity. The premium increases are so steep that he’s considering just paying off his mortgage—and foregoing the insurance that his lender requires him to carry. “I’m very grateful that I’m in a good position,” he added. 

Zablah’s premium increases are a symptom of a broader insurance crisis plaguing real estate markets across America. Experts say it’s fueled, in large part, by the disastrous effects of human-caused climate change. 

Flooding is more frequent. Higher temperatures stoke stronger hurricanes. Wildfires burn more acres. And Americans have spent generations moving to sunny places that are often the most in harm’s way, including Florida, Texas, and California. 

In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t get coverage. 

So, the cost of insuring homes against natural disasters is spiking along with atmospheric temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.

Now, new research shows that higher insurance premiums like the one Zablah is paying significantly increase the probability of people falling behind on their mortgages—or motivate them to pay the debt off early. The outcomes spell trouble for banks, and for homeowners. 

How significant is the increase in mortgage trouble? A $500 spike in annual insurance premiums was linked to a 20 percent higher mortgage delinquency rate.

That figure was extracted from findings in a recent study, which will be expanded and then undergo peer review, according to Shan Ge, an assistant professor of finance at New York University and one of the paper’s authors.

“What we found, which is the first in the literature, is that as insurance premiums go up, we have seen an increase in delinquency of mortgages,” Ge said. The research adds to a growing body of scientific literature proving that the climate crisis is also a housing crisis.

It’s a crisis with a brutal, but important side effect: Higher premiums may convince people in vulnerable areas like Miami to move out of harm’s way. 

“The market is clearly adapting, and there will be winners and losers…but ultimately there should be more winners to the extent that it sends signals and people get out of the way,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University who was not involved in the study. 

Zablah also heads the board of the Brickell Roads condominium association in Miami, where he owns an investment property. The effects of climate change are felt there too.

Brickell Roads residents had been paying $350 a month in condo fees in 2022. But then Weston Insurance, the carrier of the association’s windstorm policy, went bust. 

It was the fifth Florida insurance carrier to fold that year in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the Southeast United States, causing an estimated $112 billion in damage. It was the most expensive storm ever in Florida and third most expensive in US history. 

As the association scrambled to find a replacement policy, it confronted a stark reality: Monthly condo fees would more than triple under their new insurance policy. On October 1, 2023, it raised the condo fee at Brickell Roads to $1,000 a month. (The board has since found another insurance carrier and hopes to lower the fee to $700 a month, according to Zablah.) 

“In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their policies.” 

Climate change has blown a hole through insurance markets across the United States. In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t find companies willing to insure their homes. 

In California, that state’s Department of Insurance has barred carriers from not renewing policies in certain fire-prone zip codes, essentially forcing the companies to insure properties there. And in Florida, a volatile mix of fraud, litigation, floods, and hurricanes has left homeowners like those in Brickell Roads scrambling for coverage. 

One major reason for the spike in insurance prices is a rise in the cost of the insurance coverage that insurance companies purchase for themselves, known as reinsurance. Globally, reinsurers raised prices for property insurers by 37 percent in 2023. (Prices stabilized somewhat in 2024.)

Insurers have passed those costs on to customers, said industry analyst Cathy Seifert during a Bloomberg TV appearance on November 4. “The insurance industry will leverage climate change into pricing strength,” she said. 

Analysts and scholars who study the nexus between climate change and housing had long theorized that higher insurance rates would negatively affect property markets. 

An August 2024 report by the Congressional Budget Office noted that in 2023, 30 percent of losses from natural disasters went uninsured. Those losses further constrict an already tight supply of housing. Researchers have also found that higher insurance rates affect the availability of affordable housing. It turns out, housing markets might be more sensitive to premium spikes than many thought.

Using a dataset that links insurance policies with mortgages for 6.7 million borrowers, Ge and two other researchers established that spikes in insurance premiums led a significant number of borrowers to either pay off their mortgages early or fall behind. Obviously, many homeowners can’t afford to accelerate their mortgage payoff.

The researchers found that the effect of premium increases on mortgage delinquency is twice as large for borrowers with a high loan-to-value ratio, meaning they owe a lot of money on their homes compared to the home’s value.

“This is how many people across the country are beginning to directly experience how climate change is changing our world and the cost it’s going to have,” said Moira Birss, a research fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. “In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their (insurance) policies.” 

Conversely, the NYU study found that people who took out jumbo mortgages—large loans for expensive houses that regular loans won’t cover—were three times less likely to end up falling behind on payments. Because more than two-thirds of mortgages are backed by the federal government, it’s taxpayers who could be left holding the bag from rising climate-caused delinquencies.

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg.” said Wayne Pathman, a Miami-based land use attorney who has spent years working on resilience issues in the region. “I think it is going to get a lot worse.”

Pathman says he is seeing similar premium increases in the commercial property insurance market—and is also witnessing owners of office buildings consider choices similar to that of Zablah, the homeowner. 

Pathman recounted how one of his clients, a hotel operator, handled a looming increase in his insurance premiums. He paid off the mortgage on the building and decided to forego the $1-million-a-year premiums for windstorms. 

So next time a hurricane blows in, he’ll be on his own.

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

Helene and Milton, the two massive hurricanes that just swept into the country—killing hundreds of people, and leaving both devastation and rumblings of political upheaval in seven states—amounted to their own October surprise. Not that the storms led to some irredeemable gaffe or unveiled some salacious scandal. The surprise, really, may be that not even the hurricanes have pushed concerns about climate change more toward the center of the presidential campaign.  

With early voting already underway and two weeks before Election Day, when voters will decide between Vice President Kamala Harris, who has called climate change an “existential threat,” and former President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” Grist’s editorial staff presents a climate-focused voter’s guide—a package of analyses and predictions about what the next four years may bring from the White House, depending on who wins. 

The next administration will be decisive for the country’s progress on critical climate goals. By 2030, just a year after the next president would leave office, the US has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels, and expects to supply up to 13 million electric vehicles annually. A little further down the line, though no less critical, the country’s climate goals include reaching 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 and achieving a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.

As you gear up to vote, here are 15 ways that Harris’ and Trump’s climate- and environment-related policies could affect your life—along with some information to help inform your vote. 

Energy
Over the last year or so, utility companies across the country have woken up to a new reality: After two decades of flat growth, electricity demand is about to spike, due to the combined pressures of new data centers, cryptocurrency mining, a manufacturing boom, and the electrification of buildings and transportation.

While the next president will not directly decide how the states supply power to their new and varied customers, he or she will oversee the massive system of incentives, subsidies, and loans by which the federal government influences how much utilities meet electricity demand by burning fossil fuels—the crucial question for the climate. 

Trump’s answer to that question can perhaps be summed up in the three-word catchphrase he’s deployed on the campaign trail: “Drill, baby, drill.” He is an avowed friend of the fossil fuel industry, from whom he reportedly demanded $1 billion in campaign funds at a fundraising dinner last spring, promising in exchange to gut environmental regulations. 

Vice President Harris is not exactly running on a platform of decarbonization, either. In an effort to win swing votes in the shale-boom heartland of Pennsylvania, she has reversed course on her past opposition to fracking, and she has proudly touted the record levels of oil and gas production seen under the current administration. Despite the risk of nuclear waste, the Biden administration has also championed nuclear power as a carbon-free solution and sought to incentivize the construction of new reactors through subsidies and loans. Although Harris says her administration would not be a continuation of Biden’s, it’s reasonable to expect continuity with Biden’s overall approach of leaning more heavily on incentives for low-emissions energy than restrictions on fossil fuels to further a climate agenda. —Gautama Mehta, environmental justice reporting fellow

Home improvements
In 2022, the Biden administration handed the American people a great big carrot to incentivize them to decarbonize: the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA provides thousands of dollars in the form of rebates and tax credits for a consumer to get an EV and electrify their home with solar panels, a heat pump, and an induction stove. (Though the funding available for renters is slim, it is also out there.) In 2023, 3.4 million Americans got $8.4 billion in tax credits for home energy improvements thanks to the IRA.

If elected, Trump has pledged to rescind the remaining funding, which would require the support of Congress. By contrast, Harris has praised the law (which, as vice president, she famously cast the tie-breaking vote to pass) and would almost certainly veto any attempts by Congress to repeal it. As a presidential candidate, she has not said whether she would expand the law, though many expect she would focus on more efficient implementation.  

But while repealing the IRA might slow the steady pace of American households decarbonizing, it can’t stop what’s already in motion. “There are fundamental forces here at work,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “At the end of the day, there’s very little that Trump can do to stand in the way.” 

For one, the feds provide guidance to states on how to distribute the money made available through the IRA. More climate-ambitious states are already layering on their own monetary incentives to decarbonize. So even if that IRA money disappeared, states could pick up the slack. 

And two, even before the IRA passed, market forces were setting clean energy on a path to replace fossil fuels. The price of solar power dropped by 90 percent between 2010 and 2020. And like any technology, electric appliances will only get cheaper and better. It might take longer without further support from the federal government, but the American home of tomorrow is, inevitably, fully electric—no matter the next administration. —Matt Simon, senior staff writer focusing on climate solutions

Insurance premiums
Whether they know it or not, many Americans are already confronting the costs of a warming world in their monthly bills: In recent years, home insurance premiums have risen in almost every state, as insurance companies face the fallout of larger and more damaging hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms. In some states, like Florida and California, many prominent companies have fled the market altogether. While some Democrats have proposed legislation that would create a federal backstop for these failing insurance markets—with the goal of ensuring that coverage remains available for most homeowners—these proposals have yet to make much headway in a divided Congress. For the moment, it’s state governments, rather than the president or any other national politicians, that have real jurisdiction over homeowner’s insurance prices.

Near the end of the presidential debate in September, when both candidates were asked about what they’d do to “fight climate change,” Harris began her response by referring to “anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up” as a way to counter Trump’s denials of climate change. 

Traditional homeowner policies don’t include flood insurance, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency runs a flood insurance program that serves 5 million homeowners in the US, mostly along the East Coast. Homeowners in the most flood-prone areas are required to buy this policy, but uptake has been lagging in some particularly vulnerable inland communities—including those that were recently devastated by Hurricane Helene. Project 2025, which many experts believe will serve as the blueprint to a second Trump term (though his campaign disavows any connection to it), imagines FEMA winding down the program altogether, throwing flood coverage to the private market. This would likely make it cheaper to live in risky areas—but it would leave homeowners without financial support after floods, all but ensuring only the rich could rebuild. —Jake Bittle, staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation

Transporation
The appetite for infrastructure spending is so bipartisan that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed in 2021, has become more widely known as the bipartisan infrastructure law. But don’t be fooled. A wide gulf separates how Harris and Trump approach transportation, with potentially profound climate implications.

Harris hasn’t offered many specifics, but she has committed to advancing the rollout out of the Biden administration’s infrastructure agenda. That includes traditional efforts like building roads and bridges, mixed with Democratic priorities including union labor and an eye toward climate-resilience. The infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act include billions in spending to promote the adoption of electric vehicles, produce them domestically, and add 500,000 charging stations by 2030. They also include greener transportation efforts aimed at, among other things, electrifying buses, enhancing passenger rail, and expanding mass transit.

That said, Harris has not called for the eventual elimination of internal combustion vehicles, despite such plans in 12 states. Trump has also been sparse on details about transportation—his website doesn’t address the issue except to decry Chinese ownership. During his first term and 2020 campaign, he championed (though never produced) a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. It focused on building “gleaming” roads, highways, and bridges, and reducing the environmental review and government oversight of such projects. He has favored flipping the federal-first funding model to shift much of the cost onto states, municipalities, and the private sector.

Ultimately, Trump seems to have little interest in a transition to low-carbon transportation—the 2024 official Republican platform calls for rolling back EV mandates—and he remains a vocal supporter of fossil fuel production.  —Tik Root, senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition

Health
Rising global temperatures and worsening extreme weather are changing the distribution and prevalence of tick- and mosquito-borne diseases, fungal pathogens, and water-borne bacteria across the US. State and local health departments rely heavily on data and recommendations on these climate-fueled illnesses from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—whose director is appointed by the president and can be influenced by the White House. 

In his first term, Trump tried to divorce many federal agencies’ research functions from their rulemaking capacities, and there are concerns that, if he wins again in November, Trump would continue that effort. Project 2025, a sweeping blueprint developed by right-wing conservative groups with the aim of influencing a second Trump term, proposes separating the CDC’s disease surveillance efforts from its policy recommendation work, meaning the agency would be able to track the effects of climate change on human health, like the spreading of infectious diseases, but it wouldn’t be able to tell states how to manage them or inform the public about how to stay safe from them. 

Harris is expected to leave the CDC intact, but she hasn’t given many signals on how she’d approach climate and health initiatives. Her campaign website says she aims to protect public health, but provides no further clarification or policy position on that subject, or specifically climate change’s influence on it.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration has made strides in protecting Americans from extreme heat, the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the US. It proposed new heat protections for indoor and outdoor workers, and it made more than $1 billion in grant funding available to nonprofits, tribes, cities, and states for cooling initiatives, such as planting trees in urban areas, that reduce the risk of heat illness.

It’s reasonable to expect that a future Harris administration would continue Biden’s work in this area. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on the IRA, which includes emissions-cutting policies that will lead to less global warming in the long term, benefiting human health not just in the US but worldwide. 

But there’s more to be done. Biden established the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in the first year of his term, but it still hasn’t been funded by Congress. Harris has not said whether she will push for more funding for that office. —Zoya Teirstein, staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health

Food prices
Inflation has cooled significantly since 2022, but high prices—especially high food prices—remain a concern for many Americans. Both candidates have promised to tackle the issue; Harris went so far as to propose a federal price-gouging ban to lower the cost of groceries. Such a ban could help smaller producers and suppliers, but economists fear it could also lead to further supply shortages and reduced product quality.

Meanwhile, Trump has said he will tax imported goods to lower food prices, though analysts have pointed out that the tax would likely do the opposite. Trump-era tariff fights during the US-China trade war led to farmers losing billions of dollars in exports, which the federal government had to make up for with subsidies.

Trump’s immigration agenda could also affect food prices. If reelected, the former president has said he will expel millions of undocumented immigrants, many of whom work for low pay on farms and in other parts of the food sector, playing a vital role in food harvesting and processing. Their mass deportation and the resulting labor shortage could drive up prices at the grocery store. Meanwhile, Harris promises to uphold and strengthen the H-2A visa system—the national program that enables agricultural producers to hire foreign-born workers for seasonal work. 

In the short term, it must be emphasized that neither candidate’s economic plans will have much of an effect on the ways extreme weather and climate disasters are already driving up the cost of groceries. Severe droughts are one of the factors that have destabilized the global crop market in recent years, translating to higher US grocery store prices. Warming has led to reduced agricultural productivity and diminished crop yields, while major disasters throttle the supply chain. Even a forecast of extreme weather can send food prices higher. These climate trends are likely to continue over the next four years, no matter who becomes president. 

But the winner of the 2024 election can determine how badly climate change batters the food supply in the long run—primarily by controlling greenhouse gas emissions. —Frida Garza, staff writer focusing on the impact of climate change on food and agriculture & Ayurella Horn-Muller, staff writer focusing on the impact of climate change on food and agriculture

Drinking water
“I want absolutely immaculate, clean water,” Trump said in June during the first presidential debate this election season. But if a second Trump presidency is anything like the first, there is good reason to worry about the protection of public drinking water. 

During his first term in office, the Trump administration repealed the Clean Water Rule, a critical part of the Clean Water Act that limited the amount of pollutants companies could discharge near streams, wetlands, and other sources of water used for public consumption. “It was ready to protect the drinking water of 117 million Americans and then, within a few months of being in office, Donald Trump and [former EPA administrator] Scott Pruitt threw it into the trash bin to appease their polluter allies,” former Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a press release. 

While in office, Trump also secured a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which last year tipped the court in favor of a decision to vastly limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate pollution in certain wetlands, forcing the agency to weaken its own clean water rules. 

A Harris administration would likely carry forward the work of several Biden EPA measures to safeguard the public’s drinking water from toxic heavy metals and other contaminants. For example, in April, the EPA passed the nation’s first-ever national drinking water standard to protect an estimated 100 million people from a category of synthetic chemicals known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to cancer, high blood pressure, and immune system deficiencies. Enforcing the new standard will require the agency to examine test results from thousands of water systems across the country and follow up to ensure their compliance—an effort that will take place during the next White House administration. 

“As president,” Harris’ website says, “she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all.” Project 2025, the policy plan drawn up by former Trump staffers to guide a second Trump administration’s policies, indicates that a future Trump administration would eliminate safeguards like the PFAS rule that place limits on industrial emissions and discharges. 

Just this month, the EPA issued a groundbreaking rule requiring water utilities to replace virtually every lead pipe in the country within 10 years. With funds from Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, the agency will also invest $2.6 billion for drinking water upgrades and lead pipe replacements. Harris has previously spoken out about the dangers of lead pipes, stating at a press conference in 2022 that lead exposure is “an issue that we as a nation should commit to ending.” 

The success of these and other measures will rely on a well-staffed EPA enforcement division, which may end up being one of the most insidious stakes of this election for environmental policies. Budget cuts and staff departures during the first Trump administration gutted the EPA’s enforcement capacity — a problem that the agency has spent the past four years trying to mend. Project 2025 “would essentially eviscerate the EPA,” said Stan Meiburg, who served as acting deputy administrator for the EPA from 2014 to 2017.  —Lylla Younes, senior staff writer covering chemical pollution, regulation, and frontline communities

Clean air
President Biden’s clean air policy has been characterized by a spate of new rules to curb toxic air pollution from a variety of facilities, including petroleum coke ovens, synthetic manufacturing facilities, and steel mills. While environmental advocates have decried some of these regulations as insufficiently protective, certain provisions—such as mandatory air monitoring—were hailed as milestones in the history of the agency’s air pollution policy. Former EPA staffer and air pollution expert Scott Throwe told Grist that a Harris- and Democratic-led EPA would continue to build on the work of the past four years by  enforcing these new rules, which will require federal oversight of state environmental agencies’ inspection protocols and monitoring data. 

Project 2025 proposes a major reorganization of the EPA, which would include the reduction of full-time staff positions and the elimination of departments deemed “superfluous.” It also promotes the rollback of a range of air quality regulations, from ambient air standards for toxic pollutants to greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. 

What’s more, a growing body of research has found that poor air quality is often concentrated in communities of color, which are disproportionately close to fossil fuel infrastructure. Conservative state governments havepushedback against the Biden EPA’s efforts to address “environmental justice” through agency channels and in court—efforts that will likely enjoy more executive support under a second Trump administration. —Lylla Younes

Public lands
Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a national monument can be created by presidential decree. The act can be a useful tool to protect important landscapes from industries like oil, gas, and even green energy enterprises. Tribal nations have asked numerous presidents to use this executive power to protect tribal homelands that might fall within federal jurisdiction. During his first term, Trump argued that the act also gives the president the implicit power to dissolve a national monument.

In 2017, Trump drastically shrunk two Obama-era designations, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, in what amounted to the biggest slash of federal land protections in the history of the United States. At the time, Trump said that “bureaucrats in Washington” should not control what happens to land in Utah. While giving back local control was Trump’s stated rationale, tribes in the area, like the Diné, Ute, Hopi, and Zuni, had been working for years to protect the two iconic and culturally significant sites. Meanwhile, his decision opened up the land for oil and gas development. While not all tribal nations are opposed to oil and gas production, tribal environmental advocates are worried that a second Trump term will erode federal environmental regulations and commitments to progress in the fight against climate change. 

Since 2021, the Biden administration has put more than 42 million acres of land into conservation by creating and expanding national monuments. This includes the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, a new monument spanning a million acres near the Grand Canyon—the kind of protection that tribal activists for years had worked to prevent industrial uranium mining. And just this month, Biden announced the creation of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary—a 4,500-square-mile national marine sanctuary to be “managed with tribal, Indigenous community involvement.” 

But Harris might not continue that legacy. While she has remained silent about what she would do to protect lands, she has been vocal about continuing the US’s oil and gas production as well as a push for more mining to help with the green transition—like copper from Oak Flat in Arizona and lithium from Thacker Pass in Nevada—both important places to tribal communities in the area. Tribes have been subjected to the adverse effects of the energy crisis before—namely dams that destroyed swaths of homelands and nuclear energy that increased cancer rates of Southwest tribal members—and without specific protections, it’s easy to see green energy as a changing of the guard instead of a game changer. —Taylar Dawn Stagner, Indigenous affairs reporting fellow

Climate disasters
Congress controls how much money the Federal Emergency Management Agency receives for relief efforts after catastrophic events like hurricanes Helene and Milton, but the president holds significant sway over who receives money and when. A second Trump administration would likely curtail some of the climate-focused resiliency projects FEMA has pursued in recent years, such as cutting back money for infrastructure that would be more resilient against hazards like sea level rises, fires, and earthquakes. Republican firebrands, like Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, have decried these projects as wasteful and unnecessary.

Under the Stafford Act, which governs federal disaster response, the president has the power to disburse relief to specific parts of the country after any “major disaster”—hurricanes, big floods, fires. In September, Trump suggested that he might make disaster aid contingent on political support if he returns to office, promising to withhold wildfire support from California unless state officials give more irrigation water to Central Valley farmers. Harris has not given an explicit indication of how she would fund climate-resiliency or disaster-response programs, though she has boosted FEMA’s recovery efforts following Helene and Milton. —Jake Bittle, staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation

Climate science
The United States has long been a leader in research essential to understanding—and responding to—a warming world. The government plays a key role in advancing climate science and providing timely meteorological data to the public. Neither Trump nor Harris address this in their platform, but history yields clues to what their presidency might mean for this vital work. 

Trump has consistently dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and downplayed scientific consensus that it is anthropogenic, or driven by human activities. As president, he gutted funding for research, appointed climate skeptics and industry insiders, and eliminated scientific advisory committees from several federal agencies. Thousands of government scientists quit in response. (In fact, still reeling from Trump’s attacks, new union contracts protect scientific integrity to combat such meddling.) His administration censored scientific data on government websites and tried to undermine the findings of the National Climate Assessment, the government’s scientific report on the risks and impacts of climate change. If reelected, Trump would almost certainly adopt a similar strategy, deprioritizing climate science and potentially even restructuring or eliminating federal agencies that advance it.

Harris has long supported climate action; she co-sponsored the Green New Deal as a senator and, as vice president, cast the deciding vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which bolstered funding for agencies that oversee climate research. As part of its “whole of government” approach to the crisis, the Biden administration created the National Climate Task Force, with the EPA, NASA, and others to ensure science informs policy. Although Harris hasn’t said much about climate change as a candidate, climate organizations generally support her campaign and believe her administration will build on the progress made so far. —Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, climate news reporting fellow

Your electric bill
A lot goes into calculating the energy rates you see on your monthly electric bill—construction and maintenance of power plants, fuel costs, and much more. It’s pretty tough to draw a direct line from the president to your bill, so if you’re worried about your energy costs, you’d do well to read up on your local public utility commission, municipal electric authority, or electric membership cooperative board.

What the president can do, though, is appoint people to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—the board of up to five individuals who regulate the transmission of utilities across the entire country. As the US continues to shift away from fossil fuels, a fundamental problem stands in the way: The country’s aging and fragmented grid lacks the capacity to move all of the electricity being generated from renewable sources. In May, FERC, which currently has a Democratic majority, approved a rule to try to solve that issue; it voted to require that regional utilities identify opportunities for upgrading the capacities of existing transmission infrastructure and that regional grid operators forecast their transmission needs 20 years into the future. These steps will be essential for utility companies to take advantage of the subsidies offered in the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law. 

The rule is facing legal challenges, which like much else in US courts, appear to be political. So even if Harris wins November’s election, and maintains a commission that prioritizes the transition away from fossil fuels, the oil and gas industry and the politicians who support it will not acquiesce easily. If Trump wins, he’d have the chance to appoint a new FERC chair from among the current commissioners and to appoint a new commissioner in 2026, when the current chair’s term ends. (Or possibly sooner.)

Although FERC’s actions tend to be more insulated from changes in the White House because commissioners serve five-year terms, a commission led by new Trump appointees would most likely deprioritize initiatives that would upgrade the grid to support clean energy adoption. Trump’s appointees supported fossil fuel interests on several fronts during his previous term, for instance by counteracting state subsidies to favor coal and gas plants. —Emily Jones, regional reporter, Georgia, and Izzy Ross, regional reporter, Great Lakes

Plastic waste
Some 33 billion pounds of plastic waste enter the marine environment globally every year, and the problem is expected to worsen as the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries ramp up plastic production.

Perhaps the most important step the next president could take to curb plastic pollution is to push Congress to ratify and implement the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, which is scheduled to be finalized by the end of this year. The Biden administration recently announced its support for a version of the treaty that limits plastic production, and, though Harris hasn’t made any public comment about it, experts expect that her administration would support it as well. Meanwhile, a former Trump White House official told Politico this April that Trump—who famously withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement in his first term—would take a “hard-nosed look” at any outcome of the plastics negotiations and be “skeptical that the agreement reached was the best agreement that could have been reached.”

The Biden administration has also taken some positive steps to address plastic pollution domestically, including a ban on the federal procurement of single-use plastics. Experts expect that progress to continue under a Harris administration. In 2011, as California’s attorney general, Harris sued plastic bottle companies over misleading claims that their products were recyclable. As a senator, she co-sponsored a Democratic bill to phase out unnecessary single-use plastic products.

Trump, meanwhile, does not have a strong track record on plastic. Although he signed a 2019 law to remove and prevent ocean litter, he has taken personal credit for the construction of new plastic manufacturing facilities and derided the idea of banning single-use plastic straws. And Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda could increase the extraction of fossil fuels used to make plastics. —Joseph Winters, staff writer covering plastics, pollution, and the circular economy

Down–ballot elections
After decades of failed attempts to tackle the climate crisis, Congress finally passed major legislation two years ago with the Inflation Reduction Act. Not a single Republican voted for it. 

Elections aren’t just important for getting the legislative power needed to enact climate policies—they’re also important for implementing them. The IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law, another key climate-related law, are entering crucial phases for their implementation, particularly the doling out of billions of dollars for clean energy, environmental justice, and climate resiliency. Trump, having vowed to rescind unspent IRA funds if elected, seems poised to hamper the law’s rollout, slowing efforts to get the country using more clean energy.

But it’s a mistake to imagine that only federal elections matter when it comes to climate change. Eliminating greenhouse gases from energy, buildings, transportation, and food systems requires legislation at every level. In Arizona and Montana, for example, voters this year will elect utility commissioners, the powerful, yet largely ignored officials who play a crucial role in whether—and how quickly—the country moves away from fossil fuels. State legislators can also open the door to efforts to get 100 percent clean electricity, as happened in Michigan and Minnesota after the 2022 election. Even in a state like Washington with Democratic Governor Jay Inslee, who once campaigned for the White House on a climate change platform, votes matter—climate action is literally on the ballot in November, when voters could choose to kill the state’s landmark price on carbon pollution.

Depending on what happens with the presidential and congressional races, state and local action might be the best hope for furthering climate policy anyway.
—Kate Yoder, staff writer examining the intersections of climate, language, history, culture, and accountability

International cooperation
During his first term, Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, a global commitment to reduce the burning of fossil fuels in an effort to curb the worst impacts of climate change. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he said from the Rose Garden of the White House in 2017. Trump didn’t entirely abandon global climate discussions; his administration continued to attend global climate conferences, where it endorsed events on fossil fuels.

The Biden administration rejoined the Paris Agreement and pledged billions of dollars to combat climate change both domestically and abroad, but a second Trump administration would likely undo this progress. Trump says that he would pull out of the Paris Agreement again, and reportedly would also consider withdrawing the US from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1992 treaty that’s the basis for modern global climate talks.

Harris is expected, at least, to continue Biden’s policies. Speaking from COP28 in Dubai last year, an annual United Nations climate gathering, she celebrated America’s progress in tackling the climate crisis and petitioned for much more to be done. “In order to keep our critical 1.5 degree-Celsius goal within reach,” she said, “we must have the ambition to meet this moment, to accelerate our ongoing work, increase our investments, and lead with courage and conviction.” 

But both the Trump and Biden administrations achieved record oil and gas production during their time in office, and Harris opposes a ban on fracking. In order to make a dent in the climate crisis, whoever becomes president would have to reject that status quo and put serious money behind global promises to mitigate climate change. Otherwise, climate change-related losses will just continue to mount—already, they are expected to cost $580 billion globally by 2030. —Anita Hofschneider, senior staff writer focusing on Indigenous affairs

Jeff VanderMeer insists that he does not predict the future. Yet mere weeks before his new novel, Absolution, hit shelves, Hurricane Helene tore through the part of Florida where he lives, sharing an uncanny likeness to the fictional hurricane in his book. Of course, there’s a difference between art and reality. The through line between the storms is the climate crisis that inspired VanderMeer to write the trilogy of books that made him a household name a decade ago. 

Absolution is the latest and last installment in the lush, eerie series covering an unknown biological phenomenon known as Area X, located in VanderMeer’s home state of Florida in the real place known as the Forgotten Coast. The original trio of books covers the area and its tendency to affect living creatures and create bizarre refractions of life within its confines. The series, called the Southern Reach trilogy, garnered enormous praise, a legion of fans, and a movie adaptation. For the record, VanderMeer told me he found Hollywood “frustrating” because “they stripped out all the environmental stuff.” But he did enjoy the movie’s surreal ending. 

“We get displaced. We have to be resilient. We have to form a new narrative.”

A decade later, Absolution marks the conclusion of a weird and wonderful journey involving an assortment of biological abnormalities and government secrets. In the meantime, it seems as if the unusual world that VanderMeer wrote about and the one that we live in today are growing closer and closer. Our warmer world is not just more volatile in terms of natural disasters, like Helene and Milton, but it is also becoming a large-scale petri-dish for new diseases, the type of biological mixing and matching that VanderMeer’s books are known for—albeit on a much smaller scale. 

In VanderMeer’s fiction, the mirror world of Area X produced strange, haunting results like a character’s transformation into a whale-like creature covered in eyes, or a murderous bear with a human voice. But for VanderMeer, climate change is the scariest thing of all. 

I spoke with him just as he was returning to his home in Tallahassee after evacuating from Hurricane Helene. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

What is it like being a climate and science fiction writer right now? 

I guess it feels like kind of a privilege to be able to talk about this stuff, that the novels have reached enough readers and had enough of an impact that anyone cares what I have to say.

It’s also true that I’m right now in Florida, at the epicenter of a lot of extreme weather events. And so that creates a weird echoing effect. For example, I was fleeing Hurricane Helene up to Greenville, South Carolina, unsure if that was even the right thing to do. And then also asked by the New York Times to write a piece about fleeing the hurricane. So there’s all this real-world consequence. 

You’re getting me at the end of fleeing a hurricane, writing about it, coming back to Tallahassee, seeing the consequences of extreme weather because of warming waters because of climate crisis, and feeling both thankful that I can kind of capture a feeling people have here about these events and write about it, but also kind of caught up in it as well.

That sounds pretty jarring.

You can get in loops too, where you don’t really adapt to the situation and you’re just doing the same talking points which, relevant to your question, is something I worry about. You know, where [people on the internet] were saying, “Well, why did people even build in Asheville?” it was this weird disconnect. And it’s like, “Well, because they didn’t expect there’d be these mega-storms that would still have a huge effect, hundreds of miles inland.”

People in the aftermath of destruction seem to want to try to form their own narratives about what’s happening, and I’m sure you are someone who see this clearly, being in the epicenter, but also being someone who works in fiction.

It’s definitely something that I write about in my fiction: the idea of character agency in the face of systemic or system-wide events, whether they’re human systems or systems in the natural world. Especially in Western fiction, we have this idea of rugged individualism, right? And by the end of the narrative, things will have gone back to normal, because something’s been solved.

That’s not really what happens in the real world. We get displaced. We have to be resilient. We have to form a new narrative. We’re not always the same person we were before, you know, especially with regard to the climate crisis. And so I try to capture that. There’s a hurricane in Absolution that comes up suddenly in the middle of all these other events. And I really wanted to capture how a hurricane these days can seem like an uncanny event, even to those of us who are familiar with them. 

“People think the climate crisis is on the horizon…But more and more, we’re all being affected by it.”

Helene, to be candid, scared the crap out of me when I saw it coming to Tallahassee with 150 mile per hour winds. A lot of people decamped from Tallahassee up into North Carolina, and then were completely trapped. People think the climate crisis is on the horizon, and if they think that it’s because they haven’t been affected by it yet. But more and more, we’re all being affected by it.

In this book, Absolution, and in all the books, there are these in-group, out-group dynamics, and I’m just wondering, why is that something that you’re really interested in exploring narratively?

I’m trying to explore the psychological reality of being in these situations. I’m not trying to extrapolate, I’m not trying to predict. I’m simply trying to show what people are like facing these kinds of choices. Because, you know, people talk a lot about the landscapes and uncanny events, but they’re all filtered through a particular character point of view. And I often ask myself, is this person open to what’s happening or are they closed? Are they in denial? Are they understanding to some degree? Are they trying to form connections or are they disconnected and alienated? These are some of the issues that we find in modern times.

How do you talk to scientists? Because this series is very science-based, but the emotional resonance of why people are drawn to science is something that comes through a lot. 

My dad is a research chemist and entomologist who’s always headed up or been part of some lab, usually like fire ants and other invasive species. And so I grew up around these kinds of places. My mom was a biological illustrator for many years, and so that also brought a kind of a scientific element to her art. And between those two kinds of locations, I got to see the real human side of science. 

I think that actually really helps, along with going on actual scientific expeditions with my dad to Fiji as a kid, it’s just kind of intrinsically in you at that point that you have an understanding of science. I was really quite lucky in that regard.

What was helpful to you to get this book across the finish line?

One thing that was helpful is that there’s actually a lot of humor in it. I don’t like to write books that are monotone. Even in Annihilation, in the earlier books, there’s some sly humor going on. Here, I think it’s a little more overt in some of the relationships and some of what the secret agency is doing that’s so absurd. And then in the last section, especially with this very dysfunctional, almost tech bro-esque personality that’s in this expedition. It’s kind of unintentionally funny. That’s something that anchors me, because it gives me pleasure to write, along with the uncanny stuff.

What’s the role of fiction at this point in the climate crisis? 

I think one thing I don’t want the books to do when they skirt the edge of “prediction” is to be unrealistic. I get asked a question a lot, “Where’s the hope in your books?” or things like that. And it’s like, I don’t want the hope, I want the analysis. And I don’t want the faux analysis where we’re doing like carbon offsets that are meaningless. I don’t want to put that in my book as something that’s viable. 

I think that what fiction adds is—it’s kind of like: What do you get from religion versus science, or what do you get from philosophy rather than science? Fiction is not science, but it can give you this immersive three-dimensional reality of what it’s like to be in a situation, and it can bring your imagination to it in such a way that it really lives in your body to some degree. 

And so I think that’s why the thing that makes me most happy is having people come up to me and say that Annihilation was one reason they became a marine biologist or went into environmental science, that there was something about the character of the biologists in that book that was compelling to them. That to me, is what fiction can provide.

When Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified last week, exploding into a Category 5 storm, large parts of Florida were bracing for disaster. For Cruz Salucio, Milton wouldn’t be the first, or the worst, hurricane he’d endured. But it sparked anxiety all the same.

Salucio works for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ local radio station, Radio Conciencia. The organization primarily serves farmworkers in Southern Florida, but its various programs have a presence in 15 states around the country. 

When hurricanes like Milton, Idalia, and Ian have approached, Salucio and other radio DJs were often the most direct source of reliable, fact-checked information for the region’s Spanish- and Mayan-speaking migrant workers. Climate change is intensifying these types of storms and in the process straining resources, endangering millions of people. For workers with few resources, hurricanes can be isolating and devastating events. But Radio Conciencia tries to fill the gaps as much as possible.

People at the station often answer questions about shelters and evacuation routes. Amid the deluge of information and misinformation, Radio Conciencia has become a trusted resource for many. It helps that, when there’s not a crisis, the station plays traditional genres of music like Banda, a regional Mexican style originally influenced by polka, or marimba-centric music popular in Guatemala. It also supplements the music with messages about workers’ rights and safety, filling a vital knowledge gap. 

Salucio spoke with me, via translation, about what it feels like to provide a lifesaving resource in trying times. His story has been edited and condensed for clarity:

I remember when I first came to Immokalee trying to find a radio station to listen to. Scrolling through the dial, I came across the music that was playing on Radio Conciencia. It was a Sunday, and I remember hearing marimba, which is a traditional Guatemalan instrument, and also hearing the radio host speaking in Q’anjob’al, an Indigenous language from Guatemala. It was so striking to me at that moment to hear not only the music, but also my first language, and to have that direct connection to where I had just come from.

From there, I got really involved. I came to Radio Conciencia because it’s a community radio station. You yourself can get involved and learn how to speak on radio and manage it technologically.

When I was working in the fields back in the 2000s, you’ll often have this experience where the bosses on a particular farm want to get as much harvested as possible, quickly, before the hurricane arrives. They’ll wait till the very last minute to let people leave. Having that experience myself—that’s really what drives me.

When I’m sitting and broadcasting from the radio during these moments of crisis, where I know that members of the community, their lives and their wellbeing are in danger, it feels incredibly important to make sure they know that. I feel a profound commitment to the radio and its purpose, especially in those moments, to the point that, especially now that I have a family, there’s that kind of balancing act of being home with family and sometimes needing to get back to the office to record some last-minute audio tracks or be live on the radio.

Our goal is always to ensure that people have the information they need when they need it, that they know how to prepare for these types of crises, and, especially during a hurricane, to know where they can go to shelter.

Days ahead of a hurricane’s arrival, we will work on original announcements that we can program with important information about what to do, how to prepare, how to stay safe during and after. We’ll record and program those announcements to play to everyone periodically, so even if there’s not someone live in the station, those messages are still getting out there. And of course the other limitation is if power goes out. That does affect the radio but we try to be as prepared as possible for those eventualities.

The good news is that our radio station and community center are in quite a safe building. Even during this most recent hurricane [Milton], some of our staff and radio DJs actually sheltered and stayed here, so they were able to continue broadcasting. We’re safer here than they might have been in their homes. 

The main thing we hear from listeners during these times is just deep gratitude. A lot of people in the community, by phone and on social media, reach out to say thank you for having a place they can go to in their language that has good and reliable information, that isn’t creating panic. They will call us and say, “I live in a really crappy trailer and I don’t feel safe—where can I go? Where are the shelters?” 

These storms not only impact the community but will wipe out entire agricultural fields. So they’ll call and say, “Have you heard anything? Do you know what’s happened in the tomato fields?” 

“I’ve gone to the public shelters as well…It’s actually kind of a beautiful scene sometimes, and a good place to connect with the community and chat with people and see how everyone’s doing.”

Sometimes we’ll give them the terrible news that the entire fields got wiped out, which means no work. It always depends on the nature of the storm. For this particular storm, we could tell, basically in the final hours before the storm, that it wasn’t going to hit as hard here. So I sheltered at home with my family. The worst of it did not come inland to Immokalee. 

During other hurricanes, when I’ve lived in trailers and other insecure housing, I’ve gone to the public shelters not only to be safe myself, but it’s actually kind of a beautiful scene sometimes, and a good place to connect with the community and chat with people and see how everyone’s doing.

The reality for so many farmworkers is, especially when you’re living in trailers and really poor housing, you have so little and you are afraid of losing the little you do have of your belongings. Some people try to ride it out in their housing. Or they’re afraid that if they leave and then come back, what are they going to come back to? It might be nothing. Ideally, people will go when they need to, find a shelter to be safe if it’s going to be an extreme storm—even with that fear of losing everything they have.

Correction, Oct. 18, 2024: This story was corrected to accurately reflect the number of states where the Coalition of Immokalee workers has programs.

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

The term “climate haven” never made much sense. After Hurricane Helene dumped two feet of rain on western North Carolina, many major media outlets marveled at how Asheville, which had been celebrated as a climate haven, had been devastated by a climate-related disaster.

Some in the media later reported accurately that climate havens don’t actually exist. But that still raises the question: Where did this climate haven concept even come from?

Well before humans began putting billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, entire populations would migrate toward better conditions in search of a place with milder weather or more fertile soil or the absence of drought. Because of its speed and scale, however, human-caused climate change is especially extreme, and everywhere will be impacted by some degree of risk. There is no completely safe haven.

Which is part of how we ended up talking about the idea of climate havens. It’s wishful thinking. At least that’s what several experts told me after Helene laid a path of destruction across the Southeast and as Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida. As the impacts of climate change became more real and apparent, the media, as well as local leaders, started looking for a better story to tell.

“People are desperate for optimism,” said Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, who described the concept of climate havens as a fiction. “It gives people hope.”

“The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy. To the extent that it even exists… it’s social and economic.”

Keenan actually blames himself for helping to popularize the term. For a concept that feels so widespread now, it’s surprisingly hard to find much mention of climate havens in the media before 2018. That was when the Guardian quoted Keenan in a piece about where you should move to save yourself from climate change that used the phrase “safe havens.” Buffalo, New York, and Duluth, Minnesota, were Keenan’s suggestions.

The concept gained more traction a few months later, when Mayor Byron W. Brown referred to Buffalo as a “climate refuge” in his 2019 state of the city address, followed by outlets like Bloomberg and Quartz referring to Buffalo as a climate haven. The New York Times did a whole spread on “climate-proof Duluth,” a slogan Keenan wrote as part of an economic development package commissioned by the city. He told me it was just a joke that got pulled out of context.

It’s hard to know how responsible one professor with a knack for marketing was for the mainstreaming of the climate haven concept. But it’s easy to see why local governments would latch onto it.

The US Census Bureau estimates that as climate change warms the planet over the next several decades, 100 million people will migrate into and around the US. Increased flood risk may have already pushed several million out of coastal and low-lying areas across the US, as wildfires start to raise questions about migration in the West.

Inland cities, namely those along the Rust Belt that have been losing population for years, see an opportunity to pull those people in. “The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy,” said Billy Fleming, director of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “To the extent that a climate refuge even exists, it’s not a particularly physical or geophysical phenomenon. It’s social and economic.”

Fleming added that, for these would-be climate havens, attracting new residents is a means to pull in more tax revenue and create wealth for the community. “It’s about keeping the real estate machine churning,” he added, “which is the thing that pays for everything else in the city.”

The real estate industry has taken notice. Quite coincidentally, as Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the Southeast last week, Zillow announced a new feature that displays climate risk scores on listing pages alongside interactive maps and insurance requirements. Now, you can look up an address and see, on a scale of one to 10, the risk of flooding, extreme temperatures, and wildfires for that property, based on data provided by the climate risk modeling firm First Street. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, launched its own climate risk index using First Street data earlier this year.

“The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen.”

The new climate risk scores on Zillow and Redfin can’t tell you with any certainty whether you’ll be affected by a natural disaster if you move into any given house. But this is a tool that can help guide decisions about how you might want to insure your property and think about its long-term value.

It’s almost fitting that Zillow and Redfin, platforms designed to help people find the perfect home, are doing the work to show that climate risk is not binary. There are no homes completely free of risk for the same reasons that there’s no such thing as a perfect climate haven.

Climate risk is a complicated equation that complicates the already difficult and complex calculus of buying a home. Better access to data about risk can help, and a bit more transparency about the insurance aspect of homeownership is especially useful, as the industry struggles to adapt to our warming world and the disasters that come with it.

“As we start to see insurance costs increase, all that starts to impact that affordability question,” Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, told me. “It’ll help the housing market move towards a much healthier place, where buyers and sellers understand these risks and then have options to meet them.”

That said, knowledge of risk isn’t keeping people from moving to disaster-prone parts of the country right now. People move to new parts of the country for countless different reasons, including the area’s natural beauty, job prospects, and affordable housing. Those are a few of the reasons why high-risk counties across the country are growing faster than low-risk counties, even in the face of future climate catastrophes, which are both unpredictable and inevitable. It’s almost unfathomable to know how to prepare ourselves properly for the worst-case scenario.

“The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen,” said Vivek Shandas, an urban planning professor at Portland State University. “No matter what we think might be a manageable level of preparedness and infrastructure, we’re still going to see cracks, and we’re still going to see breakages.”

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build sea walls or find new ways to fight wildfires. In a sense, we have the opportunity to create our own climate havens by making cities more resilient to the risks they face. We can be optimistic about that future.

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

The term “climate haven” never made much sense. After Hurricane Helene dumped two feet of rain on western North Carolina, many major media outlets marveled at how Asheville, which had been celebrated as a climate haven, had been devastated by a climate-related disaster.

Some in the media later reported accurately that climate havens don’t actually exist. But that still raises the question: Where did this climate haven concept even come from?

Well before humans began putting billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, entire populations would migrate toward better conditions in search of a place with milder weather or more fertile soil or the absence of drought. Because of its speed and scale, however, human-caused climate change is especially extreme, and everywhere will be impacted by some degree of risk. There is no completely safe haven.

Which is part of how we ended up talking about the idea of climate havens. It’s wishful thinking. At least that’s what several experts told me after Helene laid a path of destruction across the Southeast and as Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida. As the impacts of climate change became more real and apparent, the media, as well as local leaders, started looking for a better story to tell.

“People are desperate for optimism,” said Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, who described the concept of climate havens as a fiction. “It gives people hope.”

“The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy. To the extent that it even exists… it’s social and economic.”

Keenan actually blames himself for helping to popularize the term. For a concept that feels so widespread now, it’s surprisingly hard to find much mention of climate havens in the media before 2018. That was when the Guardian quoted Keenan in a piece about where you should move to save yourself from climate change that used the phrase “safe havens.” Buffalo, New York, and Duluth, Minnesota, were Keenan’s suggestions.

The concept gained more traction a few months later, when Mayor Byron W. Brown referred to Buffalo as a “climate refuge” in his 2019 state of the city address, followed by outlets like Bloomberg and Quartz referring to Buffalo as a climate haven. The New York Times did a whole spread on “climate-proof Duluth,” a slogan Keenan wrote as part of an economic development package commissioned by the city. He told me it was just a joke that got pulled out of context.

It’s hard to know how responsible one professor with a knack for marketing was for the mainstreaming of the climate haven concept. But it’s easy to see why local governments would latch onto it.

The US Census Bureau estimates that as climate change warms the planet over the next several decades, 100 million people will migrate into and around the US. Increased flood risk may have already pushed several million out of coastal and low-lying areas across the US, as wildfires start to raise questions about migration in the West.

Inland cities, namely those along the Rust Belt that have been losing population for years, see an opportunity to pull those people in. “The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy,” said Billy Fleming, director of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “To the extent that a climate refuge even exists, it’s not a particularly physical or geophysical phenomenon. It’s social and economic.”

Fleming added that, for these would-be climate havens, attracting new residents is a means to pull in more tax revenue and create wealth for the community. “It’s about keeping the real estate machine churning,” he added, “which is the thing that pays for everything else in the city.”

The real estate industry has taken notice. Quite coincidentally, as Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the Southeast last week, Zillow announced a new feature that displays climate risk scores on listing pages alongside interactive maps and insurance requirements. Now, you can look up an address and see, on a scale of one to 10, the risk of flooding, extreme temperatures, and wildfires for that property, based on data provided by the climate risk modeling firm First Street. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, launched its own climate risk index using First Street data earlier this year.

“The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen.”

The new climate risk scores on Zillow and Redfin can’t tell you with any certainty whether you’ll be affected by a natural disaster if you move into any given house. But this is a tool that can help guide decisions about how you might want to insure your property and think about its long-term value.

It’s almost fitting that Zillow and Redfin, platforms designed to help people find the perfect home, are doing the work to show that climate risk is not binary. There are no homes completely free of risk for the same reasons that there’s no such thing as a perfect climate haven.

Climate risk is a complicated equation that complicates the already difficult and complex calculus of buying a home. Better access to data about risk can help, and a bit more transparency about the insurance aspect of homeownership is especially useful, as the industry struggles to adapt to our warming world and the disasters that come with it.

“As we start to see insurance costs increase, all that starts to impact that affordability question,” Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, told me. “It’ll help the housing market move towards a much healthier place, where buyers and sellers understand these risks and then have options to meet them.”

That said, knowledge of risk isn’t keeping people from moving to disaster-prone parts of the country right now. People move to new parts of the country for countless different reasons, including the area’s natural beauty, job prospects, and affordable housing. Those are a few of the reasons why high-risk counties across the country are growing faster than low-risk counties, even in the face of future climate catastrophes, which are both unpredictable and inevitable. It’s almost unfathomable to know how to prepare ourselves properly for the worst-case scenario.

“The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen,” said Vivek Shandas, an urban planning professor at Portland State University. “No matter what we think might be a manageable level of preparedness and infrastructure, we’re still going to see cracks, and we’re still going to see breakages.”

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build sea walls or find new ways to fight wildfires. In a sense, we have the opportunity to create our own climate havens by making cities more resilient to the risks they face. We can be optimistic about that future.

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

Ahead of Hurricane Milton’s destructive landfall on Wednesday evening, millions of residents chose to leave. For roughly 1,200 inmates in the Manatee County Jail, which is located in a major evacuation zone near Sarasota, Florida, that wasn’t an option. Local authorities decided not to evacuate the prisoners so they rode out the storm—which brought widespread flooding, property damage, and fierce winds to the area—in the jail.

They weren’t alone. The Manatee County Jail is one of many that chose not to evacuate, according to the New York Times. Pinellas County, and Lee County, two others on the Gulf Coast that were in the storm’s direct trajectory, also did not evacuate their jails, per a Pinellas County news conference and a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff’s Office. (Manatee County and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations.

Inmates are “often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess ” afterward.

As the Appeal and the Fort Myers News-Press reported, Manatee, Pinellas, and Lee County officials argued that they could move inmates to higher floors in case of flooding and storm surge. Manatee County officials also described the jail as “hurricane-rated,” while Pinellas County officials cited the logistical challenge of moving 3,100 inmates from the facility during the storm as justification for their decision.

The Lee County jail was fully staffed and had water tanks on standby, according to the spokesperson, who noted that all the inmates were safe as of Thursday afternoon. The main facility lost power during the storm, the spokesperson added, but there were no other “notable incidents.”

The Manatee Sheriff’s Office also told the Appeal that the inmates were “storm safe” as of Thursday and that the power was going in and out, but that they did not lose running water. The Pinellas Sheriff’s Office told the publication that it had power and no running water issues.

The Florida Department of Corrections, which oversees state prisons, meanwhile, says that “all staff and inmates in the path of Hurricane Milton have been accounted for,” in an update that it posted on Thursday morning. Per the DOC, it had evacuated 5,950 inmates from 37 facilities across the state as of that time.

The DOC has also said that its public list of evacuated facilities has a lag and may be incomplete since it only updates 24 hours after the inmates have already been transported. It told Vox that it weighs multiple risk factors when considering evacuations, including “the path of the storm…timing, traffic disruption, the risks of evacuating inmates, and the conditions of facilities being evacuated.”

In total, more than 28,000 people are incarcerated in facilities in counties that had either full or partial evacuation orders, and many were not evacuated, the Appeal reported.

Decisions not to evacuate certain facilities stood in stark contrast to dire warnings from regional leaders about the need to leave areas in the storm’s path and the “life or death” risks people faced if they failed to do so. Manatee County Jail, for example, is located in Evacuation Zone A, an area that faced high flooding risk.

“We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” Manatee County Public Safety Director Jodie Fiske previously said in a news release. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.”

Florida’s inmates are not the first forced to shelter in place during a severe hurricane. When Hurricane Helene hit last month, 550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled.

Incarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years. While some of these tasks offer an alternative path to rehabilitation or allow inmates to refine new skills, none come with the same labor protections around safety or wages that other workers generally receive.

“The incarcerated population, they’re doubly vulnerable,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Vox. “First, they’re often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess in the wake of the disaster.”

During past disasters in Florida, inmates described a dearth of running water, including drinkable water, as well as non-flushing toilets.

Federally, there are no requirements for guaranteeing the safety of incarcerated people during natural disasters, Kendrick told Vox. And while policies vary by state, a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that just six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation.

“That patchwork becomes even more patchy when you go to the local level of jails because there’s significant local control over how jails operate,” Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, told Vox.

And although there’s a Supreme Court decision that establishes a safety standard for inmates, experts note that court cases about mistreatment face an uphill battle following the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the 1990s, which made it much harder for prisoners to file civil suits. Prisons and jails also have limited oversight at either the federal or state levels, so they often operate with little regard to accountability.

As a result, incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to neglect and other abuses, in general and during natural disasters specifically, which can endanger their health and their lives. During past disasters in Florida, like 2022’s Hurricane Ian, inmates described a dearth of running water, including a lack of drinkable water as well as non-flushing toilets.

Kendrick and Wessler noted that jails and prisons suffer from a failure to prepare for these increasingly common natural disasters as well as a broader lack of concern for inmates’ well-being. To pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources—proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself.

As a baseline, states and counties should have policies that apply mandatory evacuation orders to inmates, the same way that they do to other non-incarcerated people, Kendrick said. (Although the government doesn’t force people to leave, it’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone during a storm.)

The federal government could also condition disaster aid to states based on their evacuation policies, in an attempt to guarantee that inmates are protected, attorney Maya Habash explained in the University of Maryland Law Journal. Federal laws like the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which require that the government provide resources to protect vulnerable populations, could also be amended to include references to prisoners to make clear that they should be recipients of funding as well. And the federal government could establish clear mandates that outline how prisons and jails need to treat inmates during natural disasters.

“I think the federal government should set national standards for prisons and jails and emergency responses, and those should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what places have to do,” Wessler told Vox.

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

On October 7, as Hurricane Milton was just days away from making landfall in Tampa, Florida, the city’s mayor, Jane Castor, issued a dire warning to residents in evacuation zones: “If you choose to stay…you are going to die.”

But leaving one’s home to avoid the Category 5 hurricane is not possible for everyone.

When people don’t flee their homes due to weather crises, despite warnings from government officials, there are typically two reasons why, according to Cara Cuite, an assistant professor in Rutgers University’s department of human ecology. They either don’t believe they’re at risk or that the risk is overblown, or there are situational or structural elements that prevent them from doing so.

In the case of Hurricane Milton, which was set make landfall near Tampa Bay on Wednesday evening, Cuite said the former group is probably pretty small, as Castor and other trusted officials have been unequivocal about the dire consequences of staying. But for the second group, here’s what they might be up against:

The Cost of Travel

A 2023 estimate by the Federal Reserve indicated that nearly 40 percent of Americans couldn’t cover a $400 emergency expense in cash, and a 2021 study found that people who evacuated from the Texas Coastal Bend during Hurricane Harvey spent about $1,200 on average on evacuating—more if they had to stay in hotels.

To evacuate via personal car, residents need to be able to pay for gas, a hotel, food and any other relevant necessities, assuming their car is in workable condition. If they evacuate via plane, they would need to pay for the aforementioned costs, along with the cost of a plane ticket, assuming they can reach an airport. Though some airlines were accused of price-gouging as people attempted to flee Florida, others say that they have since capped their prices.

Cierra Chenier, a writer and historian from New Orleans, said that inequalities were only exacerbated by emergency situations. “Any socioeconomic disparity that exists on a day-to-day is only going to be heightened during disaster,” she said. “It’s always those, the communities that are most vulnerable, that suffer the most.”

Before Hurricane Milton, the Florida department of health deployed nearly 600 emergency response vehicles to support evacuations, while the Florida division of emergency management is also offering free evacuation shuttles to shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is currently providing some financial relief to victims of Hurricane Helene, the category 4 storm that ended on September 27 and killed more than 225 people throughout Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. But everyone who needs help may not receive it in a timely manner, or at all.

Nowhere to Go

Many of the shelters, hotels and rentals that people in Florida would typically flee to are already full because of Hurricane Helene.

Stacy Willet, a professor in emergency management and homeland security at the University of Akron, said that a lack of pre-established places to evacuate can prevent people from leaving.

“Evacuation by invitation is one of the strongest ways to get people to leave,” she said. “If they have a place to go, if they know that they have a house in a safe zone—just sometimes knowing and offering that place to that person in that disaster zone is enough to get them to move earlier.”

But some people have to figure out accommodations without having the support network of family or friends. If shelters within a reasonable distance are packed and hotels are full, those people must either travel extreme distances or simply try to ride out the storm.

Disability

For people who are able-bodied, the specific needs of disabled or ill people during evacuations may not be front of mind. But a disability or illness may prevent someone from being able to leave their homes, much less travel elsewhere.

“If you have a disability and you don’t have an accessible place to evacuate to or you don’t have a vehicle, that’s extra difficult,” Cuite said. “You have to find help moving that can actually accommodate, let’s say, a wheelchair or whatever you might need for your disability. So these things can compound on each other when you fall into multiple categories.”

Pets

Some shelters are not pet-friendly and those that are may have a cap on the number or types of pets they accept, so many people will stay behind and avoid evacuation to care for their pets.

“Sometimes people stay to protect their home, to protect their animals that they can’t take with them,” Cuite said. “In more rural areas maybe not pets, but farm animals. People feel responsible for staying behind to take care of things and their animals that they’re in charge of.”

Fear of permanent displacement

An estimated 1.5 million people evacuated Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina, but many of those people were unable to return. For some, especially those who have experienced natural disaster caused displacement before, the fear of leaving and either not being able to return or returning to nothing is enough to attempt surviving a hurricane by staying put.

“It’s great that you might have busloads of people that you’re able to get out very quickly, but who knows how they make it separated from their families, which we know happens. How long are they going to be gone? We don’t know what the impacts are gonna be from these different storms,” Chenier said. “And so what is the strategy around ensuring that people have a right to their homes and have a right to return?”

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

Ahead of Hurricane Milton’s destructive landfall on Wednesday evening, millions of residents chose to leave. For roughly 1,200 inmates in the Manatee County Jail, which is located in a major evacuation zone near Sarasota, Florida, that wasn’t an option. Local authorities decided not to evacuate the prisoners so they rode out the storm—which brought widespread flooding, property damage, and fierce winds to the area—in the jail.

They weren’t alone. The Manatee County Jail is one of many that chose not to evacuate, according to the New York Times. Pinellas County, and Lee County, two others on the Gulf Coast that were in the storm’s direct trajectory, also did not evacuate their jails, per a Pinellas County news conference and a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff’s Office. (Manatee County and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations.

Inmates are “often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess ” afterward.

As the Appeal and the Fort Myers News-Press reported, Manatee, Pinellas, and Lee County officials argued that they could move inmates to higher floors in case of flooding and storm surge. Manatee County officials also described the jail as “hurricane-rated,” while Pinellas County officials cited the logistical challenge of moving 3,100 inmates from the facility during the storm as justification for their decision.

The Lee County jail was fully staffed and had water tanks on standby, according to the spokesperson, who noted that all the inmates were safe as of Thursday afternoon. The main facility lost power during the storm, the spokesperson added, but there were no other “notable incidents.”

The Manatee Sheriff’s Office also told the Appeal that the inmates were “storm safe” as of Thursday and that the power was going in and out, but that they did not lose running water. The Pinellas Sheriff’s Office told the publication that it had power and no running water issues.

The Florida Department of Corrections, which oversees state prisons, meanwhile, says that “all staff and inmates in the path of Hurricane Milton have been accounted for,” in an update that it posted on Thursday morning. Per the DOC, it had evacuated 5,950 inmates from 37 facilities across the state as of that time.

The DOC has also said that its public list of evacuated facilities has a lag and may be incomplete since it only updates 24 hours after the inmates have already been transported. It told Vox that it weighs multiple risk factors when considering evacuations, including “the path of the storm…timing, traffic disruption, the risks of evacuating inmates, and the conditions of facilities being evacuated.”

In total, more than 28,000 people are incarcerated in facilities in counties that had either full or partial evacuation orders, and many were not evacuated, the Appeal reported.

Decisions not to evacuate certain facilities stood in stark contrast to dire warnings from regional leaders about the need to leave areas in the storm’s path and the “life or death” risks people faced if they failed to do so. Manatee County Jail, for example, is located in Evacuation Zone A, an area that faced high flooding risk.

“We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” Manatee County Public Safety Director Jodie Fiske previously said in a news release. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.”

Florida’s inmates are not the first forced to shelter in place during a severe hurricane. When Hurricane Helene hit last month, 550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled.

Incarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years. While some of these tasks offer an alternative path to rehabilitation or allow inmates to refine new skills, none come with the same labor protections around safety or wages that other workers generally receive.

“The incarcerated population, they’re doubly vulnerable,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Vox. “First, they’re often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess in the wake of the disaster.”

During past disasters in Florida, inmates described a dearth of running water, including drinkable water, as well as non-flushing toilets.

Federally, there are no requirements for guaranteeing the safety of incarcerated people during natural disasters, Kendrick told Vox. And while policies vary by state, a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that just six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation.

“That patchwork becomes even more patchy when you go to the local level of jails because there’s significant local control over how jails operate,” Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, told Vox.

And although there’s a Supreme Court decision that establishes a safety standard for inmates, experts note that court cases about mistreatment face an uphill battle following the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the 1990s, which made it much harder for prisoners to file civil suits. Prisons and jails also have limited oversight at either the federal or state levels, so they often operate with little regard to accountability.

As a result, incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to neglect and other abuses, in general and during natural disasters specifically, which can endanger their health and their lives. During past disasters in Florida, like 2022’s Hurricane Ian, inmates described a dearth of running water, including a lack of drinkable water as well as non-flushing toilets.

Kendrick and Wessler noted that jails and prisons suffer from a failure to prepare for these increasingly common natural disasters as well as a broader lack of concern for inmates’ well-being. To pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources—proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself.

As a baseline, states and counties should have policies that apply mandatory evacuation orders to inmates, the same way that they do to other non-incarcerated people, Kendrick said. (Although the government doesn’t force people to leave, it’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone during a storm.)

The federal government could also condition disaster aid to states based on their evacuation policies, in an attempt to guarantee that inmates are protected, attorney Maya Habash explained in the University of Maryland Law Journal. Federal laws like the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which require that the government provide resources to protect vulnerable populations, could also be amended to include references to prisoners to make clear that they should be recipients of funding as well. And the federal government could establish clear mandates that outline how prisons and jails need to treat inmates during natural disasters.

“I think the federal government should set national standards for prisons and jails and emergency responses, and those should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what places have to do,” Wessler told Vox.

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

On October 7, as Hurricane Milton was just days away from making landfall in Tampa, Florida, the city’s mayor, Jane Castor, issued a dire warning to residents in evacuation zones: “If you choose to stay…you are going to die.”

But leaving one’s home to avoid the Category 5 hurricane is not possible for everyone.

When people don’t flee their homes due to weather crises, despite warnings from government officials, there are typically two reasons why, according to Cara Cuite, an assistant professor in Rutgers University’s department of human ecology. They either don’t believe they’re at risk or that the risk is overblown, or there are situational or structural elements that prevent them from doing so.

In the case of Hurricane Milton, which was set make landfall near Tampa Bay on Wednesday evening, Cuite said the former group is probably pretty small, as Castor and other trusted officials have been unequivocal about the dire consequences of staying. But for the second group, here’s what they might be up against:

The Cost of Travel

A 2023 estimate by the Federal Reserve indicated that nearly 40 percent of Americans couldn’t cover a $400 emergency expense in cash, and a 2021 study found that people who evacuated from the Texas Coastal Bend during Hurricane Harvey spent about $1,200 on average on evacuating—more if they had to stay in hotels.

To evacuate via personal car, residents need to be able to pay for gas, a hotel, food and any other relevant necessities, assuming their car is in workable condition. If they evacuate via plane, they would need to pay for the aforementioned costs, along with the cost of a plane ticket, assuming they can reach an airport. Though some airlines were accused of price-gouging as people attempted to flee Florida, others say that they have since capped their prices.

Cierra Chenier, a writer and historian from New Orleans, said that inequalities were only exacerbated by emergency situations. “Any socioeconomic disparity that exists on a day-to-day is only going to be heightened during disaster,” she said. “It’s always those, the communities that are most vulnerable, that suffer the most.”

Before Hurricane Milton, the Florida department of health deployed nearly 600 emergency response vehicles to support evacuations, while the Florida division of emergency management is also offering free evacuation shuttles to shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is currently providing some financial relief to victims of Hurricane Helene, the category 4 storm that ended on September 27 and killed more than 225 people throughout Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. But everyone who needs help may not receive it in a timely manner, or at all.

Nowhere to Go

Many of the shelters, hotels and rentals that people in Florida would typically flee to are already full because of Hurricane Helene.

Stacy Willet, a professor in emergency management and homeland security at the University of Akron, said that a lack of pre-established places to evacuate can prevent people from leaving.

“Evacuation by invitation is one of the strongest ways to get people to leave,” she said. “If they have a place to go, if they know that they have a house in a safe zone—just sometimes knowing and offering that place to that person in that disaster zone is enough to get them to move earlier.”

But some people have to figure out accommodations without having the support network of family or friends. If shelters within a reasonable distance are packed and hotels are full, those people must either travel extreme distances or simply try to ride out the storm.

Disability

For people who are able-bodied, the specific needs of disabled or ill people during evacuations may not be front of mind. But a disability or illness may prevent someone from being able to leave their homes, much less travel elsewhere.

“If you have a disability and you don’t have an accessible place to evacuate to or you don’t have a vehicle, that’s extra difficult,” Cuite said. “You have to find help moving that can actually accommodate, let’s say, a wheelchair or whatever you might need for your disability. So these things can compound on each other when you fall into multiple categories.”

Pets

Some shelters are not pet-friendly and those that are may have a cap on the number or types of pets they accept, so many people will stay behind and avoid evacuation to care for their pets.

“Sometimes people stay to protect their home, to protect their animals that they can’t take with them,” Cuite said. “In more rural areas maybe not pets, but farm animals. People feel responsible for staying behind to take care of things and their animals that they’re in charge of.”

Fear of permanent displacement

An estimated 1.5 million people evacuated Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina, but many of those people were unable to return. For some, especially those who have experienced natural disaster caused displacement before, the fear of leaving and either not being able to return or returning to nothing is enough to attempt surviving a hurricane by staying put.

“It’s great that you might have busloads of people that you’re able to get out very quickly, but who knows how they make it separated from their families, which we know happens. How long are they going to be gone? We don’t know what the impacts are gonna be from these different storms,” Chenier said. “And so what is the strategy around ensuring that people have a right to their homes and have a right to return?”

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the power of misinformation in the United States better than what happened Monday morning when retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn hit the send button on a social media post. He shared a video that claimed “weather modification operations” that are “clearly connected” with the Department of Defense were responsible for Hurricane Helene’s “assault” on the Carolinas.

“You have to listen to this clip,” Flynn told his 1.7 million followers on X. “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?”

Within 15 hours, the post by former President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser had more than half a million views. Add that to the 43 million views of alt-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims late last week that “Yes they can control the weather.”

Now compare that to the post by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact immediately debunking the weather modification theory with its most untruthful “Pants on Fire!” rating a day after Helene made landfall: After 10 days, that post had all of 11,400 views—less than 2 percent of Flynn’s audience.

With the storm-battered Southeast bracing for another massive hurricane and the hyperpartisan election just four weeks away, government officials and rescue workers aren’t just battling the elements, they’re fighting against a spiraling misinformation war.

“The combination of the two just makes the misinformation even more drastic,” says Josephine Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media who studies misinformation. “There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

“There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

Many of the false narratives involve the military, which is so often at the heart of conspiracy theories—hiding evidence of UFOs at Area 51 or working with Trump to take down a cabal of Satan-worshipping global elites. But the claims circulating in the wake of Helene and the buildup to Hurricane Milton have been more immediate, more personal: The military doesn’t want to help you.

In fact, it may want to harm you.

Almost as soon as Helene made landfall September 26, a narrative started spinning up on social media: The government had botched the response to the storm—on purpose.

While much of the false information focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response, dark narratives about the military also circulated, spread by far-right influencers and military veterans alike.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, more than 6,000 National Guard members were activated for search and rescue and to help clean up the wreckage. But online, people posted that they hadn’t seen guard members in their neighborhood. In a disaster the size of Helene, rescuers can’t be everywhere at once. But online, posters began to circulate the false idea that maybe the guard wasn’t deployed at all.

And Fort Liberty, the US Army’s largest military base, home to the famed 82nd Airborne Division, is in North Carolina, mere hours from some of the state’s hardest-hit areas. Some conspiratorial posts asked why soldiers from the base weren’t immediately mobilized. Active-duty troops typically do not deploy as first responders to natural disasters.

In the social media ecosphere—on alt-tech platforms like Rumble, Gab, and GETTR, as well as more mainstream sites like X—these questions quickly coalesced into a grab bag of conspiracy theories. The military wasn’t deploying soldiers for hurricane response because the Pentagon decided they would be put to better use in the Middle East or Ukraine instead. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to prevent red-state voters from casting their ballots—or even wanted them dead. The federal government was planning to seize land in western North Carolina for lucrative lithium mining contracts.

None of that was true.

“If troops are being deployed and [people] don’t necessarily see it in their geographic area, this is a ‘Is this really happening?’-type question,” Lukito says.

“There’s a lot of political actors that can take advantage of that.”

On Saturday, Trump amplified the idea that the military had not responded to the hurricane, claiming at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina. That is untrue: The North Carolina National Guard says it has rescued hundreds of people and delivered more than a million pounds of supplies, some of it by helicopter.

But even as top FEMA officials and local sheriffs begged residents to sign up for federal emergency aid while beating back misinformation, a new false narrative was gaining traction online: The military had perfected the science of weather control and was now weaponizing it against conservatives.

“We have an inherent distrust of our government,” says Pablo Breuer, board chair of the counter-disinformation nonprofit Disarm Foundation and a career Navy veteran.

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

An analysis by The War Horse and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, of 40 different social media platforms found that two days before Greene’s viral “they can control the weather” post, comments connecting the military to weather manipulation spiked on Gab, a social media platform favored by the far right.

“I’d bet my life it was the US Military using their HAARP Technology manipulating the weather to destroy a large portion of Red States and people before the election,” one user wrote, before moving on to antisemitic tropes. The user’s profile featured pro-Russia, white nationalist content.

It’s not a new idea. HAARP—a research program studying the upper atmosphere based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and initially funded by the military—has long been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Back in January, right-wing agitator and white nationalist Laura Loomer asked on X whether the “deep state” was using HAARP to control the weather when a blizzard threatened turnout for the Iowa caucus. It was not.

“We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military-industrial complex,” she tweeted.

Posts about geoengineering the weather also spiked on other social media sites after Helene. Some of those posts, particularly on more mainstream platforms, pushed back on misinformation, and social media users quickly added context in X’s Community Notes debunking Greene’s viral post.

But views of Flynn’s and Greene’s “weather manipulation” posts dwarfed the number of views on X, for example, of carefully crafted posts from some notable climate scientists about the deadly confluence of extreme weather.

“The fingerprints of #ClimateChange are all over what has transpired in recent weeks and may yet occur in coming days,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist, posted in a thread Monday.

“There are still thousands of folks in dire need…Helping them is and should remain the primary short-term priority. Yet if we can’t also manage to have the harder conversations regarding natural hazard risk & disasters & climate change in the moments when people are actually paying attention, we’re never going to solve any of the underlying problems.”

Just days before Helene slammed into the state, the Georgia National Guard’s ​​Headquarters Company of the 110th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion prepared for a long-planned nine-month deployment to Poland to support US forces and allies stationed in Europe.

Online, that and other deployments were held up—inaccurately—as proof that the military didn’t want to save American lives.

Images of text messages, ostensibly from National Guard members and active-duty soldiers, began circulating, claiming that troops were ready and willing to deploy to the disaster zone but that “higher ups” weren’t allowing it.

But that’s not how disaster response works, Breuer says.

“We have more than enough troops and equipment to be able to do the things that the military is being asked to do overseas and do the things that we want and need to do at home,” Breuer says. “We’re ready and willing to help anyone at any time.”

But he points out that the military cannot just deploy itself into a disaster zone.

Responding to a natural disaster the scale of Helene is a sprawling effort among local, state, and federal resources, as well as private and nonprofit organizations. Any military response is first provided by the National Guard, which is typically mobilized under state—not federal—control. Governors of affected states can request the support of guard units from other states.

As claims about missing guard troops proliferated online, National Guard units already were mobilizing. Before Helene made landfall, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, already had authorized 500 guard members to respond to the storm, quickly adding another thousand troops as the storm battered Georgia. That number has since increased to 2,500.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, initially activated more than 350 National Guard members as the storm moved into the Carolinas and steadily increased that number as the scale of devastation became clear.

In total, more than 6,000 guard members from 18 states have mobilized to provide search and rescue and begin the cleanup effort.

In a news conference Friday, Cooper expressed his frustration with the growing tide of misinformation.

“It can hurt our relief efforts,” he said. “It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

“It can hurt our relief efforts. It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

Federal troops can also help with disaster recovery, but it’s not their primary mission—and the military typically doesn’t deploy federal troops without a request from a state governor, says DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the emergency management and homeland security department at SUNY Albany. Often, that comes only after an initial assessment of the damage.

Last Wednesday, Biden announced that 1,000 soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell in Kentucky were deploying to help with hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina. On Sunday, the White House mobilized an additional 500 active-duty troops after approving a request from the North Carolina governor.

“We want to make sure that we’re being complementary, not out there doing something on our own,” Maj. General Robert Davis, director of operations for US Northern Command, told WRAL News, stressing that the National Guard and FEMA take the lead in disaster response.

“Even going back as far as Hurricane Andrew in Florida, you see the signs, ‘Where’s the calvary?’” Bennett Gayle told The War Horse. “There’s very few things that you can have the federal government just impose within a state.”

A deluge of misinformation often follows natural disasters, but the timing of this fall’s powerful twin hurricanes is particularly inauspicious.

“Unfortunately, this one is happening just one month out from the election,” says Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization researching and countering extremism. 

In such a hyperpoliticized environment, people look for sources of information they can rely on. Despite overall declining faith in institutions, the military still commands high levels of trust, experts say, and people claiming connections to the military are seen as more credible messengers about the government.

Keneally cautions that it can be difficult to suss out whether somebody actually served—just because their social media profile says they’re a veteran doesn’t mean they are. But getting veterans, or people who claim to be, to amplify messages is a long-standing disinformation tactic.

“They are trying to say, you’re a good patriot, you went to save your country,” Keneally says. “Now look at what’s happening to your country that you swore your life to protect.”

As false narratives about the hurricane response gained traction, people claiming connections to the military were more than happy to offer their “insider take”—from Flynn, who served in the Army for more than 30 years and still draws a military pension, to veterans online claiming they personally knew troops who were prevented from responding to the storm.

But Breuer, who served in the Navy for 22 years, says trusting individual veterans on social media over active-duty military leadership doesn’t make sense.

“The admirals and the generals that are in charge of the military…take an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Breuer says.

“That includes things like storms.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, with additional reporting from Anastasia Zolotova Franklin, Catherine Tong, Andrea Richardson, and Alexa Koenig of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. The story was fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

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

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeastern United States, killing more than 200 people and causing perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in property and economic damage, Hurricane Milton has spun up in the Gulf of Mexico and taken aim at Florida. On Monday, Milton reached Category 5 status with winds reaching as high as 180 mph, and it’s expected to cause widespread flooding with torrential rainfall and a towering storm surge when it makes landfall, likely around Tampa Bay on Wednesday.

How Milton got to this point is even more remarkable. A hurricane undergoes “rapid intensification” if its sustained wind speeds jump by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours. Helene did that before making landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida’s west coast. But Milton’s intensification has been nothing short of explosive: Wind speeds skyrocketed by 90 mph in 24 hours—at one point managing a 70-mph leap in just 13 hours—leaving meteorologists and researchers stunned. 

“The storm barely formed on October 5, and on October 7, it is a Cat 5 hurricane. That is very impressive.”

It’s one of the fastest intensification events scientists have ever observed in the Atlantic. Even sophisticated hurricane models didn’t see it coming. “This is definitely extraordinary,” said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist who studies hurricanes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The storm barely formed on October 5, and on October 7, it is a Cat 5 hurricane. That is very impressive.”

Like Helene before it, Milton formed under the perfect conditions for rapid intensification. A hurricane’s fuel is high ocean temperatures, and the Gulf of Mexico has been a warm bath in recent months, with temperatures over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, well above average figures. “Sea surface temperatures in this area are near record, if not record-breaking,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “It’s a little bit difficult to say, actually.” 

That’s because of an unfortunate irony: Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville, North Carolina, where the National Centers for Environmental Information stores data on ocean temperatures. “The sea surface temperature data that we rely on to make our day-to-day climate attribution calculations is actually unavailable to us,” said Gilford. “It’s been down for about 11 days now because of Hurricane Helene.” 

Losing access to that data is making it harder to calculate how much climate change has contributed to Milton’s intensification. But Gilford can say with confidence that the sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made at least 100 times more likely because of climate change, and that’s a conservative estimate.

Hurricanes also like high humidity, which Milton has plenty of. And low wind shear—winds moving at different speeds at various heights in the atmosphere—meant Milton could organize and spin up nicely. “There’s nothing to impede the storm from the atmospheric standpoint,” Balaguru said. 

In this case, the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. It could be especially dangerous in Tampa Bay, which acts like an overflowing bowl. 

Milton’s extreme intensification has the fingerprints of climate change all over it. For one, as the atmosphere warms, so too do the oceans, providing vast pools of fuel for hurricanes. Scientists are also finding that changes in atmospheric patterns have been decreasing wind shear in coastal regions. A difference in temperature between the land and sea also creates circulation patterns that boost the amount of humidity in the atmosphere. 

So with higher humidity, warmer oceans, and weaker wind shear, hurricanes have everything they need to rapidly intensify into monsters. Indeed, scientists are finding a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore in recent years. That makes hurricanes all the more dangerous: A coastal community might be preparing to ride out a Category 1 storm only for an unsurvivable Category 5 to suddenly come ashore.

In general, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, so hurricanes have more moisture to wring out as rain. A recent study found that climate change caused Helene to dump 50 percent more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Gilford expects climate change to also boost the rainfall that Milton dumps on Florida.

Like Helene did in Big Bend, Milton is expected to bulldoze ashore a storm surge of perhaps 15 feet along Florida’s west coast. That’s in part a consequence of the gentle slope from the coast out into the Gulf of Mexico: If the water were deeper, the storm surge could flow into the depths. But in this case, the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. The surge in Tampa Bay could be especially dangerous, since it acts like an overflowing bowl. 

As a result, the National Weather Service is warning that Milton could be the worst storm to hit the Tampa area in more than a century. Milton might not just be an immediate emergency for Florida—it could well be a harbinger of the supercharged hurricanes to come. 

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the power of misinformation in the United States better than what happened Monday morning when retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn hit the send button on a social media post. He shared a video that claimed “weather modification operations” that are “clearly connected” with the Department of Defense were responsible for Hurricane Helene’s “assault” on the Carolinas.

“You have to listen to this clip,” Flynn told his 1.7 million followers on X. “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?”

Within 15 hours, the post by former President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser had more than half a million views. Add that to the 43 million views of alt-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims late last week that “Yes they can control the weather.”

Now compare that to the post by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact immediately debunking the weather modification theory with its most untruthful “Pants on Fire!” rating a day after Helene made landfall: After 10 days, that post had all of 11,400 views—less than 2 percent of Flynn’s audience.

With the storm-battered Southeast bracing for another massive hurricane and the hyperpartisan election just four weeks away, government officials and rescue workers aren’t just battling the elements, they’re fighting against a spiraling misinformation war.

“The combination of the two just makes the misinformation even more drastic,” says Josephine Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media who studies misinformation. “There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

“There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

Many of the false narratives involve the military, which is so often at the heart of conspiracy theories—hiding evidence of UFOs at Area 51 or working with Trump to take down a cabal of Satan-worshipping global elites. But the claims circulating in the wake of Helene and the buildup to Hurricane Milton have been more immediate, more personal: The military doesn’t want to help you.

In fact, it may want to harm you.

Almost as soon as Helene made landfall September 26, a narrative started spinning up on social media: The government had botched the response to the storm—on purpose.

While much of the false information focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response, dark narratives about the military also circulated, spread by far-right influencers and military veterans alike.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, more than 6,000 National Guard members were activated for search and rescue and to help clean up the wreckage. But online, people posted that they hadn’t seen guard members in their neighborhood. In a disaster the size of Helene, rescuers can’t be everywhere at once. But online, posters began to circulate the false idea that maybe the guard wasn’t deployed at all.

And Fort Liberty, the US Army’s largest military base, home to the famed 82nd Airborne Division, is in North Carolina, mere hours from some of the state’s hardest-hit areas. Some conspiratorial posts asked why soldiers from the base weren’t immediately mobilized. Active-duty troops typically do not deploy as first responders to natural disasters.

In the social media ecosphere—on alt-tech platforms like Rumble, Gab, and GETTR, as well as more mainstream sites like X—these questions quickly coalesced into a grab bag of conspiracy theories. The military wasn’t deploying soldiers for hurricane response because the Pentagon decided they would be put to better use in the Middle East or Ukraine instead. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to prevent red-state voters from casting their ballots—or even wanted them dead. The federal government was planning to seize land in western North Carolina for lucrative lithium mining contracts.

None of that was true.

“If troops are being deployed and [people] don’t necessarily see it in their geographic area, this is a ‘Is this really happening?’-type question,” Lukito says.

“There’s a lot of political actors that can take advantage of that.”

On Saturday, Trump amplified the idea that the military had not responded to the hurricane, claiming at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina. That is untrue: The North Carolina National Guard says it has rescued hundreds of people and delivered more than a million pounds of supplies, some of it by helicopter.

But even as top FEMA officials and local sheriffs begged residents to sign up for federal emergency aid while beating back misinformation, a new false narrative was gaining traction online: The military had perfected the science of weather control and was now weaponizing it against conservatives.

“We have an inherent distrust of our government,” says Pablo Breuer, board chair of the counter-disinformation nonprofit Disarm Foundation and a career Navy veteran.

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

An analysis by The War Horse and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, of 40 different social media platforms found that two days before Greene’s viral “they can control the weather” post, comments connecting the military to weather manipulation spiked on Gab, a social media platform favored by the far right.

“I’d bet my life it was the US Military using their HAARP Technology manipulating the weather to destroy a large portion of Red States and people before the election,” one user wrote, before moving on to antisemitic tropes. The user’s profile featured pro-Russia, white nationalist content.

It’s not a new idea. HAARP—a research program studying the upper atmosphere based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and initially funded by the military—has long been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Back in January, right-wing agitator and white nationalist Laura Loomer asked on X whether the “deep state” was using HAARP to control the weather when a blizzard threatened turnout for the Iowa caucus. It was not.

“We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military-industrial complex,” she tweeted.

Posts about geoengineering the weather also spiked on other social media sites after Helene. Some of those posts, particularly on more mainstream platforms, pushed back on misinformation, and social media users quickly added context in X’s Community Notes debunking Greene’s viral post.

But views of Flynn’s and Greene’s “weather manipulation” posts dwarfed the number of views on X, for example, of carefully crafted posts from some notable climate scientists about the deadly confluence of extreme weather.

“The fingerprints of #ClimateChange are all over what has transpired in recent weeks and may yet occur in coming days,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist, posted in a thread Monday.

“There are still thousands of folks in dire need…Helping them is and should remain the primary short-term priority. Yet if we can’t also manage to have the harder conversations regarding natural hazard risk & disasters & climate change in the moments when people are actually paying attention, we’re never going to solve any of the underlying problems.”

Just days before Helene slammed into the state, the Georgia National Guard’s ​​Headquarters Company of the 110th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion prepared for a long-planned nine-month deployment to Poland to support US forces and allies stationed in Europe.

Online, that and other deployments were held up—inaccurately—as proof that the military didn’t want to save American lives.

Images of text messages, ostensibly from National Guard members and active-duty soldiers, began circulating, claiming that troops were ready and willing to deploy to the disaster zone but that “higher ups” weren’t allowing it.

But that’s not how disaster response works, Breuer says.

“We have more than enough troops and equipment to be able to do the things that the military is being asked to do overseas and do the things that we want and need to do at home,” Breuer says. “We’re ready and willing to help anyone at any time.”

But he points out that the military cannot just deploy itself into a disaster zone.

Responding to a natural disaster the scale of Helene is a sprawling effort among local, state, and federal resources, as well as private and nonprofit organizations. Any military response is first provided by the National Guard, which is typically mobilized under state—not federal—control. Governors of affected states can request the support of guard units from other states.

As claims about missing guard troops proliferated online, National Guard units already were mobilizing. Before Helene made landfall, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, already had authorized 500 guard members to respond to the storm, quickly adding another thousand troops as the storm battered Georgia. That number has since increased to 2,500.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, initially activated more than 350 National Guard members as the storm moved into the Carolinas and steadily increased that number as the scale of devastation became clear.

In total, more than 6,000 guard members from 18 states have mobilized to provide search and rescue and begin the cleanup effort.

In a news conference Friday, Cooper expressed his frustration with the growing tide of misinformation.

“It can hurt our relief efforts,” he said. “It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

“It can hurt our relief efforts. It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

Federal troops can also help with disaster recovery, but it’s not their primary mission—and the military typically doesn’t deploy federal troops without a request from a state governor, says DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the emergency management and homeland security department at SUNY Albany. Often, that comes only after an initial assessment of the damage.

Last Wednesday, Biden announced that 1,000 soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell in Kentucky were deploying to help with hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina. On Sunday, the White House mobilized an additional 500 active-duty troops after approving a request from the North Carolina governor.

“We want to make sure that we’re being complementary, not out there doing something on our own,” Maj. General Robert Davis, director of operations for US Northern Command, told WRAL News, stressing that the National Guard and FEMA take the lead in disaster response.

“Even going back as far as Hurricane Andrew in Florida, you see the signs, ‘Where’s the calvary?’” Bennett Gayle told The War Horse. “There’s very few things that you can have the federal government just impose within a state.”

A deluge of misinformation often follows natural disasters, but the timing of this fall’s powerful twin hurricanes is particularly inauspicious.

“Unfortunately, this one is happening just one month out from the election,” says Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization researching and countering extremism. 

In such a hyperpoliticized environment, people look for sources of information they can rely on. Despite overall declining faith in institutions, the military still commands high levels of trust, experts say, and people claiming connections to the military are seen as more credible messengers about the government.

Keneally cautions that it can be difficult to suss out whether somebody actually served—just because their social media profile says they’re a veteran doesn’t mean they are. But getting veterans, or people who claim to be, to amplify messages is a long-standing disinformation tactic.

“They are trying to say, you’re a good patriot, you went to save your country,” Keneally says. “Now look at what’s happening to your country that you swore your life to protect.”

As false narratives about the hurricane response gained traction, people claiming connections to the military were more than happy to offer their “insider take”—from Flynn, who served in the Army for more than 30 years and still draws a military pension, to veterans online claiming they personally knew troops who were prevented from responding to the storm.

But Breuer, who served in the Navy for 22 years, says trusting individual veterans on social media over active-duty military leadership doesn’t make sense.

“The admirals and the generals that are in charge of the military…take an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Breuer says.

“That includes things like storms.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, with additional reporting from Anastasia Zolotova Franklin, Catherine Tong, Andrea Richardson, and Alexa Koenig of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. The story was fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

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

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeastern United States, killing more than 200 people and causing perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in property and economic damage, Hurricane Milton has spun up in the Gulf of Mexico and taken aim at Florida. On Monday, Milton reached Category 5 status with winds reaching as high as 180 mph, and it’s expected to cause widespread flooding with torrential rainfall and a towering storm surge when it makes landfall, likely around Tampa Bay on Wednesday.

How Milton got to this point is even more remarkable. A hurricane undergoes “rapid intensification” if its sustained wind speeds jump by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours. Helene did that before making landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida’s west coast. But Milton’s intensification has been nothing short of explosive: Wind speeds skyrocketed by 90 mph in 24 hours—at one point managing a 70-mph leap in just 13 hours—leaving meteorologists and researchers stunned. 

“The storm barely formed on October 5, and on October 7, it is a Cat 5 hurricane. That is very impressive.”

It’s one of the fastest intensification events scientists have ever observed in the Atlantic. Even sophisticated hurricane models didn’t see it coming. “This is definitely extraordinary,” said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist who studies hurricanes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The storm barely formed on October 5, and on October 7, it is a Cat 5 hurricane. That is very impressive.”

Like Helene before it, Milton formed under the perfect conditions for rapid intensification. A hurricane’s fuel is high ocean temperatures, and the Gulf of Mexico has been a warm bath in recent months, with temperatures over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, well above average figures. “Sea surface temperatures in this area are near record, if not record-breaking,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “It’s a little bit difficult to say, actually.” 

That’s because of an unfortunate irony: Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville, North Carolina, where the National Centers for Environmental Information stores data on ocean temperatures. “The sea surface temperature data that we rely on to make our day-to-day climate attribution calculations is actually unavailable to us,” said Gilford. “It’s been down for about 11 days now because of Hurricane Helene.” 

Losing access to that data is making it harder to calculate how much climate change has contributed to Milton’s intensification. But Gilford can say with confidence that the sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made at least 100 times more likely because of climate change, and that’s a conservative estimate.

Hurricanes also like high humidity, which Milton has plenty of. And low wind shear—winds moving at different speeds at various heights in the atmosphere—meant Milton could organize and spin up nicely. “There’s nothing to impede the storm from the atmospheric standpoint,” Balaguru said. 

In this case, the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. It could be especially dangerous in Tampa Bay, which acts like an overflowing bowl. 

Milton’s extreme intensification has the fingerprints of climate change all over it. For one, as the atmosphere warms, so too do the oceans, providing vast pools of fuel for hurricanes. Scientists are also finding that changes in atmospheric patterns have been decreasing wind shear in coastal regions. A difference in temperature between the land and sea also creates circulation patterns that boost the amount of humidity in the atmosphere. 

So with higher humidity, warmer oceans, and weaker wind shear, hurricanes have everything they need to rapidly intensify into monsters. Indeed, scientists are finding a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore in recent years. That makes hurricanes all the more dangerous: A coastal community might be preparing to ride out a Category 1 storm only for an unsurvivable Category 5 to suddenly come ashore.

In general, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, so hurricanes have more moisture to wring out as rain. A recent study found that climate change caused Helene to dump 50 percent more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Gilford expects climate change to also boost the rainfall that Milton dumps on Florida.

Like Helene did in Big Bend, Milton is expected to bulldoze ashore a storm surge of perhaps 15 feet along Florida’s west coast. That’s in part a consequence of the gentle slope from the coast out into the Gulf of Mexico: If the water were deeper, the storm surge could flow into the depths. But in this case, the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. The surge in Tampa Bay could be especially dangerous, since it acts like an overflowing bowl. 

As a result, the National Weather Service is warning that Milton could be the worst storm to hit the Tampa area in more than a century. Milton might not just be an immediate emergency for Florida—it could well be a harbinger of the supercharged hurricanes to come. 

It appears as though Mark Robinson is hellbent on his apparent refusal to take emergency action in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Following the North Carolina lieutenant governor’s role as the sole lawmaker to skip a vote on North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s request to declare a state of emergency before Helene struck late last month, Robinson, also the Republican gubernatorial candidate, was once again the only official to fail to respond to Cooper’s executive order to increase relief efforts. 

According to CBS17, each member of North Carolina’s Council of State had 48 hours to respond to Cooper’s call for action on Saturday. But Robinson did not respond. Robinson’s newly hired chief of staff, Krishna Polite, told the news outlet on Tuesday that Robinson had supported the order, but it went awry because Roy’s formal request was sent to former staff members.

Robinson’s team did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. 

Robinson’s campaign has been inundated with chaos in recent months, with half of his staff quitting following a CNN report connecting to him racist and sexually explicit remarks on a pornographic message board. That included comments declaring himself a “black NAZI!” and referring to Mein Kampf as a “good read.” But Robinson has remained defiant, refusing to bow out of the race in the face of multiple controversies.

That defiance, or at least Robinson’s refusal to accept responsibility, appears to extend to his Helene response. After missing the initial state of emergency vote, Robinson posted on X: “Democrats like Cooper, [North Carolina Attorney General] Josh Stein & Joe Biden want to hide behind bureaucratic resolutions that pass automatically—instead of getting out there and working to help people in dire need. I won’t stand for this.”

Though his recent controversies may have shocked people at the national level, Cooper, a Democrat, may not be so surprised. In July, the North Carolina governor explained at an event for land conservation that he dropped out of the running to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate because he was worried about the damage Robinson could do if he left office. (North Carolina’s state constitution says, “During the absence of the Governor from the State…the Lieutenant Governor shall be Acting Governor.”)  

“This was not the right time for our state or for me,” Cooper said at the time. “We had concerns that he would try to seize the limelight…and that would be a real distraction to the presidential campaign.” 

Cooper’s latest executive order supports recovery from Hurricane Helene by increasing the number of professional health care workers and making emergency medications more readily available.

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

Something’s shifted. And it’s not just the climate.

Even before being named a tropical storm, I knew that what would become Mean Helene was set on a mission to be yet another multibillion-dollar disaster. I knew that it would undergo rapid intensification and become a catastrophic hurricane. And I knew that a calamitous rainfall event would unfold in the Southeast many hours after landfall.

So, I did what I’ve done during my entire 40 year career—I tried to warn people. Except that the warning was not well received by everyone. A person accused me of being a “climate militant,” a suggestion that I’m embellishing extreme weather threats to drive an agenda. Another simply said that my predictions were “an exaggeration.”

But it wasn’t an exaggeration.

The storm surge from Helene was widespread and up to 15 feet deep. The windstorm sliced through the Southeast with gusts up to 100 miles per hour. And the rains were, as I predicted, “biblical.”

Helene became a major hurricane on September 26 amid a rapid intensification (RI) cycle in which it attained 55 mph greater windspeeds in a span of 24-hours—just short of the “extreme” RI threshold of 58 mph in 24 hours. It was the second time since it formed that maximum sustained windspeeds had increased by at least 35 miles per hour in a day.

As a result, Helene went from an 80 mph low-end Category 1 hurricane one day to a 140 mph Category 4 cyclone the next. According to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, Category 1 hurricane damage would be expected to be “minimal,” while Category 4 hurricane damage would be “devastating.”

Helene was the second major hurricane (Cat 3 or higher) of the 2024 season. Record-setting Hurricane Beryl preceded it as the earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic basin’s history. Beryl became a major hurricane in the month of June east of the Lesser Antilles, the first time that’s ever happened during the first month of hurricane season since record-keeping began in 1851.

While Beryl weakened before reaching the United States as a Category 1 hurricane, Helene intensified into a major hurricane and continued strengthening right up to landfall. That now puts 2020-2024 into the record books, tying the mark for the longest consecutive number of years (five) in which a major hurricane has made landfall in the United States.

“Helene’s extreme floods have resulted in apocalyptic scenes. Some small towns were mostly leveled. Others are cut off from surrounding civilization.”

Hurricane Helene’s wind field was about as large as they come. The diameter of sustained tropical storm force winds reached over 450 miles. Based on historical statistics of tropical cyclone size, that put Helene in the 9oth percentile. Miami, never closer than 300 miles from Helene’s center, experienced a wind gust of 72 mph. Hurricane force winds also extended out an unusually far distance of 60 miles from the eye.

The large wind field was a big reason why the National Weather Service forecasted an “unsurvivable” storm surge. Storm-force winds roared from south-southwest to north-northeast across the entire eastern Gulf of Mexico. This long wind fetch drove water towards Florida.

The concave shape of the coastline between Apalachicola and Clearwater helped “collect” all that Gulf water, which was driven even higher because of bathymetry—the depth and shape of the seafloor. Waters are shallow in that region because the continental shelf extends out from Florida far into the Gulf. That means that there isn’t much room to “store” the water being driven towards the coast by the hurricane.

The resulting surge was immense. Preliminary post-landfall modeling of storm surge from Helene indicated areas within the Big Bend region of the state near Keaton Beach, Steinhatchee, and Horseshoe Beach had water levels reach more than 15 feet above ground level. Along the west coast of the Florida peninsula, Cedar Key had a record surge of 9 feet, while Tampa Bay experienced a modern-day record surge of approximately 7 feet.

The depth of the saltwater inundation was extremely well forecast by the National Hurricane Center. Yet, in Florida, dead bodies were found in evacuated coastal areas where some had retreated to their attics to avoid the rising storm surge.

If that wasn’t enough, damaging winds penetrated well inland, thanks in part to Helene’s extreme strength, but also because the storm’s speed of motion was accelerating as it made landfall, and its wind field was so huge that it took quite some time to wind down. Windstorm damage extended far inland beyond Florida to Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. A 100-mph gust was recorded in Alma, Georgia. Mount Mitchell North Carolina, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, had a gust to 106 mph from Helene.

And then came the rain.

Preliminary storm-total rainfall measured on the ground included nearly 31 inches in Yancey County, northeast of Asheville, North Carolina. Radar estimated totals in areas where there were no rain gauges exceeded 40 inches just over the state line in South Carolina’s Greenville County.

Approximately half of Chimney Rock, North Carolina, has been reduced to debris that has flowed into Lake Lure. The regions of Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee are going to require extensive assistance in the following weeks and possibly months for recovery.… pic.twitter.com/ciR59qRxRY

— Live Storm Chasers (@LiveStormChaser) September 29, 2024

A Predecessor Rain Event caused by a stalled weather front had hit that very same region just days prior to Helene’s impacts, saturating the ground on the heels of what had been a wetter-than-normal summer. The flooding and landslide disaster that Helene’s rainfall caused was facilitated by topography, as runoff rushed into the creeks and rivers that flow down from the Appalachian Mountains.

Helene’s extreme floods have resulted in apocalyptic scenes. Some small towns were mostly leveled. Others are cut off from surrounding civilization, with no way in or out except by air. It is a humanitarian catastrophe that is still unfolding.

Beyond the short-term suffering from its immediate victims, long term implications of Helene’s hecatomb include more pressure on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and state-level relief agencies, more fuel for a burgeoning insurance crisis, and more reasons to think twice about building or rebuilding in harm’s way in a century that looks nothing like the past. Because the hurricanes of the early 21st century are not like the ones of the 20th century.

Warming oceans are fueling stronger tropical cyclones—the costliest weather disasters in the United States. Helene’s intensity took off while passing over waters that were over 3 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than historical averages, a condition made 600 times more likely by climate change, according to Climate Central’s CSI Ocean index. Since 2017, eight Category 4 and 5 hurricanes have struck US soil—as many Cat 4 & 5 landfalls as occurred in the previous 57 years.

This concerning recent trend fits overall tendencies in the Atlantic. Observations show an increase in tropical cyclone intensification rates in the Atlantic basin from 1982-2009. The number of storms that quickly intensified from Category 1 (or weaker) into a major hurricane more than doubled in 2001-2020 compared to 1971-1990.

Globally, the proportion of tropical cyclones that reach very intense (Category 4 and 5) levels is projected to increase, too. Higher tropical storm and hurricane rainfall rates, like those seen in the Appalachians, are expected to continue in a warming planet. And, in places like Florida, sea level rise is accelerating at such a dramatic pace that today’s storm surges can reach 8 inches higher than when Hurricane Andrew struck south of Miami a little over 30 years ago.

For decades, I had felt in control. Not in control of the weather, of course. But in control of the message that, if my audience was prepared and well informed, I could confidently guide them through any weather threat, and we’d all make it through safely. Today as a result of so many compounding climate-driven factors, the warming world has forcibly shifted my manner from calm concern to agitated dismay.

Now I look at storms differently. And I communicate differently. I don’t need to be told “you’ve changed” to know that I’m not the same. Perhaps those who have known me as the just-the-facts, non-alarmist meteorologist can’t get used to the new me. That’s why they bicker and accuse me over overhyping emerging weather threats.

But no one can hide from the truth. Extreme weather events, including hurricanes, are becoming more extreme. I must communicate the growing threats from the climate crisis come hell or high water—pun intended.

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

Something’s shifted. And it’s not just the climate.

Even before being named a tropical storm, I knew that what would become Mean Helene was set on a mission to be yet another multibillion-dollar disaster. I knew that it would undergo rapid intensification and become a catastrophic hurricane. And I knew that a calamitous rainfall event would unfold in the Southeast many hours after landfall.

So, I did what I’ve done during my entire 40 year career—I tried to warn people. Except that the warning was not well received by everyone. A person accused me of being a “climate militant,” a suggestion that I’m embellishing extreme weather threats to drive an agenda. Another simply said that my predictions were “an exaggeration.”

But it wasn’t an exaggeration.

The storm surge from Helene was widespread and up to 15 feet deep. The windstorm sliced through the Southeast with gusts up to 100 miles per hour. And the rains were, as I predicted, “biblical.”

Helene became a major hurricane on September 26 amid a rapid intensification (RI) cycle in which it attained 55 mph greater windspeeds in a span of 24-hours—just short of the “extreme” RI threshold of 58 mph in 24 hours. It was the second time since it formed that maximum sustained windspeeds had increased by at least 35 miles per hour in a day.

As a result, Helene went from an 80 mph low-end Category 1 hurricane one day to a 140 mph Category 4 cyclone the next. According to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, Category 1 hurricane damage would be expected to be “minimal,” while Category 4 hurricane damage would be “devastating.”

Helene was the second major hurricane (Cat 3 or higher) of the 2024 season. Record-setting Hurricane Beryl preceded it as the earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic basin’s history. Beryl became a major hurricane in the month of June east of the Lesser Antilles, the first time that’s ever happened during the first month of hurricane season since record-keeping began in 1851.

While Beryl weakened before reaching the United States as a Category 1 hurricane, Helene intensified into a major hurricane and continued strengthening right up to landfall. That now puts 2020-2024 into the record books, tying the mark for the longest consecutive number of years (five) in which a major hurricane has made landfall in the United States.

“Helene’s extreme floods have resulted in apocalyptic scenes. Some small towns were mostly leveled. Others are cut off from surrounding civilization.”

Hurricane Helene’s wind field was about as large as they come. The diameter of sustained tropical storm force winds reached over 450 miles. Based on historical statistics of tropical cyclone size, that put Helene in the 9oth percentile. Miami, never closer than 300 miles from Helene’s center, experienced a wind gust of 72 mph. Hurricane force winds also extended out an unusually far distance of 60 miles from the eye.

The large wind field was a big reason why the National Weather Service forecasted an “unsurvivable” storm surge. Storm-force winds roared from south-southwest to north-northeast across the entire eastern Gulf of Mexico. This long wind fetch drove water towards Florida.

The concave shape of the coastline between Apalachicola and Clearwater helped “collect” all that Gulf water, which was driven even higher because of bathymetry—the depth and shape of the seafloor. Waters are shallow in that region because the continental shelf extends out from Florida far into the Gulf. That means that there isn’t much room to “store” the water being driven towards the coast by the hurricane.

The resulting surge was immense. Preliminary post-landfall modeling of storm surge from Helene indicated areas within the Big Bend region of the state near Keaton Beach, Steinhatchee, and Horseshoe Beach had water levels reach more than 15 feet above ground level. Along the west coast of the Florida peninsula, Cedar Key had a record surge of 9 feet, while Tampa Bay experienced a modern-day record surge of approximately 7 feet.

The depth of the saltwater inundation was extremely well forecast by the National Hurricane Center. Yet, in Florida, dead bodies were found in evacuated coastal areas where some had retreated to their attics to avoid the rising storm surge.

If that wasn’t enough, damaging winds penetrated well inland, thanks in part to Helene’s extreme strength, but also because the storm’s speed of motion was accelerating as it made landfall, and its wind field was so huge that it took quite some time to wind down. Windstorm damage extended far inland beyond Florida to Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. A 100-mph gust was recorded in Alma, Georgia. Mount Mitchell North Carolina, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, had a gust to 106 mph from Helene.

And then came the rain.

Preliminary storm-total rainfall measured on the ground included nearly 31 inches in Yancey County, northeast of Asheville, North Carolina. Radar estimated totals in areas where there were no rain gauges exceeded 40 inches just over the state line in South Carolina’s Greenville County.

Approximately half of Chimney Rock, North Carolina, has been reduced to debris that has flowed into Lake Lure. The regions of Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee are going to require extensive assistance in the following weeks and possibly months for recovery.… pic.twitter.com/ciR59qRxRY

— Live Storm Chasers (@LiveStormChaser) September 29, 2024

A Predecessor Rain Event caused by a stalled weather front had hit that very same region just days prior to Helene’s impacts, saturating the ground on the heels of what had been a wetter-than-normal summer. The flooding and landslide disaster that Helene’s rainfall caused was facilitated by topography, as runoff rushed into the creeks and rivers that flow down from the Appalachian Mountains.

Helene’s extreme floods have resulted in apocalyptic scenes. Some small towns were mostly leveled. Others are cut off from surrounding civilization, with no way in or out except by air. It is a humanitarian catastrophe that is still unfolding.

Beyond the short-term suffering from its immediate victims, long term implications of Helene’s hecatomb include more pressure on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and state-level relief agencies, more fuel for a burgeoning insurance crisis, and more reasons to think twice about building or rebuilding in harm’s way in a century that looks nothing like the past. Because the hurricanes of the early 21st century are not like the ones of the 20th century.

Warming oceans are fueling stronger tropical cyclones—the costliest weather disasters in the United States. Helene’s intensity took off while passing over waters that were over 3 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than historical averages, a condition made 600 times more likely by climate change, according to Climate Central’s CSI Ocean index. Since 2017, eight Category 4 and 5 hurricanes have struck US soil—as many Cat 4 & 5 landfalls as occurred in the previous 57 years.

This concerning recent trend fits overall tendencies in the Atlantic. Observations show an increase in tropical cyclone intensification rates in the Atlantic basin from 1982-2009. The number of storms that quickly intensified from Category 1 (or weaker) into a major hurricane more than doubled in 2001-2020 compared to 1971-1990.

Globally, the proportion of tropical cyclones that reach very intense (Category 4 and 5) levels is projected to increase, too. Higher tropical storm and hurricane rainfall rates, like those seen in the Appalachians, are expected to continue in a warming planet. And, in places like Florida, sea level rise is accelerating at such a dramatic pace that today’s storm surges can reach 8 inches higher than when Hurricane Andrew struck south of Miami a little over 30 years ago.

For decades, I had felt in control. Not in control of the weather, of course. But in control of the message that, if my audience was prepared and well informed, I could confidently guide them through any weather threat, and we’d all make it through safely. Today as a result of so many compounding climate-driven factors, the warming world has forcibly shifted my manner from calm concern to agitated dismay.

Now I look at storms differently. And I communicate differently. I don’t need to be told “you’ve changed” to know that I’m not the same. Perhaps those who have known me as the just-the-facts, non-alarmist meteorologist can’t get used to the new me. That’s why they bicker and accuse me over overhyping emerging weather threats.

But no one can hide from the truth. Extreme weather events, including hurricanes, are becoming more extreme. I must communicate the growing threats from the climate crisis come hell or high water—pun intended.

With the Federal Emergency Management Agency reeling from major staffing and funding shortages amid the impact of Hurricane Helene, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refused on Sunday to commit to reconvening the House before Election Day to aid recovery efforts. In response to a letter from President Biden urging congressional leaders back to replenish federal disaster loan funding, Johnson said during a Fox News Sunday interview that he’d only do so after the election—all but ensuring the funds will run out.

The Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program offers low-interest loans to businesses as well as homeowners and renters in disaster areas, and is often the largest source of disaster recovery funds available to survivors. In the letter, Biden also reiterated the need for more disaster relief funds for FEMA, which he says will otherwise be forced to pause long-term recovery efforts related to previous disasters.

Earlier this year, FEMA was already forced to implement “immediate needs funding” restrictions, which paused funding for previous disasters. It’s very likely, without additional funding, that the agency would have to do so again, which would delay vital recovery projects and repairs that are essential for communities to rebuild and prepare for future crises.

Johnson pointed to the $20 billion Congress allocated for FEMA as part of a stopgap measure—then returned to his previously scheduled attacks on undocumented immigrants, who Johnson inexplicably blamed for the shortfall. While he did acknowledge that the streams of funding for FEMA’s disaster relief efforts are separate from those used to address immigration relief, he also attacked the Biden administration for supposedly “gleefully” reimbursing NGOs for transporting undocumented immigrants across the country. In reality, migrant relief efforts represent less than three percent of FEMA’s total annual budget—and the shortfall would still be there if these efforts stopped. 

In September of this year, as a response to FEMA implementing such restrictions, the National Association of Counties, along with nine other organizations, wrote a letter asking Congress to provide $6.1 billion in additional funding so FEMA could continue long-term recovery efforts. If every dollar spent in the last fiscal year on FEMA’s Shelter and Service Program—which provides migrant support—went to that end, it would still leave a gap of more than $5.3 billion for FEMA to restore its long-term recovery plans.

And while the $20 billion Johnson mentions did allow FEMA to do so, the stopgap measure was just that: the restrictions could easily come back into force as the total cost of Hurricane Helene continues to rise, and as Hurricane Milton—which is expected to be one of the most intense in history—makes landfall in Florida.