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On September 26, Hurricane Helene punched into the Florida coast north of Tampa Bay. With sustained wind of 220km/h, the category 4 hurricane was the strongest ever to make landfall in that area. It caused destruction across five states and killed at least 200 people.
Hurricane Milton is expected to hit Tampa on Thursday between category 3 and category 5, the highest storm rating.
A message outside an apartment in the Davis Islands community of Tampa, Florida, as residents prepare for the arrival of Hurricane Milton.Credit: AP
“It’s an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” veteran meteorologist John Morales said during a live report for NBC 6 South Florida, choking back tears as he detailed the speed of the storm’s intensification. “I apologise … This is just horrific.”
About 5.5 million people have been called on to evacuate.
“This is literally catastrophic,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said on CNN on Monday evening. “I can say this without any dramatisation whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”
The data that was causing Morales such distress was the storm’s intensification. Milton grew in intensity at a speed that has shocked observers, growing from category 1 to 5 in just 24 hours.
A study last year suggested that storms originating in the Atlantic Ocean are now more than twice as likely to strengthen from category 1 to category 3 in just 36 hours, based on data from 2001-2020, compared with 1971-1990, Reuters reported this week.
The driving force of this rapid intensification is the heat being contained in the Earth’s atmosphere.
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Under the Paris Agreement, the world agreed to an effort to keep average temperature rises from pre-industrial levels below 2 degrees — and as close to 1.5 degrees as possible — precisely to avoid the worst impacts of events like those unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the past 12 months, global warming was at 1.62 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Tuesday.
Until those average temperatures are sustained for years, the goals of the Paris Agreement will not be considered lost, but some scientists fear that 1.5 degrees may no longer be achievable.
Among them is Sir Jim Skea, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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Speaking at a climate summit this week, he said that keeping to 1.5 degrees would have meant cutting emissions for the past five years, the UK’s Telegraph newspaper reported. But emissions have not yet peaked.
Now he fears that even the goal of holding warming to 2 degrees may be slipping from grasp.
Whether it can be achieved is up to politicians rather than scientists, he argued. “Frankly, it’s down to human agency and choice.”
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