Florida’s governor prepared for this inevitable storm by burying his head

Everyone knew that a storm this size would eventually hit the city of Tampa on the west central coast of the Floridian peninsula, and that the cost to human life and property could be catastrophic.

As far back as 2015, the Boston-based disaster modelling firm, Karen Clark & Company, issued a report saying that Tampa, which is both low-lying and heavily populated, was the US city most vulnerable to a hurricane. It estimated the cost of a large hurricane to the area’s residential and commercial property to be about $US175 billion ($260 billion).

Scientists warned that climate change was speeding up sea-level rise such that the storm surges caused by the hurricanes that formed each year over the Gulf of Mexico were rapidly becoming more destructive.

In a major report on the threat to the region, the Washington Post wrote in 2017 that due to “gambler’s luck”, the hurricanes that kept barrelling in across the gulf kept swerving at the last minute to reprieve the people of Tampa.

The last direct hit from a category 3 hurricane in 1921 left the area in ruins, but few people lived there then. A single death was recorded. More than 3 million live across the Tampa Bay region today.

As the warnings kept coming in, the former governor, Republican Rick Scott, responded by banning state officials from using the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in official communications.

The current Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, followed up by banning the use of the terms in state laws. The same legislation also prohibited offshore wind turbines and cut restrictions on gas pipelines. “I’m not a global warming person. I don’t want that label on me,” he explained in his 2018 campaign.

However DeSantis identifies himself on the climate change spectrum, it was always clear his state’s luck was not going to hold forever. As long as the world kept pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the seas were going to keep warming and rising, and the storms growing.

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.

“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.

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.

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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