How fossil fuels mutated Milton

Climate scientists tell HEATED the historic storm represents "the profound irresponsibility and culpability" of polluters.

A satellite image of Hurricane Milton as it approaches Florida on October 9, 2024. The Category 5 hurricane is one of the fiercest and fastest-growing storms in history. Source: NOAA

For scientists who study the effects of climate change, the scariest thing about Hurricane Milton is not simply its historic strength. It’s the fact that Milton grew so strong so quickly—mutating from a pipsqueak into a monster. 

Milton’s rapid intensification from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane left meteorologists speechless, with one veteran NBC6 Miami scientist tearing up on air. On X, hurricane scientists described Milton’s sudden explosion as “unprecedented,” “terrifying,” and “jaw-dropping,” as the storm’s wind speeds grew from 60 mph to over 180 mph in only 36 hours—one of the fastest intensifications on record.

A similarly rapid hurricane intensification happened just weeks earlier with Hurricane Helene, which transformed from a relatively weak tropical storm into a historic Category 4 hurricane within two days.

Source: NASA Earth on X

These fast-evolving mutant storms are the new and terrifying reality of hurricane season, multiple climate and hurricane scientists told me this week. “We’re seeing a qualitatively more intense and dangerous breed of hurricane take hold on a warmer planet,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. 

And when it comes to who to blame for this terrifying new reality, Mann argues one culprit should take center stage: the fossil fuel industry, which is responsible for 76 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

“ExxonMobil’s own scientists warned that continued fossil fuel burning would lead to “potentially catastrophic events,” Mann said. That those catastrophes are playing out today represents “the profound irresponsibility and culpability of a fossil fuel industry that knowingly hid evidence of the tremendous danger of their product—not just danger to individuals … but danger to humanity and the planet. A whole higher category of crime.”

A screenshot of Exxon’s internal 1982 memo detailing the catastrophic consequences of burning fossil fuels and deforestation. Source: Climate Investigations Center

How fossil fuels mutated Milton

Milton’s explosive growth falls into a category scientists call “extreme rapid intensification,” defined by when a hurricane gains wind speeds of at least 58 miles per hour in 24 hours. The last time a hurricane did that was almost exactly one year ago, when Hurricane Otis took meteorologists by surprise in October 2023.

Both Otis’s and Milton’s rapid intensification were driven by the same thing: An extremely hot Gulf of Mexico, which scientists say was made far more likely by heat-trapping pollutants from the fossil fuel, agriculture, chemical and cement industries.

Source: New York Times

It’s easy to understand how pollution heats the ocean. Oceans are one of the Earth’s greatest heat sinks, absorbing 93 percent of heat trapped by greenhouse gases since 1970. That’s helped keep temperatures on land lower than they otherwise would be, but there’s a tradeoff: Research suggests that warmer sea temperatures may lead to more rapidly-intensifying tropical cyclones, which include tropical storms and hurricanes.

“Really warm ocean waters are an ideal fuel source for a hurricane like Milton,” said Andra Garner, a hurricane scientist at Rowan University.

In the past two weeks, ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were about 30-31 degrees Celsius (86-88°F)—about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius above average. The climate crisis made these extraordinarily high ocean temperatures at least 400 to 800 times more likely over the past two weeks, according to a rapid attribution study from Climate Central.

“It's not unreasonable to say that if we continue to warm the planet, including our oceans and our atmosphere, we will be continuing to kind of stack the deck against ourselves,” said Garner, who recently authored a peer-reviewed analysis of rapidly intensifying hurricanes published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Hurricanes that undergo extreme rapid intensification, like Milton, are three times as likely to occur today than in previous decades. Source: Climate Central

Garner looked over the past 50 years at ocean temperatures as they grew warmer, and found that hurricanes were intensifying more rapidly than in past decades. The number of hurricanes that rapidly intensified from Category 1 to Category 3 or higher more than doubled between 2001 to 2020, compared to 1971 to 1990. 

The rapid heating of the planet makes it more probable that “we can have these hurricanes potentially intensifying more quickly than they used to, or reaching greater strength than they might have if we had a cooler planet,” she said.

However, some hurricane scientists are still cautious about the connection between climate change and rapidly intensifying hurricanes, because there’s very little reliable data on storm intensity before 1980. “We can't be as confident about it because we don't have the kind of long-term smoking gun trend that we have for global mean temperature or sea level rise,” said Tom Knutson, a hurricane and climate scientist at NOAA. 

But even scientists like Knutson cite multiple studies that project that Atlantic hurricanes are becoming more intense, and more likely to make landfall, in a warmer world. And scientific models reveal that trend will continue in the future. If the planet heats by 2 degrees Celsius, those models predict that hurricanes will be about 5 percent more intense than they are today, with proportionally more Category 4 and 5 storms.

The science is also extremely clear that heat-trapping pollution causes sea level rise and heavier rainfall, both of which make hurricanes more dangerous. Rainfall rates for tropical cyclones are expected to rise with the planet’s temperature, causing deadly flash floods like those found in Asheville, North Carolina. Sea level rise also means that coastal communities, and communities further inland, are more likely to be flooded during a storm.

That’s an objectively scary reality. But we know the primary source of greenhouse gas pollution, scientists note, so we also know how to slow the problem. 

“The bad news here is that we know that human-caused climate change is driving these kinds of extremes to be more deadly,” said Garner. “But the good news is that we are the cause, and so we can also be the solution.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that oceans are Earth’s greatest heat sink, and that there’s very little reliable data on storm intensity before 1980.

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Further reading:

• In the 70s and 80s, Exxon privately acknowledged climate change poses “catastrophic” risk. HEATED, December 2021.

  Exxon has privately acknowledged catastrophic climate risk for decades. In a memo from 1981, Roger Cohen, a top Exxon scientist, cautioned that climate change could "produce effects which will, indeed, be catastrophic, at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth's population." 

• Category 5 Milton poses an exceptionally serious threat to Florida’s west coast. Yale Climate Connections, October 7, 2024.

  It is very likely that Milton will be a highly destructive hurricane costing over $10 billion for Florida – and Milton could end up placing among the costliest U.S. hurricanes on record, depending on the eventual details of landfall. The risk is also high that Milton will be very deadly if people in low-lying areas do not heed evacuation orders and flee the hurricane.

• Hit by Disaster? How to Get What You Deserve From Insurers or FEMA. The New York Times, October 5, 2024.

  The New York Times asked experts what to do, and what to avoid. Their advice boils down to two points: You don’t need to settle for whatever your insurance company or FEMA first offers you. And you don’t have to fight them alone.

• Hurricane Milton: Debunking online conspiracy theories as the storm looms. Mashable, October 7, 2024.

  This shouldn't be something that we need to explain but, no, neither the government nor some nefarious "they" are able to generate a storm to unleash on its own citizens. But that is something that's circulating online ahead of Milton's landfall. Typically speaking, these sorts of conspiracy theories are coming from rightwing accounts that specialize in trafficking that kind of misinformation.

• Category 6-level hurricanes are already here, a new study says. Grist, February 2024.

  In the real world, Category 5 is synonymous with the biggest and baddest storms. But some U.S. scientists are making the case that it no longer captures the intensity of recent hurricanes. A paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out a framework for extending the current hurricane rating system, the Saffir-Simpson scale, with a new category for storms that have winds topping 192 miles per hour. According to the study, the world has already seen storms that would qualify as Category 6s.

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