Weather worries

The recent double blow of major hurricanes in the southeastern United States has brought out the best in Americans—and the worst. On the one hand, armies of private citizens, many of them church-led, have descended on disaster zones to provide urgently needed supplies, help in disaster recovery efforts, and even engage in life-saving search and rescue missions. Social media platforms have played a key role in enabling these groups to mobilize and respond to communities in need rapidly. However, in an increasingly divided and paranoid society, those same platforms have also allowed wild rumors to spread.

Claims that FEMA was confiscating or destroying disaster relief supplies quickly escalated into rumors that government agencies were cordoning off affected areas, hiding hundreds of bodies, bulldozing structures, and seizing land. U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., who represents some of the hardest-hit areas in his district, issued a statement reassuring his constituents that no, “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock.” Meanwhile, however, as Hurricane Milton spun up to a Category 5 storm over the Gulf of Mexico, similar claims began to proliferate that it, too, had been engineered by the government. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., amplified such claims, stating, “Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

It is perhaps an index of the sheer epistemic chaos of our age, and that points to the profound breakdown of trust between the governing and the governed. That breakdown explains why such claims have gained so much traction that major media outlets and the president of the United States felt forced to address them. If the government had wanted to seize lithium deposits in a little North Carolina mountain valley, there are presumably more efficient ways for it to do so than engineering and steering a 500-mile-wide hurricane into six states. As for Milton, the conspiracy theorists have yet to offer a motive for the supposed weather manipulation or for why the evil schemers would have first rapidly intensified the storm and then rapidly weakened it. Perhaps most puzzling is the fact that many of those most convinced that humans can engineer hurricanes also seem least convinced that humans can contribute to climate change.

Indeed, the extraordinary back-to-back storms have provoked a renewed chorus of urgent warnings from many meteorologists and climate scientists that Helene and Milton are a taste of what we can expect in a warming world and that humans must take decisive action to combat climate change. Certainly, they are part of a worrying trend: Since 2017, there have been eight Category 4 and 5 landfalls in the United States, more than in the previous 45 years combined. Just as dangerous as the strength of a hurricane making landfall is the rate of intensification—if a storm strengthens very rapidly on its approach to land, as recent storms like Helene, Idalia (2023), and Ian (2022) did, then residents may not have time to prepare adequately. Recent years have indeed seen a marked increase in such rapidly intensifying storms.

Both trends could have something to do with our warming climate. Although there are other key indicators, the main limiting factor on how quickly and how far a hurricane can intensify is ocean temperature, with even slight increases in heat content significantly increasing a storm’s potential intensity.

While there is much that we cannot control and cannot know when it comes to the weather, there is plenty we can know and plenty we can do in response. Over the past two decades, hurricane forecasting has advanced by quantum leaps, with five-day forecasts now as accurate as two-day predictions used to be. However, this increased confidence has not necessarily filtered out to the general public, as recent storms showed—many in Helene’s path failed to evacuate, while many Floridians who were not in significant danger from Milton panicked and clogged highways trying to escape the state. The result is that hurricane death tolls have actually risen this century even as forecasts have improved.

Although we might be tempted to laugh at conspiracy theories of sinister government agents spawning hurricanes in a laboratory, the breakdown of trust represented by such theories has real-world consequences. If we are to prepare for natural disasters going forward, we must learn again whom we can trust and how to take the prudent actions that do lie within our control. That’s certainly the right place to start.