Helene and Milton, Harbingers of Climate Chaos

“Helene” and “Milton” could be a favorite aunt and uncle; instead, they have become emblems of the deepening climate disaster as the names of hurricanes that have brought death and destruction. Amid these two epic storms, a historic election is underway, with one political party actively spewing lies and disinformation about the cause of the hurricanes and the deployment of disaster relief — lies that can take lives. Meanwhile, marginalized communities, like prisoners and farmworkers, suffer heightened risks from extreme weather events but, like the mention of climate change itself, rarely appear on the major networks’ nonstop coverage. One lesson from these back-to-back hurricanes: the climate emergency is real and it impacts us all.

Floridians are still assessing Milton’s impact. The storm had threatened to devastate Tampa. Some projections suggest that a direct, Category 5 hurricane impact on that low-lying city could cause over $230 billion in damage, in addition to the lives lost. While Milton’s path diverged slightly from that worst-case scenario, early damage assessments still paint a dire picture.

More than 100 tornado warnings were issued as the powerful, climate-fueled weather system approached Florida’s Gulf Coast. One tornado touched down on Florida’s east coast, killing at least four people. Rescuers were still sifting through the wreckage on Thursday, searching for more victims.

Scientists are speaking with ever more precision about the impact of the human-induced warming climate on hurricanes and other extreme weather events. Exceptionally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico supercharged both Helene and Milton. NASA’s Earth Observatory noted, “Sea surface temperatures helped fuel [Milton]’s rapid intensification … with winds increasing from 80 to 175 miles per hour in 24 hours.”

The World Weather Attribution project, researching links between climate and extreme weather, reported “climate change is enhancing conditions conducive to the most powerful hurricanes like Helene, with more intense rainfall totals and wind speeds,” predicting hurricanes will be more frequent — at least 1.5 times as likely — and stronger, as a result of human-caused climate change.

While the science is clear, Republicans such as presidential candidate Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have been spreading lies with alarming success, falsely claiming that the federal government is directing emergency response funds to immigrants, or, in Greene’s case, claiming the government is actually controlling the weather to hurt red states.

“I think we’re entering into a really dark new phase reckoning with the climate crisis,” David Wallace-Wells, a columnist with the New York Times, said on the Democracy Now news hour. “Many people are choosing to retreat into little cocoons of disinformation and paranoia. That scares me, in some ways, even more than the weather itself.”

While demagogues distract, real people continue to suffer. Far from the 24-hour Milton coverage on cable networks, Florida’s roughly 28,000 incarcerated people were trapped in prisons and jails. Jordan Martinez, an organizer with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, pressured officials to evacuate incarcerated people before the hurricane hit.

“The ongoing situation in Florida has been one of almost complete neglect and fiction writing by the Florida Department of Corrections and various county sheriff’s offices, jails, etc., claiming that incarcerated people are in fact, being evacuated,” Martinez said on Democracy Now.

“We were able to achieve one evacuation of the Orient Road Jail in Hillsborough County. But Manatee County, Lee County, Pinellas County, as well as St. Johns County on the eastern coast, all left prisoners in mandatory evacuation zones in the jails.”

The Intercept reported that during Hurricane Helene, prisoners in North Carolina, stranded without power, were forced to drink water from toilets and to store their human waste in plastic bags, abandoned by prison guards who protected themselves.

Florida’s vast and largely immigrant agricultural workforce also face extraordinary and largely unreported hurricane risks, including inadequate housing.

Most workers’ “mobile homes are really, really old. They are not safe places to be,” Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farmworker and organizer at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in southwest Florida said on Democracy Now. “Sadly, the conditions of vulnerability, living conditions especially, are horrible in most agricultural communities. It’s all the dangers of climate change. This time, we were lucky that it didn’t hit us directly, but we know that other communities are suffering and are going to be needing support. … We will be taking steps to try to support them as much as we can.”

The Atlantic hurricane season typically runs through November. How many more Helenes and Miltons, how many more preventable climate deaths and wasted billions of dollars, not only here but around the world, will it take before the United States, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gas pollution, rises to the challenge and genuinely confronts this devastating climate emergency?