Why Hurricane Milton Is a Sign of the New Abnormal

“We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.” This assessment, co-authored by several of the world’s leading climate scientists, was published on Tuesday, in the journal BioScience. Also on Tuesday, the National Hurricane Center updated its warning about Hurricane Milton, now churning across the Gulf of Mexico: “Milton has the potential to be one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida.”

These two statements are, unfortunately, related. Weather-wise, the world has entered uncharted territory; as the BioScience group put it, “We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives.” One result of this is that weather-related disasters are going to become increasingly devastating. Another is that they are going to become harder to predict. The new normal is that there is not going to be a new normal.

Milton, pretty much from its inception, has been an abnormal storm. “It is exceedingly rare for a hurricane to form in the western Gulf, track eastward, and make landfall on the Western coast of Florida,” Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell, explained to Vox. As Milton swirled over the Gulf of Mexico, it encountered water that was almost three and a half degrees hotter than usual for early October. (In a grim irony, data about water temperatures in the Gulf are hard to come by right now, because Hurricane Helene, which hit less than two weeks ago, damaged the offices of the group that normally supplies the figures—the National Centers for Environmental Information, headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina.)

Hurricanes draw their energy from the surface waters of the oceans; the warmer the water, the more energy is available. Hurricane models predicted that Milton would strengthen as it moved east; still, forecasters have been stunned by its development. The storm went from barely a hurricane to a Category 5 storm in less than twenty-four hours. (It has since weakened slightly, to a Category 4.) A storm is said to undergo rapid intensification if its maximum sustained winds increase in speed by thirty knots—roughly thirty-five miles per hour—in a day. Extreme rapid intensification happens when wind speeds increase by fifty knots, or about fifty-eight miles per hour, in that time. Milton’s maximum sustained winds increased by more than ninety miles per hour in a day.

“This is absolutely mind boggling,” Zoe Mintz, a meteorologist for KPIX, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco, tweeted. John Morales, a meteorologist with WTVJ, in Miami, practically broke down in tears on Monday, when he announced that the storm’s atmospheric pressure had dropped by fifty millibars in ten hours. “This is just horrific,” he said. (Falling air pressure is usually a sign that a hurricane is gaining strength; on Monday, Milton’s central pressure reached a near-record low.)

Milton is expected to make landfall on the west-central coast of Florida on Wednesday night. Tampa, owing to its position on a shallow continental shelf, may be the American city most vulnerable to storm-surge damage, and it could see a direct hit from the hurricane. In recent years, sea levels along Florida’s Gulf Coast have been rising at twice the global average rate; in the past decade, they’ve climbed by roughly five inches. This means that every storm surge in the region will be that much higher. (Milton’s total storm surge could be as high as fifteen feet.) Meanwhile, much of the region is still clogged with debris left behind by Helene. As it happens, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, says that he’s “not a global-warming person.” Just a few months ago, he signed a bill that erased most references to the problem from state law. This sort of behavior would be comical if the stakes were not so tragically—and world-historically—high.

It is, unfortunately, too late to prevent many more Milton-like horrors from occurring: once the oceans warm, they are not cooling down in a time frame relevant to Tampa. The BioScience report put it this way: “We will see much more extreme weather in the coming years.” The best that the United States—and the rest of the world—can do at this point is try to limit the damage by, on the one hand, radically reducing fossil-fuel emissions and, on the other, building more resilient infrastructure.

What will finally convince the U.S. to get its head out of the (disappearing) sand and face these twin challenges? There was a time one might have thought that devastating back-to-back hurricanes would do it. But that was back when there still was a normal. ♦