This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 8 episode of "All In with Chris Hayes."
Hurricane Milton is expected to make landfall in Florida early Thursday. The National Hurricane Center is advising Florida residents to “get their families and homes ready and evacuate if told to do so.” As of Wednesday, storm surge warnings cover almost all of the state’s western coast.
Forecasters expect Milton to reach shore with winds well above 100 mph, rain amounting to 10 inches, and a coastal storm surge as high as 10 feet in some areas.
The storm essentially sucks up the heat and uses it as energy. It is like packing dynamite into a bomb.
John Morales, a meteorologist for Miami’s local NBC affiliate, NBC 6 South Florida, got choked up as he delivered a devastating report on the storm Monday night.
"You can imagine the winds — I mean the seas are just so incredibly, incredibly hot,” Morales told viewers. “Record hot as you might imagine. You know what’s driving that, I don’t need to tell you: global warming. Climate change is leading to this and becoming an increasing threat.”
As Morales said, we know why this is happening. Climate change is making our Earth and our oceans hotter. The Gulf of Mexico has seen record-warm water this year. And those higher temperatures fuel stronger storms with higher winds, more rain and worse flooding. The storm essentially sucks up the heat and uses it as energy. It is like packing dynamite into a bomb.
Hurricane Helene just showed us how this phenomenon is wreaking havoc, even in areas previously thought to be safe from these kinds of storms, like Asheville, North Carolina.
New research found strong evidence that human-driven climate change strengthened Helene’s destructive power. One study said it made the storm’s rainfall up to 20% heavier and its winds 7% stronger. Another report found that a warmer climate led to 50% more rain over parts of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia than would have been expected.
Storms like Helene and what we expect to come from Milton are exactly what experts have been screaming about for decades, as Morales told Nicolle Wallace on “Deadline White House." He said that’s why he got so emotional during the forecast.
“I just broke down in a mixture of empathy, angst — over these increasing extreme weather events — and also frustration,” Morales said Tuesday. “Because for over 20 years, I’ve been trying to communicate on what would be coming if we did not check the injection of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And well, here we are and it’s not going to get any better.”
So, we are now preparing for the second major, climate change-fueled hurricane in two weeks which could put a dangerous strain on federal resources.
The New York Times reports: “The Federal Emergency Management Agency is running out of staff to deal with the potential devastation of Hurricane Milton.” As of Monday morning, “just 9% of FEMA’s personnel ... were available to respond to the hurricane or other disasters,” according to the Times.
Storms like Helene and what we expect to come from Milton are exactly what experts have been screaming about for decades.
While FEMA says “it is well equipped to handle the strains,” it’s a reminder of the challenge of more frequent natural disasters. As the Times notes, FEMA staff are currently “also responding to flooding and landslides in Vermont, tornadoes in Kansas, the aftermath of Tropical Storm Debby in New York and Georgia and the Watch Fire in Arizona. And those are just the disasters that were declared in the past two weeks.”
Remember, this is what we are facing with global temperatures a little over 1 degree Celsius higher than the preindustrial average. Now, imagine what it will look like when we reach 2 degrees? Or 3? Or 4? That is the world Donald Trump would push us toward faster if he returns to the White House.
Not that he cares. Trump thinks it would be good for real estate values. At a town hall in Flint, Michigan, in September, he joked about climate change, claiming nuclear weapons were a bigger threat compared to global warming and said rising ocean levels would be a “good thing,” providing residents with “more seafront property.”
We have known for decades that our planet is warming and that we would start seeing the brutal effects. But conservatives remain so deep in their denial that they are flailing around for anyone or anything else to blame.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is promoting a baseless conspiracy theory about a mysterious “they” controlling the weather, suggesting that “they” are sending the hurricanes to Republican areas to impact the election. And now, she’s being amplified by right-wing media and the Republican nominee himself, who mentioned the false claim during a rally in Wisconsin on Sunday.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, even found a way to blame it on immigrants. “You have FEMA, which is there for disaster relief for American citizens after a terrible storm, being deployed repeatedly to deal with Kamala Harris’ wide open border and the migrant invasion that it’s caused,” Vance told Newsmax on Monday.
Conservatives remain so deep in their denial that they are flailing around for anyone or anything else to blame.
“That lack of focus on their core mission, that distraction and focusing instead on illegal immigrants — I guarantee that has made the disaster response worse.”
That is false; both FEMA and the White House dispute those claims, saying that the disaster relief fund is completely separate from other programs. But of course, it’s not really surprising that this is the way conservatives are reacting. They were never going to see the real impacts of climate change after decades of denial and declare, “OK, we were wrong!” But their behavior, in the face of the dire consequences of this impending one-two punch for the Southeast, should serve as a wake-up call to everyone about the very real stakes of this election.