It’s been a big day for… Listening to...

0:00 10:23
GOAT

It’s been a big day for… Listening to...

Climate Change

Hurricane Florence Was Supposed To Be The Storm Of A Lifetime, But It Wasn't Even The Storm Of This Week, Thanks To Super Typhoon Mangkhut

Tropical Depression (formerly Hurricane) Florence was "supercharged" by 50% thanks to climate change, while the most powerful storm of the year rages on the other side of the world simultaneously: this is the new normal.

This time last week, stark evacuation notices were being issued to residents of the US states of North and South Carolina, as Hurricane Florence powered across the Atlantic towards the country’s eastern coastline.

Over the weekend, over 60 people have died as Mangkhut swept across the Philippines, Hong Kong and into mainland China, where two and a half million people were evacuated.

Rescuers carrying children walk in a flooded road as Typhoon Mangkhut made landfall in Guangdong Province on September 16, 2018 in Hong Kong, China. 

Florence made landfall less aggressively than had been predicted (with footage of a reporter struggling to keep his feet while passers-by stroll easily in the background turning into a meme over the weekend) and has been downgraded to a tropical depression.

But it’s still killed 12 people, and a unique study suggesting that the effects of climate change worsened the effects by 50%.

A Stony Brook University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory attribution study found that Florence was 80km wider and brought 50% more rain thanks to climate change.

Flooding is seen near Interstate Highway 95 in Lumberton, North Carolina on September 16, 2018. 

“The idea we can’t attribute individual events to climate change is out of date, it’s just no longer true,” said Michael Wehner, one of the scientists at the Berkeley lab. “We’ve reached the point where we can say this confidently.”

Another study found tropical cyclones globally are getting slower and stronger – meaning worse drenchings and flooding wherever they land.

While the National Hurricane Centre called Florence “the storm of a lifetime”, it was a bit like calling a US-only baseball championship the World Series, as Mangkhut spent some time rated as a Super Typhoon and broke the strength records set by the year’s earlier storms.

And the storm activity across both the Pacific and the Atlantic was noteworthy:

The storm in the Gulf of Mexico didn’t make it to the naming stage, though little Isaac still reportedly has a 20% chance of taking its place in the next few days.

Meanwhile, as we approach the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria making landfall in Puerto Rico, the US president is actively downplaying the official death toll of over 3000 people, calling it a conspiracy by the Democratic Party to undermine him, while the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is doing nothing to counter the idea.

And Australia’s latest prime minister is the guy who brings coal into the House Of Representatives like it’s a pet rock, appoints the most anti-renewables bloke he can find as Energy Minister, and offers prayer as a solution to the drought exacerbated by climate change.

Maybe not this year, but sometime soon, a storm the size of Mangkhut or Florence could be a problem for the people of Far North Queensland, or Darwin. These storms are natural disasters, but they are worse than they would otherwise have been, because of our inaction on the climate.

Soon they might stop being “the storm of a lifetime”, and we’ll just be dealing with a lifetime of storms.