What is the most annoying thing in the world? Battening down the hatches expecting terrible disasters to fall on your head only to find that whatever storm was passing was basically a wet fart.
Hurricane Helene a couple of weeks ago was on target to pass directly over Polk County at one point in the forecast track, leaving folks like myself in a perplexing situation. You either warn folks ahead of time to get ready for impending wind and rain we ain’t used to, or wait for the worst to happen and report on it after the fact.
The latter wouldn’t exactly be the responsible move, and so you end up in a situation where you feel like you’re crying wolf over the weather instead of being helpful in what could be a major natural disaster. We were fortunate that Helene shifted eastward before it hit, came up through the eastern half of the state instead of our side.
Sadly for many in Florida, south and east Georgia and western North Carolina, they find themselves in the midst of devastation and the cleanup efforts that follow, having to navigate the headaches of everything from finding a hot meal to calling and waiting for help from insurance companies.
Then you look at what happened with Hurricane Milton in the past days and how fast it formed, pushed ashore and hit Florida hard enough to impact both the gulf and east coasts. People still had piles of rubble on the ground from the previous storm coming in and causing damage. Others have been rebuilding since one hit two years prior. Now they have to start all over again.
How many times can you be knocked down and get back up again to rebuild? Apparently, as many times as you possibly can for the residents who stick around on the coastlines.
What can we conclude from these back-to-back storms, and the increasing number of hard hits the coastlines of the southeast have taken over the past years?
Nothing is getting better with the climate. It is only getting warmer, and the storms are growing larger and hit harder than they have before (in recorded history of weather tracking.)
Individually there are some actions we can take to make things somewhat better. Maybe we all drive less, open our windows more at home and use less air conditioning throughout the year, and making sure we are using less electricity overall are some positive starts. We need to plant more trees and let them grow up long enough to become carbon sinks.
On the global scale, we have to move away from fossil fuels if we ever hope to reverse the damage we’ve already done. Whether electric cars are the answer is still up for debate, but they are the lead driver in replacing the internal combustion engine for a vehicle powerplant. It comes with caveats, like horrible mining practices for lithium and having to deal with folks like Elon Musk.
No one technology can save us from our warming planet or one particular action. We need to decrease the amount of carbon in the atmosphere in gas form and return it back to a solid somehow, so we can all breathe deeply again and maybe avoid these giant storms from forming late in hurricane season.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers on this front, or any other for that matter.
Yet I know one particular thing is universally true: we all want some form of change in the standard operating procedure.
I am glad that the forecast turned out wrong, and we weren’t hit by the remnants of hurricanes in Polk County. I am wary of what might come in the future however, since the dice keep rolling and at some point we’ll land on snake eyes and find ourselves in the midst of some real stormy weather.
Then for all the times I cried wolf, there will actually be one at the door.
Leave a Reply