Tropical Weather & Hurricane Season

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Before Hurricane, Florida Republicans Helped Oil Donors Fight Climate Rules
by David Sirota. (Founder/editor in chief, The Lever; Oscar nominated for Don’t Look Up.)
September 28, 2022

Introduction:

(The Lever) Roughly three months before Florida was clobbered by this week’s climate-intensified hurricane, eight of the state’s Republican lawmakers pressured federal regulators to halt a proposal requiring businesses to more thoroughly disclose the risks they face from climate change.
Those lawmakers have raked in more than $1 million of campaign cash from oil and gas industry donors, according to data reviewed by The Lever.

The proposed rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission are designed to give investors, government officials, and the general public much more information and details about the dangers of climate change. But even in Florida — one of America’s most climate-threatened states — top Republicans are trying to help fossil fuel industry lobbyists block such disclosure mandates that could better inform communities about climate risks. Those mandates could also help identify which carbon-emitting companies are most responsible for the climate crisis.

On June 15th, seven of Florida’s House lawmakers signed a letter to SEC Chair Gary Gensler demanding he rescind a proposal that would require large corporations to “disclose extensive climate-related data and additional ‘climate risks.’”

“Congress did not establish the SEC to set climate policy nor to be the final arbiter of businesses' strategies to combat climate change, which is what these rules will do,” the lawmakers wrote, lambasting the agency for “taking a novel, activist approach to climate policy.”

The following Florida Republican House members signed the letter while pulling in fossil fuel industry campaign cash: Gus Bilirakis ($259,550), Vern Buchanan ($174,490), Kat Cammack ($54,737), Byron Donalds ($60,163), Neal Dunn ($20,902), Bill Posey ($127,000), and Mike Waltz ($71,553).

Read more here: https://www.levernews.com/before-hurri ... 0KhvHzkTY

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Hurricane Ian heads for Carolinas after pounding Florida
Source: AP

By MEG KINNARD and ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — A revived Hurricane Ian set its sights on South Carolina’s coast Friday and the historic city of Charleston, with forecasters predicting a storm surge and floods after the megastorm caused catastrophic damage in Florida and left people trapped in their homes.

With all of South Carolina’s coast under a hurricane warning, a steady stream of vehicles left Charleston on Thursday, many likely heeding officials’ warnings to seek higher ground. Storefronts were sandbagged to ward off high water levels in an area prone to inundation.

On Friday morning in Charleston, powerful wind gusts bent tree branches and sent sprays of steadily falling rain sideways. Streets in the 350-year-old city were largely empty, an ordinarily packed morning commute silenced by the advancing storm.

With winds holding at 85 mph (140 kph), the National Hurricane Center’s update at 5 a.m. Friday placed Ian about 145 miles (235 km) southeast of Charleston and forecast a “life-threatening storm surge” and hurricane conditions along the Carolina coastal area later Friday.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/hurricanes-f ... osition_02

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If I built a time machine I'd use it to launch geo's satellites focused on the Atlantic. One every 10-15 years for the last thousand years. I'd transmit the data of the past one onto harddrives as I launch another one and continue until I have all satellite images. Imagine the nhc's face when they looked at the images. This would enhance our understanding so much.

I bet the 1920's-1940's period weren't' much different from the 1995-2022 period. Same could be said about 1880's through 1900's...

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Ian Leaves Dozens Dead as Focus Turns to Rescue and Recovery
October 1, 2022

Introduction:

FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP via Courthouse News) — Dozens of Florida residents left their flooded and splintered homes by boat and by air on Saturday as rescuers continued to search for survivors in the wake of Hurricane Ian, while authorities in South Carolina and North Carolina began taking stock of their losses.

The death toll from the storm, one of the strongest hurricanes by wind speed to ever hit the U.S., grew to nearly three dozen, with deaths reported from Cuba, Florida and North Carolina. The storm weakened Saturday as it rolled into the mid-Atlantic, but not before it washed out bridges and piers, hurdled massive boats into buildings onshore and sheared roofs off homes, leaving hundreds of thousands without power.

At least 35 people were confirmed dead, including 28 people in Florida mostly from drowning but others from Ian's tragic aftereffects. An elderly couple died after their oxygen machines shut off when they lost power, authorities said.

As of Saturday, more than 1,000 people had been rescued from flooded areas along Florida's southwestern coast alone, Daniel Hokanson, a four-star general and head of the National Guard, told The Associated Press while airborne to Florida.

Chris Schnapp was at the Port Sanibel Marina in Fort Myers on Saturday, waiting to see whether her 83-year-old mother-in-law had been evacuated from Sanibel Island. A pontoon boat had just arrived with a load of passengers from the island — with suitcases and animals in tow — but Schnapp's mother-in-law was not among them.

Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/ian-lea ... recovery/

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Florida deaths rise to 47 amid struggle to recover from Ian
Source: AP

By REBECCA SANTANA and MEG KINNARD

FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) — Rescuers evacuated stunned survivors on a large barrier island cut off by Hurricane Ian and Florida’s death toll climbed sharply, as hundreds of thousands of people were still sweltering without power days after the monster storm rampaged from the state’s southwestern coast up to the Carolinas.

Florida, with nearly four dozen reported dead, was hit hardest by the Category 4 hurricane, one of the strongest to make landfall in the United States. Flooded roadways and washed-out bridges to barrier islands left many people isolated, amid limited cellphone service and a lack of basic amenities such as water, electricity and the internet.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday that multibillionaire businessman Elon Musk was providing some 120 Starlink satellites to “help bridge some of the communication issues.” Starlink, a satellite-based internet system created by Musk’s SpaceX, will provide high-speed connectivity.

Florida utilities were working to restore power. As of Saturday night, nearly 1 million homes and businesses were still without electricity, down from a peak of 2.67 million.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/hurricanes-e ... osition_05

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Here’s What’s Known About How Climate Change Fuels Tropical Cyclones
by Mathew Barlow and Suzana Camargo
October 3, 2022

Extract::

(The Conversation) These are basic physical properties of the climate system, and this simplicity lends a great deal of confidence to scientists’ expectations for storm conditions as the planet warms. The potential for greater evaporation and higher rain rates is true in general for all types of storms, on land or sea.

That basic physical understanding, confirmed in computer simulations of these storms in current and future climates, as well as recent events, leads to high confidence that rainfall rates in hurricanes increase by at least 7% per degree of warming.

Storm strength and rapid intensification

Scientists also have high confidence that wind speeds will increase in a warming climate and that the proportion of storms that intensify into powerful Category 4 or 5 storms will increase. Similar to rainfall rates, increases in intensity are based on the physics of extreme rainfall events.

Damage is exponentially related to wind speed, so more intense storms can have a bigger impact on lives and economies. The damage potential from a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds, like Ian at landfall, is roughly 256 times that of a category 1 storm with 75 mph winds.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/hurricane- ... es-191583

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Hurricane Orlene hits Mexico's Pacific coast near Mazatlan
Source: AP

By FERNANDO LLANO

MAZATLAN, Mexico (AP) — Hurricane Orlene made landfall on Mexico’s Pacific coast near the tourist town of Mazatlan on Monday before quickly weakening over western Mexico.

Electrical cables swayed and sent off showers of sparks in the town of El Rosario, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) south of Mazatlan, close to where the hurricane hit.

Orlene lost some strength after roaring over the Islas Maria, a former prison colony being developed as a tourist draw. The main island is sparsely populated, mainly by government employees, and most buildings there are made of brick or concrete.

The hurricane’s winds, once at Category 4 force, had slipped back to 85 mph mph (140 kph) as it hit land about 45 miles (75 kilometers) southeast of Mazatlan Monday morning, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.



Read more: https://apnews.com/article/hurricanes-m ... 25ed35c09f

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Julia is now a Category 1 hurricane over Central America
Source: CNN

By Gene Norman and Zoe Sottile,

(CNN) Tropical Storm Julia is now categorized as a hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center on Saturday.

The storm is passing between San Andres and the Providencia islands and is moving west at 17 mph, the NHC said in a 7 p.m. ET update.

Hurricane Julia is expected to strengthen slightly before striking the Nicaraguan coast early Sunday, according to the NHC.

Along with hurricane-force winds, life-threatening rainfall of 6 to 10 inches, with isolated amounts of up to 15 inches, is possible in Nicaragua.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/08/world/ju ... index.html

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19 dead as Julia drenches Central America with rainfall
Source: AP

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Former Hurricane Julia has dissipated, but is still drenching Guatemala and El Salvador with torrential rains Monday after it reemerged in the Pacific following a pounding of Nicaragua.

At least 19 people were reported dead as a direct or indirect result of the storm.

Guatemala’s disaster prevention agency said five people died after a hillside collapsed on their house in Alta Verapaz province, burying them.

Authorities in El Salvador said five Salvadoran army soldiers died after a wall collapsed at a house where they sought refuge in the town of Comasagua, where hundreds of police and soldiers have been conducting anti-gang raids. Another soldier was injured.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/caribbean-st ... osition_05

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Cuba: A Tale of Two Hurricanes
by Rosa Miriam Elizalde
October 13, 2022

Extract:

(Alternet) While gusts of wind of more than 200 kilometers per hour blew in the north of Pinar del Río, more than 37,000 accounts on Twitter replicated the hashtag #CubaPaLaCalle (Cuba to the streets), with calls for protests, roadblocks, assaults on government institutions, sabotage, and terrorism, and with instructions on how to prepare homemade bombs and Molotov cocktails. Less than 2 percent of the users who participated in this virtual mobilization were in Cuba. Most of those who made the call to “fire up” the streets in Cuba were connected to American technology platforms and did so while hundreds of kilometers away from the country that remained in darkness. Perhaps some on the island kept their battery-powered radio. Still, what millions of Cubans had in the palm of their hands was not a bottle of Hemingway’s rum but a cellphone connected to the internet (the country of 11 million inhabitants has 7.5 million people with access to social media).

… Imagine this panorama: you are anguished with the here and now. You have no electricity and no drinking water. What little food you have bought with great difficulty and kept refrigerated will go bad in no time. You don’t know what has happened to your family that lives in the western provinces, where the damage is apocalyptic. You have no idea how long this new crisis will last. Daily life before the hurricane was already desperate due to the economic blockade imposed by the United States, inflation, and shortages being faced by Cubans. Still, you see on your mobile that “everyone” (on the internet, of course) seems to be doing well and has plenty, while thousands of people on social media (and their trolls) shout that the culprit of your misfortune is the communist government. Your only light source is the mobile screen, which works like Plato’s allegory of the cave: you sit with your back to a flaming fire while virtual figures pass between you and the bonfire. You only see the movements of their shadows projected on the walls of the cave, and those shadows whisper the solution to your desperate reality: #CubaPaLaCalle.

Read more here: https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/a-tal ... rricanes/

caltrek’s comment: How ironic that so many of those that claim a Cuban ancestry do more to try to destabilize the Cuban regime than they do to respond to the hurricane caused problems of Cuba. Perhaps, in part, because many are struggling to recover from their own disaster in Florida. One wonders how they can continue their great loyalty to those most committed to climate change denialism here in the United States.

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Rain warning for Mexico's south Gulf coast as TS Karl nears
Source: AP

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Tropical Storm Karl moved slowly toward Mexico’s southern Gulf coast on Friday, and while it was not expected to grow into a hurricane, forecasters warned of the danger of flash floods from heavy rains in the region.

The storm was expected to make landfall in Veracruz state or Tabasco state by late Friday or early Saturday.

Karl had maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (75 kph) on Friday morning, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The storm was centered about 80 miles (130 kilometers) northwest of Ciudad del Carmen and headed south-southeast at 7 mph (11 kph).

A tropical storm warning was in effect from Coatzacoalcos to Sabancuy.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/hurricanes-f ... a3a2189970

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