Helene Doesn't Give a Fuck

Deny climate science or all science, the only thing you will get is caught unprepared for the inevitable.

Hurricane Helene hit the South over the weekend and laid waste to parts of Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina., killing near a hundred people, washing away towns, and causing billions in damage. In what is turning into something normal, Helene started out as a Category 1 hurricane and then rapidly escalated to Category 4. It also danced around until it quickly found its direction. The result was a lot of “too little, too late” for the people living in the hurricane zone.

Areas such as North Carolina’s mountain region figured that they’d be safe from the storm, only to see rivers and streams swell into monster torrents that took out roads, bridges, and towns. Western Florida has seen many, many hurricanes, but didn’t seem to be prepared for Helene’s strength. Communities in Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia figured for a little more rain than usual, but not what they experienced. Why not?

It is no secret that a warming ocean – whatever the cause – can create conditions for what the weather overground call “rapid escalation.” A combo of warm seas and colder air can cause a storm to rapidly escalate to a hurricane and a hurricane to go from a lesser category to the extreme. The same combo also makes for much bigger storms, one which cover hundreds of miles in a pass, rather than something in the tens.

This is not stuff we just learned or learned through studying climate change. The warm water/cold air reaction is something we’ve known about for a long, long time. We know that warmer water evaporates much faster than colder water. When that evaporated moisture rises and hits cold air, the temperature difference makes it difficult for the cold air to absorb the warm water droplets. The droplets need to go somewhere so they form into clouds, which hold the moisture, moisture that eventually falls as rain. Intensify the process and you get storms, intensify it more, especially over the ocean, and you get hurricanes and typhoons.

There’s nothing controversial or exotic about this science. There are not only basic cloud-making experiments that you can do at home, but you can find parenting sites with kid-level activities based on the science. Seriously, this is science project volcano level stuff, information that should be known, not just by school kids lucky enough to have creative science teachers, but our public officials.

And it’s not like our public officials – specifically our elected ones – don’t have resources to educate them on this stuff. The United States government has a very, very good agency called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). One of its main projects is a world-best hurricane center, which not only monitors and alerts people to hurricanes, it conducts studies on them and tries to figure out how to deal with rapid escalation and weather phenom that is harder to predict than ever. NOAA also studies the ocean, particularly within US territorial waters, and is tasked with helping protect sensitive areas and endangered species.

To study the changing dynamics of hurricane season, NOAA studies climate, which puts it right in the center of climate research, including research on climate change. That and its mission to help prevent exploitation of and damage to our ocean waters and sea floors has made it enemies among Big Corporations, especially the extraction industries, who use mostly Republican politicians to fight the NOAA to the point of planning for its elimination. “We must destroy this Marxist plot called NOAA!” they yell while extreme weather is destroying the regions that they represent.  

GOP, Inc. has long made climate change denialism central to its politics, so much so that over decades they’ve help created a culture that truly denies science. And from that culture they’ve spawned politicians who are true believers of climate denialism, not just cynical greed-heads. The result is that we now have large regions of the United States that operate as if none of what happened with Helene is happening or ever happens – so they do not prepare for what is surely inevitable.

One of the most frustrating responses from Republican climate deniers is the insistence that the intensification of hurricane season and extreme weather is “just a natural cycle,” which is both an admission of what is happening outside our windows and acknowledgement that we are in a cycle and not experiencing fluke events. And then they bumble along like copping to the weather cycle is an excuse not to prepare for extreme weather. It’s like they a school got shot up, they look at the bullet holes and puddles of blood, and tell us to offer “thoughts and prayers” - because no one wants to say “gun violence prevention.” Or they are informed that a deadly virus is on the way, they say “Okay,” downplay it and tell us just need to hold on while the bodies pile up - because “pandemic” is a bad word and they don’t want to get blamed for doing their job.

Unfortunately, if you live in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, or North Carolina that’s what you get from the politicians that control your states. Of those five states, the GOP owns it all – the governor’s mansion and the legislature - in four of them. In North Carolina, there’s a Dem governor, but the Republicans have a strong lock on the legislature.

So, instead of copping to a climate emergency (whatever the cause, cyclical or not), Republican Florida has a MAGA governor who is more intent on harassing queer folk and dumbing down his citizens than doing very basic things to prepare for monster storms. Georgia fights over ballot access while Atlanta and other towns get hammered by storms that the state has not prepared for. Tennessee and Mississippi are so damn regressive that they seem to be dealing with life and weather as if it was the late 1800s. And North Carolina’s power struggles are so intense that the state has no real plan in dealing with the Outer Banks, which is being wiped out by sea level rise, let alone a hurricane system hitting the hills.

And there’s a damn good chance that each and every one of these states - with the possible exception of North Carolina - will vote red up and down the ballot, including sending Trump to the White House. It’s as if they hate themselves so much that they don’t remember that Trump was a disaster during disasters that happened during his reign. Doubt me, let’s revisit just two Trump “disaster” images.

In 2019, during Hurricane Dorian, Trump took a sharpie to a map showing the hurricane’s progress. With pen in hand he doctored the hurricane’s path and tried to pass it off as legit. Why? Because initial predictions didn’t show Dorian hitting Alabama, which it did, and Trump took it as a personal assault, when it was really just weather being weather, i.e. not totally predictable. And that – ineptly trying to cover his ass - was his major contribution to that crisis.

In 2017, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, Trump flew to the island, surveyed the damage, threw paper towels at survivors, flew back to DC, and worked to deny the Puerto Ricans the aid they were entitled to. Why? Trump claimed that Puerto Ricans didn’t know how to take care of their island. Puerto Ricans said its because Trump hates Brown people. While I believe that Trump does dislike Puerto Ricans enough to deny them aid based on their ethnicity, I also know that Trump tried to deny wildfire aid to California because we laughed at him when he told us to rake our forests. Bigotry + egomania = death.

Here's the thing: It doesn’t matter whether people agree with Trump on whatever, or whether people voted for him or not, or if a hurricane “embarrassed” the top dog, one of the jobs of the president is to do things to help Americans when they are in need. It is not to play politics with aid or to assign blame for natural events. It’s the job of governors and state legislatures to prepare for disasters, even ones caused by things that they’d rather not acknowledge. And before Trump, that is what ever god damn president, governor, mayor, and legislature has done (and it is what Biden and Harris are doing now).

Forget politics or ideology, preparing for this stuff is the job of our elected officials, so why oh why oh why would anyone – especially in the aforementioned states, states who were failed by their mostly Republican officials – elect or reelect people who will not do the job? Is race-hate, misogyny, transphobia, queer-baiting, and xenophobia more important than keeping your house from being washed away in a storm? Your bridges from collapsing into rivers? Your homes from falling into the sea? Your whole town wiped out? All because your Republican elected officials spend more time scaring you about electric cars and non-existent hamburger bans instead of figuring out how to help you?

I don’t know what to say these voters other than, Grow the fuck up and start taking care of yourself. If you think Trump is going to miraculously stop hurricanes from happening or will magically solve all the problems brought on by the Chinese hoax called Climate Change, I have a some “silver coins” to sell you. My lord.