Suffolk Closeup: It’s real and will happen to us

In 2024, this area dodged a huge bullet of a hurricane. Although we are on the northern part of the Atlantic coast’s hurricane alley where the enormous storms often move, we somehow avoided one this year.

That is not going to last.

This year, instead, terrible hurricanes somehow, rather than going north and hitting us, struck in the south — most notably Helene and Milton, which devastated a large portion of the southeastern United States.

Helene on Sept. 26 made landfall in Florida. Just two weeks later, on Oct. 9, Milton also made landfall in Florida.

The rapidity of their intensifying to such a level spurred a consideration of providing a new hurricane category beyond what has been the highest, Category 5. This is a result of global warming, or as it’s often described, climate change. “Hurricanes Milton and Helene Were Intensified by Climate Change,” was the headline on Oct. 16 of a report by EcoWatch, the environmental news publication. Its article, by Michael Riojas, began: “Hurricanes — the most powerful storms on Earth — are becoming more widespread and destructive as a warming planet increases their intensity. … Hurricanes Helene and Milton are following the trend of these storms becoming supercharged and more likely to form,” said the piece, reporting on “a pair of studies from the World Weather Attribution.”

World Weather Attribution or WWA is an international partnership based at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford in England and established in 2014  to analyze and communicate how climate change may affect extreme weather events. Its component organizations include: Princeton University; Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environment in France; the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre that includes 31 countries; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The Helene report of WWA is headed: “Climate change key driver of catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Helene that devastated both coastal and inland communities.” It describes how the storm “formed in the Gulf of Mexico above record-hot sea surface temperature” and rapidly intensified to a Category 4 hurricane.

The Milton report of WWA is headed “Yet another hurricane wetter, windier and more destructive because of climate change.” It relates: “Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico and intensified in the course of only two days into a Category 5 hurricane.”

Both reports are online at worldweatherattribution.org/

WWA has also focused on global warming causing drought, extreme rainfall and heatwaves. As to heatwaves, we had quite a weird week last week — summer-like weather in late October, with a record temperature of 82 degrees at Long Island MacArthur Airport on Oct. 22.

As to extreme rainfall, consider what happened in northern portions of Suffolk County this August — up to 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. “During the extreme rainfall event mudslides washed out roads, streets were inundated with flood waters,” noted the Long Island MacArthur Airport. Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine declared a state of emergency. He called it “a once in a 100-year storm. I don’t think we’re going to have to wait another 100 years. It tells you the impact climate change is having on our weather and the natural disasters we’re having.”

Kevin McAllister, founder and president of the Sag Harbor-based organization Defend H20, who has long warned about the impacts of global warming on this area, said the intense rainstorm was “on a tropical scale … our existing stormwater infrastructure is incapable of handling the volume of water associated with drenching tropics-like rain events. Restoring wetlands to absorb floodwaters which can be accomplished simply by removing obsolete dams is an important step in local adaptation.” 

Meanwhile, global warming is causing a sea level rise. And the storm surge from a “hurricane on steroids” as was seen to our south this year hitting us, and the impacts of “wind and water” would cause “enormous flooding and damage,” McAllister said. “Coastal Long Island would be transformed.”

“As a greater community we have to get behind some hard choices,” says McAllister. “We have to talk about seriously moving back off the coast to save our beaches.”

He scores “unbridled shore hardening, allowing the rapid expansion of stone, steel and geotextile seawalls on the coast.”

McAllister says: “Delays instituting adaptive strategies, such as coastal retreat, are a prescription for coastal armoring which is an inevitable death sentence for recreational beaches and critical wildlife habitat. It’s death by anchoring, and it will be a heartfelt loss for all Long Islanders if we allow it to happen.”

He describes the “dumping of sand,” what has been given the nice name “beach nourishment,” as short-term and “exorbitantly” expensive.

There is “way too much reliance on the Army Corps of Engineers,” says McAllister, and coastal schemes that are “economically and environmentally unsustainable: millions of dollars in sand washed out to sea in storm after storm. With every coastal community up and down the East Coast in the same boat and soliciting the federal government for sand dollars, the money will run dry.”

The stakes are very high.

The Long Island Regional Planning Council presented a “Long Island Economic Risk Flood Risk Study” last month which concluded that 43,000 businesses employing 370,000 people on Long Island’s south shore face a significant chance of flooding.

“As we saw with Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the devastation from severe flooding impacts not only residents along the south shore but commercial properties,” said John Cameron, the chair of the council in a statement. “It is vital to quantify the potential economic hit our regional economy could take from the next big storm, and work with all levels of government on developing measures and strategies that can reduce the risk.”

Meanwhile, there’s the politics of climate change. USA Today ran an article on Oct. 19 on this. It began, “Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are both campaigning on climate as the 2024 presidential race enters its final days.” It said: “While Harris has repeatedly referred to climate change as a ‘crisis,’ Trump has pushed back against the existence of climate change …” He has said, noted the piece by Kate S. Peterson, “It’s a hoax.”

Climate change, not too incidentally, used to strictly be called global warming. But as the USA Today article noted, political strategist Frank Luntz in a memo “advised the George W. Bush administration to refer to ‘climate change’ rather than ‘global warming’ because it was ‘less frightening’ than the phrase ‘global warming.’” Bush took his advice.

My first journalism on the issue occurred in 1997 with a TV program I hosted interviewing Ross Gelbspan on his then just-published book “The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, The Cover-up, The Prescription.” Gelbspan was a reporter and editor at newspapers including The Washington Post, Village Voice and Boston Globe.

The summary of the work by Basic Books, its publisher, said: “This book not only brings home the imminence of climate change but also examines the campaign of deception by big coal and big oil that is keeping the issue off the public agenda. It examines the various arenas in which the battle for control of the issue is being fought — a battle with surprising political alliances and relentless obstructionism.”

Gelbspan, a Pulitzer Prize winner, passed away this past January.

These days the heat is very much on.