The 2024 hurricane season is here, and we’ve already had our first record-breaking hurricane in Beryl, which caused billions in damage and deaths in Texas, Grenada, Venezuela and nearby areas.
Importantly, climate change helped this storm break these records and do so much damage. But if you watched the news, you likely didn’t hear about that.
Beryl broke several records, despite only being the first hurricane to hit the US in this season. It was remarkable in that it was the earliest category 4 and 5 hurricane on record, had the strongest sustained winds of any hurricane prior to August, developed the farthest east in the ocean of any hurricane in almost 100 years, intensified more rapidly than any hurricane this early in the year, and hit land three times (hurricanes usually strengthen over water, and weaken over land).
These records are the reflection of climate change’s effects on our atmosphere and oceans. The additional energy that we have added to each helps to fuel more destructive storms.
This is all well-understood, but if you listened to the media’s coverage of these storms, you wouldn’t have heard any of it. Only 4% of media’s Beryl coverage included mention of climate change, according to an analysis by Media Matters.
That said, we must remember that “weather is not climate.” The existence of one colder-than-normal day does not disprove the overall pattern of higher global temperatures. A sizeable proportion of people predicate their understanding of climate science on what their personal local temperature has been for the last two days.
What we are talking about here are larger patterns, not individual weather events – even hurricanes like Beryl. While Beryl was not singularly “caused” by climate change, it was influenced by it, as climate change makes storms stronger and more destructive.
How climate change and storms are connected
As one might expect out of massive, species-wide global efforts to spew enormous amounts of heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere, human-caused climate change tends to have a lot of varied effects on the environment.
Some of these effects are better understood than others, with scientists working every day to figure out exactly the magnitude of the effects that rising temperatures have on myriad aspects of the environment. Scientists tend to be precise in their language, so even if certain climate effects are plausible and supported by early data, scientists may still speak in a couched manner which can lead to a perception of uncertainty.
But one thing that is well-understood is that a warmer atmosphere, and warmer water, means stronger storms.
The reason behind this is fairly simple. Heat is energy, so more heat means more energy. When a hurricane crosses over warm ocean water, that warmth helps to feed the storm and make it stronger.
Currently, the ocean is about 1 degree Celsius warmer on average than it was before humans started affecting the climate by burning fossil fuels. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, averaged over the entire ocean it is the energy equivalent of several billion nuclear bombs worth of energy added to the ocean in just the last couple decades. That’s a lot of extra energy to feed storms, meaning a lot more destruction when they roll through town.
That extra energy hasn’t been evenly distributed, either. Some of the places that have seen the most warming are the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Seaboard of the US, the most densely populated part of the world’s largest historical emitter. Around this time last year, Gulf waters might have set a world record for the hottest seawater ever recorded at 101ºF/38ºC.
Warmer water also means higher sea levels, which means more flooding due to storm surge. Much has been said about how sea level rise is caused by melting ice sheets, but a less often mentioned feature is the thermal expansion of water. As water (or any substance) gets warmer, it expands. Averaged over the entire ocean, this makes the ocean bigger and therefore contributes to rising sea levels.
Warmer air also contributes. Warmer air is able to hold more moisture than colder air, which means more precipitation.
So, combining the effects of warmer and water air, we have more significant storm surge and more rainfall, meaning more dangerous hurricanes. After all, in a hurricane, it’s not the wind that’s the most dangerous, it’s the water.
More warmth, more damage
All of this warmth also means a longer hurricane season, with earlier storms that develop more rapidly.
The reason hurricane season typically comes in the tail end of warmer months is because that’s when ocean and air temperatures are higher, contributing to all the above effects. But if the atmosphere and ocean are warmer, then the period of time in the year where conditions are right for hurricanes will be wider, which means hurricane season is longer and harder to contend with.
This will also tend to mean that storms develop more rapidly. Storms typically gain energy while traveling over the ocean (due to warm water, as mentioned above), and having more energy available means they can develop faster. Faster-developing storms mean less notice to make preparations, less time to evacuate populations from danger zones, and more stress on infrastructure in making those rapid preparations and evacuations.
And most of all, stronger storms means more damage. The US has had increasingly-more “billion-dollar disasters” in recent years. Since 1980, the US averaged 8.5 natural disaster events with more than a billion dollars worth of damage per year (adjusted for inflation). But in the last 5 years, that average has ballooned to 20.4 events, with 2023 setting the record at 28 billion-dollar disasters.
These numbers are often ignored when it comes to the “cost” of carbon reduction. Environmental opponents say it’s too expensive to clean up humanity’s act, but in fact it’s much more expensive if we don’t take action (by sixfold, according to research).
So we now know how storms are influenced by climate change, how Beryl has been historic in many ways, how those records were contributed to by climate change, and how devastating an impact these climate-affected storms have.
Despite these interactions being fairly well understood, and it being clear that hurricanes are getting stronger due to climate change, climate change still didn’t manage to make it into almost any TV news coverage about the storm.
According to Media Matters’ analysis, out of 701 minutes and 343 segments about the storm, only 15 segments, or 4%, mentioned climate change at all. Cable news networks mentioned it 9 times, and broadcast TV networks mentioned it 6 times.
Among the cable news stations, CNN faired best, mentioning climate change 7 times out of 111 segments. MSNBC trailed with 2 mentions in 46 segments. And, as you might expect, Fox News, which is owned by climate denier Rupert Murdoch, aired 77 segments and did not mention climate change once.
Broadcast news did similarly poorly, with ABC mentioning climate 3 times in 39 segments, CBS mentioning it twice in 37, and NBC once in 33.
Media matters selected two standout segments from CNN and MSNBC.
In CNN’s segment, reporter Bill Weir examined climate’s effects on extreme weather events and reminded us that science can help us explain these patterns in our climate:
And in MSNBC’s segment, scientist Michael Mann was invited to explain climate change’s effects, the societal and economic impacts, and how these connect to the political choices that we as Americans are expected to make in November, with a stark choice between a candidate who has taken significant climate action and one who promises to ignore science and cause more danger and destruction:
The lack of coverage highlights a significant issue with tackling climate change. Despite that it is the most important challenge that humanity has ever confronted – after all, nothing matters without clean air, clean water, and a livable environment – relatively few voters put the environment highest on their list of important issues.
That list is instead dominated by any number of other issues that are focused upon in media and which are less important than climate change. Or some of which are indeed related to climate change, such that approaching the climate problem could alleviate other pressures that people perceive as important.
But it’s hard for people to make these connections when media refuses to make them. If all of the media you watch tells you that something is a problem, you are likely to perceive that as a problem, whether it really is one or not.
This is where we get to the speculative portion of this article, wherein I try to analyze how we got where we are, and how we can solve it.
Make no mistake, the largest and richest industry in the world, the oil industry, is actively lying to you to shift your perceptions about real solutions to the problems they cause. That rich industry also happens to buy a lot of advertising, which makes it harder for ad-funded networks – especially those that are actively in favor of spreading fossil propaganda like the climate denier-run Fox – to speak up against the guys who pay the bills.
Even for algorithmically-based advertising, the same influence is there. Climate change is an issue that requires less, not more, consumption to combat. People who sell things generally like consumption. So any algorithmic news is incentivized to show you fewer climate stories, lest they get fewer sweet sweet consumer clickthroughs.
But there is a much more mundane, and less conspiratorial, explanation for why media doesn’t talk about climate change: because you, dear reader, don’t want to hear about it.
Climate change is an enormous and difficult problem that will require participation from basically everyone on Earth, and all of us will need to learn about what solutions work and how to implement them. These solutions need to be both personal and structural – everyone’s personal carbon emissions need to go down, primarily those of us in rich countries, and also new rules need to be enforced to ensure that companies and people are incentivized to pollute less and/or punished for polluting more.
Frankly, that’s hard, and thinking about it makes people feel bad. So they don’t want to hear about it, because it’s complicated and oftentimes feels impossible.
While people might want to act personally, they’ll think that it’s too expensive or difficult to do so, and they’ll see that not enough action is happening from major players and wonder whether it’s worth the time for them to do much work personally when it seems like nobody else is doing so.
Though we must understand that this attitude is also influenced by propaganda – polluters want you to feel like nothing can be done, because then they can continue the status quo. But we have to avoid this feeling.
I understand these feelings, and it is indeed hard. Trust me, my job is to talk about climate and climate solutions, which means I have to think and talk about this all the time. I see more data and reports than most about the problems with our climate and how we are not doing enough to solve these problems, even though some partial solutions can be remarkably simple.
Climate scientists also feel the call of the void when looking at how society has responded to their repeated attempts to wake the public up about this problem. For a sense of what it’s like, watch the movie Don’t Look Up, which parodizes how society responds to an imminent disaster by simply ignoring it. It’s eerily similar to real life, to the point where I often hated watching the movie because it felt too real. Which is, of course, the entire point of the movie.
So, I go and write about some climate story like this one, and spend a lot of time getting it right, and often enough, any story about climate goes over like a lead balloon (feel free to share this one far and wide to prove me wrong… pretty please, mister algorithm?). When instead, I could have spent 30 minutes writing about some dumb thing Elon did and gotten a much bigger response. As always, petty drama rules the day.
We climate reporters have bills to pay too, and writing about climate doesn’t pay them, because people don’t read them. No wonder people or newsrooms don’t cover it as much as they should when there’s less incentive to do so (as parodied in another scene in Don’t Look Up). I’m probably doing volunteer work today. You’re welcome, I guess.
How do we solve this?
But all of this doesn’t let anyone off the hook. We still need to write about it, to talk about it more, to recognize this problem, to do more to solve it, at all levels. Frankly, it’s like any problem of collective action – everyone has a reason not to act as long as they think nobody else is. Someone has to break the cycle.
Journalists need to do the right thing and connect the dots properly, especially when it’s as easy as adding one or two sentences to the hundreds of segments done about a major news event like Beryl. Say it with me: “human-caused climate change makes waters warmer, which causes stronger storms, which contributed to Beryl’s record-breaking nature.” You can have that sentence royalty-free. Have at it, networks. (You can also get more information from Covering Climate Now, a great resource for climate journalists, which tipped me to the Media Matters study to begin with, and also offered a free quote).
News consumers need to do the right thing and stay informed about this topic. I know it’s hard and annoying, but this problem gets solved better the more informed you are, and the more you talk about it with people you know and who trust you, and the more you act on lowering your personal emissions and demanding that your representatives do more on climate. Anyone reading this already took the first step by going through another one of my huge rants, and for that I thank you (but please, mister algorithm, may I have but a crumb of virality?)
Governments need to do the right thing and act more on climate change even if people don’t rank it as their most important issue. Given that climate change underlies so many other societal problems, acting to solve it can help to solve those other problems too. It’s a problem that changes are often too long-term to be captured in a single term of office, so doing these things won’t always help your re-election campaign but simply be done for the good of society – but that’s the job of a public servant anyway, so get on it.
And fossil fuel companies need to do the right thing and stop exis…. uh, stop the propaganda? I don’t know, let’s just stick with stop existing. But other companies can reduce their exposure to fossil fuels, which consumers say they want anyway (and that means you consumers need to follow up on that promise, by the way).
I understand that that’s a lot of direction I’ve just given to a lot of people, but at the very least, can we start off with acknowledging the reality of science and mentioning it when relevant, like in the case of Hurricane Beryl? Because none of the rest of this happens if we don’t at least recognize the problem and its effects in the first place.
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