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Climate Change Boosted Helene’s Deadly Rain and Wind and Scientists Say Same Is Likely for Milton

Ahead of expected landfall of Hurricane Milton, a heavy stream of evacuation traffic slowly moves southward from North-West Florida on Interstate 75, in in Naples, Florida, USA, 08 October 2024. (EPA)
Ahead of expected landfall of Hurricane Milton, a heavy stream of evacuation traffic slowly moves southward from North-West Florida on Interstate 75, in in Naples, Florida, USA, 08 October 2024. (EPA)
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Climate Change Boosted Helene’s Deadly Rain and Wind and Scientists Say Same Is Likely for Milton

Ahead of expected landfall of Hurricane Milton, a heavy stream of evacuation traffic slowly moves southward from North-West Florida on Interstate 75, in in Naples, Florida, USA, 08 October 2024. (EPA)
Ahead of expected landfall of Hurricane Milton, a heavy stream of evacuation traffic slowly moves southward from North-West Florida on Interstate 75, in in Naples, Florida, USA, 08 October 2024. (EPA)

Human-caused climate change boosted a devastating Hurricane Helene 's rainfall by about 10% and intensified its winds by about 11%, scientists said in a new flash study released just as a strengthening Hurricane Milton threatens the Florida coast less than two weeks later.

The warming climate boosted Helene's wind speeds by about 13 miles per hour (20.92 kilometers per hour) and made the high sea temperatures that fueled the storm 200 to 500 times more likely, World Weather Attribution calculated Wednesday from Europe. Ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above average, WWA said.

"Hurricane Helene and the storms that were happening in the region anyway have all been amplified by the fact that the air is warmer and can hold more moisture, which meant that the rainfall totals — which, even without climate change, would have been incredibly high given the circumstances — were even higher," Ben Clarke, a study co-author and a climate researcher at Imperial College London, said in an interview.

Milton will likely be similarly juiced, the authors said.

The scientists warned that continued burning of fossil fuels will lead to more hurricanes like Helene, with "unimaginable" floods well inland, not just on coasts. Many of those who died in Helene fell victim to massive inland flooding, rather than high winds.

Helene made landfall in Florida with record storm surge 15 feet (4.57 meters) high and catastrophic sustained winds reaching 140 miles per hour (225.31 kilometers per hour), pummeling Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia. It decimated remote towns throughout the Appalachians, left millions without power, cellular service and supplies and killed over 230 people. Search crews in the days following continued to look for bodies. Helene was the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland US since Katrina in 2005.

Helene dumped more than 40 trillion gallons of rain — an unprecedented amount of water — onto the region, meteorologists estimated. That rainfall would have been much less intense if humans hadn’t warmed the climate, according to WWA, an international scientist collaborative that runs rapid climate attribution studies.

"When you start talking about the volumes involved, when you add even just a few percent on top of that, it makes it even much more destructive," Clarke said.

Hurricanes as intense as Helene were once expected every 130 years on average, but today are about 2.5 times more likely in the region, the scientists calculated.

The WWA launched in 2015 to assess the extent to which extreme weather events could be attributed to climate change. The organization’s rapid studies aren’t peer-reviewed but use peer-reviewed methods. The team of scientists tested the influence of climate change on Helene by analyzing weather data and climate models including the Imperial College Storm Model, the Climate Shift Index for oceans and the standard WWA approach, which compares an actual event with what might have been expected in a world that hasn't warmed about 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.

A separate analysis of Helene last week by Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientists determined that climate change caused 50% more rainfall in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, and that observed rainfall was "made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming." That study was also not peer-reviewed but used a method published in a study about Hurricane Harvey.

Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, wasn't involved in either study. She said there are uncertainties in exactly how much climate change is supercharging storms like Helene, but "we know that it’s increasing the power and devastation of these storms."

She said Helene and Milton should serve "as a wake up call" for emergency preparedness, resilience planning and the increased use of fossil fuels.

"Going forward, additional warming that we know will occur over the next 10 or 20 years will even worsen the statistics of hurricanes," she said, "and we will break new records."

Analysis is already indicating climate change made possible the warmed sea temperatures that also rapidly intensified Milton. Clarke said the two massive storms in quick succession illustrates the potential future of climate change if humans don't stop it.

"As we go into the future and our results show this as well, we still have control over what trajectory this goes in as to what risks we face in the future, what costs we pay in the future," he said. "That just hinges on how we change our energy systems and how many more fossil fuels we burn."

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Control the Path and Power of Hurricanes like Milton? Forget It, Scientists Say

Clouds are seen over the beach as Hurricane Milton advances, in Progreso, Mexico, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)
Clouds are seen over the beach as Hurricane Milton advances, in Progreso, Mexico, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)
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Control the Path and Power of Hurricanes like Milton? Forget It, Scientists Say

Clouds are seen over the beach as Hurricane Milton advances, in Progreso, Mexico, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)
Clouds are seen over the beach as Hurricane Milton advances, in Progreso, Mexico, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)

Hurricanes are humanity’s reminder of the uncontrollable, chaotic power of Earth’s weather.

Milton’s powerful push toward Florida just days after Helene devastated large parts of the Southeast likely has some in the region wondering if they are being targeted. In some corners of the internet, Helene has already sparked conspiracy theories and disinformation suggesting the government somehow aimed the hurricane at Republican voters.

Besides discounting common sense, such theories disregard weather history that shows the hurricanes are hitting many of the same areas they have for centuries. They also presume an ability for humans to quickly reshape the weather far beyond relatively puny efforts such as cloud seeding.

“If meteorologists could stop hurricanes, we would stop hurricanes,” Kristen Corbosiero, a professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University at Albany. “If we could control the weather, we would not want the kind of death and destruction that’s happened.”

Here’s a look at what humans can and can’t do when it comes to weather:

The power of hurricanes, heightened by climate change

A fully developed hurricane releases heat energy that is the equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes — more than all the energy used at a given time by humanity, according to National Hurricane Center tropical analysis chief Chris Landsea.

And scientists are now finding many ways climate change is making hurricanes worse, with warmer oceans that add energy and more water in the warming atmosphere to fall as rain, said Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

“The amount of energy a hurricane generates is insane,” said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. It’s the height of human arrogance to think people have the power to change them, he said.

But that hasn't stopped people from trying, or at least thinking about trying.

Historical efforts to control hurricanes have failed

Jim Fleming of Colby College has studied historical efforts to control the weather and thinks humans have nowhere near the practical technology to get there. He described an attempt in 1947 in which General Electric partnered with the US military to drop dry ice from Air Force jets into the path of a hurricane in an attempt to weaken it. It didn't work.

“The typical science goes like understanding, prediction and then possibly control,” Fleming said, noting that the atmosphere is far more powerful and complex than most proposals to control it. “It goes back into Greek mythology to think you can control the powers of the heavens, but also it's a failed idea.”

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the federal government briefly tried Project STORMFURY. The idea was to seed a hurricane to replace its eyewall with a larger one that would make the storm bigger in size but weaker in intensity. Tests were inconclusive and researchers realized if they made the storm larger, people who wouldn’t have been hurt by the storm would now be in danger, which is an ethical and liability problem, the project director once said.

For decades, the National Hurricane Center and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have been asked about nuclear-bombing a hurricane. But the bombs aren't powerful enough, and it would add the problem of radioactive fallout, Corbosiero said.

Bringing cooling icebergs or seeding or adding water-absorbing substances also are ideas that just don’t work, NOAA scientists said.

Climate change begets engineering — and lots of questions

Failed historical attempts to control hurricanes differ somewhat from some scientists' futuristic ideas to combat climate change and extreme weather. That's because instead of targeting individual weather events, modern geoengineers would operate on a larger scale — thinking about how to reverse the broad-scale damage humans have already done to the global climate by emitting greenhouse gases.

Scientists in the field say one of the most promising ideas they see based on computer models is solar geoengineering. The method would involve lofting aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere to bounce a tiny bit of sunlight back into space, cooling the planet slightly.

Supporters acknowledge the risks and challenges. But it also "might have quite large benefits, especially for the world’s poorest," said David Keith, a professor at the University of Chicago and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative.

Two years ago, the largest society of scientists who work on climate issues, the American Geophysical Union, announced it was forming an ethics framework for “climate intervention."

Some scientists warn that tinkering with Earth’s atmosphere to fix climate change is likely to create cascading new problems. Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann expressed worries on the ethics framework that just talking about guidelines will make the tinkering more likely to occur in the real world, something that could have harmful side effects.

Field, of Stanford, agreed that the modeling strongly encourages that geoengineering could be effective, including at mitigating the worst threats of hurricanes, even if that's decades away. But he emphasized that it's just one piece of the best solution, which is to stop climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

“Whatever else we do, that needs to be the core set of activities,” he said.