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Climate change and energy production are in a kind of twisted embrace. There’s the obvious aspect of it: Much of the energy produced today comes from burning hydrocarbons, which leads to further building up of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing climate change. To fix that, more energy has to be generated from sources that don’t emit carbon.
But here’s the less obvious aspect: The weather, and therefore the climate, also affects how much energy can be produced from non-carbon-emitting sources.
This can mean something as simple as smoke produced by wildfire obscuring the sun and leading to less solar power production, but it really matters a lot for power derived from rain and snowmelt.
In the United States, a major portion of our non-carbon-emitting energy comes from hydropower. And hydropower capacity — literally the amount of water stored in reservoirs — is affected by the climate.
In the Pacific Northwest, which has an extensive system of dams that provide much of the region’s power, the Energy Information Administration expects that hydropower generation will fall off by about a fifth for 2023 compared to 2022 — 19 percent to be exact.
The EIA credited the forecast reduction to “above-normal temperatures in May ... [that] melted snow rapidly, resulting in a significant loss of water supply.” In the first six months of the year, hydropower generation fell off by 24 percent.
But what climate can take away in one region, it can give in another. While the Northwest has about half of the country’s hydropower, much of the remainder is in California, which experienced a record-setting wet and snowy winter. And that means very full reservoirs. The EIA said that the state had 94 percent more hydropower generation in the first half of the year compared to 2022 and expected almost double 2022’s generation for the whole year.
And that pattern may be repeated.
The expected El Niño weather pattern this winter “is associated with wetter-than-average conditions in the Southwest United States, including parts of California, and warmer-than-average temperatures in the Northwest,” according to the EIA.
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And made Helene so much worse, according to new reports from Climate Central and World Weather Attribution.
Contrary to recent rumor, the U.S. government cannot direct major hurricanes like Helene and Milton toward red states. According to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, however, human actors almost certainly made the storms a lot worse through the burning of fossil fuels.
A storm like Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 227 people so far and caused close to $50 billion in estimated property losses across the southeast, is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Additionally, WWA researchers determined that extreme rainfall from Helene was 70% more likely and 10% heavier in the Appalachians and about 40% more likely in the southern Appalachian region, where many of the deaths occurred, due to climate change.
“Americans shouldn’t have to fear hurricanes more violent than Helene — we have all the knowledge and technology needed to lower demand and replace oil, gas, and coal with renewable energy,” Friederike Otto, the lead of WWA and a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “But vitally, we need the political will.” Alarmingly, the attribution study found that storms could drop an additional 10% or more rain on average as soon as the 2050s if warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius.
WWA’s study is not the first to be released on Hurricane Helene, but it was still produced incredibly quickly and has not been peer reviewed. Just a few weeks ago, the group issued a correction on a report estimating the contribution of climate change to recent flooding in Europe.
Separately, Climate Central looked at Hurricane Milton, which already has the distinction of being the fifth strongest Atlantic storm on record. The nonprofit’s findings show that Milton’s rapid intensification — one of the fastest and most powerful instances of the phenomenon in history — is primarily due to high sea surface temperatures in the weeks before Milton developed, which was made at least 400 times more likely by climate change and up to 800 times more likely. (WWA relied on Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index for oceans for its research, but found “climate change made the unusually hot sea surface temperature about 200-500 times more likely.”)
Attribution science is incredibly tricky, especially for a storm system like a hurricane that has variables ranging from wind shear to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation to ocean temperatures and jet stream variations. When I spoke to a member of the WWA team earlier this year, I was told the organization specifically avoids attributing the intensification of any individual hurricane — in theory, one of the more straightforward relationships — to climate change because of the relatively limited historical modeling available. Even something like rainfall “is not necessarily correlated to the magnitude of the floods that you see because there are other factors,” WWA’s Clair Barnes previously told me — for example, the steep-sided mountains and hollows of western North Carolina, which served as funnels for rainfall to an especially devastating effect.
But regarding the relationship between hurricanes and climate change more generally, “We’re relatively confident that storms will get more intense” in a warming world, Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton geoscientist, explained on a recent episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast. “And we’re really confident that storms will get wetter.”
Helene and Milton hammer that point home: once-in-a-generation storms can now arrive on back-to-back weekends. You can almost understand the impulse to devise a zany explanation as to why. Only, the truth is far simpler than cloud seeding or space lasers: a warmer atmosphere makes for warmer oceans, which make for wetter, more intense storms. And while hurricane seasons eventually end, global temperatures haven’t stopped going up. That, perhaps, is the more terrifying subtext of the attribution studies: There will be more Miltons and Helenes.
We didn’t have to wait long for climate to come up during tonight’s vice presidential debate between VP hopefuls Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz — the night’s second question was about the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene and fueled by warmer air and waters due to climate pollution.
Vance started off his answer innocuously enough, extending his thoughts and prayers to those affected by the hurricane and then proceeding to some campaign boilerplate. “I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air and clean water,” Vance said up top, echoing Trump’s claim that he wants “absolutely immaculate clean water and … absolutely clean air,” from the presidential debate back in June. (It’s worth noting, of course, that his policy choices tell a different story.)
Vance then proceeded to hedge the climate change question in a way that wound up backing him right into it. “One of the things that I've noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions, this idea that carbon emissions drives all of the climate change,” Vance said. “Well, let’s just say that's true — just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science. Let’s just say that’s true.”
He then went on to describe an America-first all-of-the-above energy and manufacturing policy that sounded more than a little familiar.
If Hurricane Helene were the only memorable storm to make landfall in the U.S. in 2024, this would still be remembered as an historically tragic season. Since its arrival as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday night in Florida’s Big Bend region, Helene has killed more than 100 people and caused more than $160 billion across six states. Recovery efforts are expected to last years, if not decades, in the hardest-hit regions of Western North Carolina, some 300 miles inland and 2,000 feet above the nearest coastline. “Helene is going to go down as one of the most impactful hurricanes in U.S. history,” AccuWeather’s senior director of forecasting operations, Dan DePodwin, told me when we spoke on Friday.
As of Monday morning, the National Hurricane Center is tracking five additional systems in the Atlantic basin. Two of those storms reached named status on Friday — Joyce and Isaac — though their paths appear to keep them safely in the middle of the Atlantic. A third storm, Kirk, reached tropical storm strength on Monday and is expected to strengthen into a major hurricane, but is likewise likely to turn north and stay out at sea.
But the two other systems could potentially make U.S. landfall. The first and most concerning is an area of low pressure in the Caribbean “similar to where Helene developed,” DePodwin told me. “We’re going to be monitoring that from the middle to end of [this] week. All options are open with where it could go — anywhere along the Gulf Coast, from Mexico to Florida.”
Directly behind Kirk, in the eastern Tropical Atlantic and out toward the Cape Verde islands, another tropical depression is likely forming. “Anytime you get a tropical wave coming off of Africa this time of year, in late September or early October,” you want to keep an eye on it, DePodwin went on. Sometimes, depending on the weather patterns, those storms stay far out at sea, like Joyce or Kirk. “But the next one probably has a better chance of making it farther west across the Atlantic” because of the prevailing weather patterns, DePodwin said. “So we’ll keep an eye on that one” — though forecasters are still days away from knowing if it could make it as far west as the East Coast.
Let this be a lesson in speaking too soon. Although the 2024 hurricane season went through a long lull at the end of the summer, it’s about to definitively silence any talk of it being a “quiet” year. “We’re predicting at least [five] more named storms to get to that 16 to 20 named storm range that we have for the season,” DePodwin told me. Many of those would likely come in October, which “can be a pretty active month,” but due to the “La Niña pattern we’re moving into and the very warm waters of the [Atlantic] Basin, we think we could get a couple of named storms in November, which is not always the case.”
Finishing the season with 16 to 20 named storms would put 2024 well above the 1991-2020 average of 14 named storms per year. But as hurricane forecasters are always quick to point out, all it takes is one destructive storm making landfall for it to be a “bad” hurricane year. In that case, there’s no debate: 2024 is already bad. Now we must wait, prepare, and hope it doesn’t get any worse.