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While they’re confident in the accuracy of this year’s predictions, the future looks a lot murkier.
The president is on his way to Los Angeles next.
Recovering from a disaster like the Palisades or Eaton fire can take years. Here’s what they can expect.
The nonprofit uses a mixture of public data and algorithmic magic to unleash funds fast.
That means big, bad things for disaster relief — and for climate policy in general.
It’s known as the 50% rule, and Southwest Florida hates it.
The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.
In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?
No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”
But just because a landfill won’t turn into a mass of airborne dirt and half-decomposed projectiles doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. Because landfills — especially large ones — often contain more advanced infrastructure such as gas collection systems, which prevent methane from being vented into the atmosphere, and drainage systems, which collect contaminated liquid that’s pooled at the bottom of the waste pile and send it off for treatment. Meyers told me that getting these systems back online after a storm if they’ve been damaged is “the most critical part, from our standpoint.”
A flood-inundated gas collection system can mean more methane escaping into the air, and storm-damaged drainage pipes can lead to waste liquids leaking into the ground and potentially polluting water sources. The latter was a major concern in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed a landfill’s waste liquid collection system in the Municipality of Juncos in 2017.
As for methane, calculating exactly how much could be released as a result of a dysfunctional landfill gas collection system requires accounting for myriad factors such as the composition of the waste and the climate that it’s in, but the back of the envelope calculations don’t look promising. The Southeast County Landfill near Tampa, for instance, emitted about 100,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2022, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (although a Harvard engineering study from earlier this year suggests that this may be a significant underestimate). The EPA estimates that gas collection systems are about 75% effective, which means that the landfill generates a total of about 400,000 metric tons of CO2-worth of methane. If Southeast County Landfill’s gas collection system were to go down completely for even a day, that would mean extra methane emissions of roughly 822 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. That difference amounts to the daily emissions of more than 65,000 cars.
That’s a lot of math. But the takeaway is: Big landfills in the pathway of a destructive storm could end up spewing a lot of methane into the atmosphere. And keep in mind that these numbers are just for one hypothetical landfill with a gas collection system that goes down for one day. The emissions numbers, you can imagine, start to look much worse if you consider the possibility that floodwaters could impede access to infrastructure for even longer.
So stay strong out there, landfills of Florida. You may not be the star of this show, but you’ve got our attention.
With consequences that are extremely real.
Maybe Sharpiegate wasn’t so funny after all.
You’ll recall the micro-controversy from 2019, when then-President Donald Trump said that Hurricane Dorian was headed toward Alabama (which it wasn’t), and officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were pressured to back up Trump’s mistake. It culminated in Trump presenting a map in the Oval Office on which someone drew a bubble atop the projected path of the storm so it would stretch into Alabama, apparently with a Sharpie.
At the time it was troubling but comical, a representation of how the cult-like adoration Trump demanded would distort the work of government in idiotic ways. Five years later, with a storm surge of misinformation pouring over the country in response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, it looks more like a harbinger of things to come.
In any crisis, some measure of confusion is inevitable. Rumors spread and misunderstandings proliferate, fed by fear and desperation. The most extravagant varieties of misinformation are often either short-lived or confined to a minority of the population. That has not been true, however, when it comes to Helene, and it looks like Milton will repeat the same pattern. This time, the misinformation is more explicitly partisan than ever before, and it portends a disturbing future in which every natural disaster could become not just a challenging task of rescue and cleanup but a simultaneous fight against falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
It’s not that disasters have never been political; presidents are often judged by how they react (anyone over 40 knows what the phrase “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” refers to), with politicians discredited or elevated by how they performed and the opposition taking the opportunity to criticize the administration’s competence. But Trump has given that familiar criticism a particularly venomous cast, claiming not just that the disaster response is falling short but that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are intentionally ignoring the victims because of who they are.
Trump has focused in particular on three falsehoods: First, that the federal government is abandoning hurricane victims in areas where there are lots of Republican voters; second, that funds for recovery are unavailable because the Biden administration gave them to undocumented immigrants (“they stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season”); and third, that the $750 distributed immediately to survivors to enable them to obtain food and other basics, known as Serious Needs Assistance, is all the aid anyone will get.
It was like a bat-signal: As soon as Trump set the terms, conservative media and influencers swung into action, repeating Trump’s bogus claims to their audiences. And then things took a strange turn.
To bring a conspiracy theory into the mainstream, you need individuals and outlets who serve as disinformation linkages, connecting the crazier people and ideas to those with legitimacy. In this case, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, played a key role, and she had a message: The weather is being manipulated by a shadowy conspiracy with powerful technologies at its disposal. “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X to her 3.7 million followers. “Anyone who says they don’t, or makes fun of this, is lying to you.”
As evidence, Greene and her allies offer the fact that many people have proposed geoengineering as a solution to a warming planet, which in their eyes means it must already be taking place, and that’s why these hurricanes came to the Southeast. And who is “They”? It might be the government, but to many, it’s obviously the Jews.
Antisemitic conspiracy theories around the hurricanes are swirling on the fetid sewer of right-wing hate and misinformation controlled by the world’s richest individual. As the Washington Postreported, “The attacks, which include wild claims that Jewish officials are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery or even seize victims’ property, are being fomented largely on Elon Musk’s X.”
The tide of misinformation can be partly explained by the calendar. “What’s different about this natural disaster is the timing,” says Danielle Lee Tomson of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. “We’ve never had such an incredible, devastating natural disaster within weeks of a presidential election that has impacted two swing states,” North Carolina and Georgia. That gives purchase to the claims that there are conspiracies afoot to change the outcome of the election.
In 2024, it may have been inevitable that a disaster would be tied, however implausibly, to the “one narrative to rule them all this election cycle, which is that of non-citizen voting,” Tomson notes.
Disaster makes people search for answers that give order to chaos and suffering. Even answers that describe a world of sinister forces can be weirdly comforting, by assuring their adherents that they are among a select group who understand the reality most people miss. Amidst the chaos, you can grasp onto whatever bizarre belief you choose.
In the future, we might expect that any climate-linked disaster — hurricanes, floods, heat waves, droughts — will become fodder for this kind of misinformation, not just passed around from person to person but driven from the top of the political food chain.
In effect, this is the inverse of the kind of climate misinformation we’re more used to, which goes under the heading of “denial”: denying that temperatures are increasing, or that carbon pollution is a problem, or that human activity drives climate change. Since the occurrence of a hurricane or fire or other observably extreme event can’t be denied, this new kind of misinformation actually posits not just that the effects of climate change are real, but that they’re worse than you realize. It isn’t just that people have lost their lives or their homes due to a disaster, but that the disaster was engineered by sinister forces (including but not limited to the government) to accomplish a nefarious political goal.
So yesterday’s climate denier could become tomorrow’s climate obsessive, seeing in every disaster the hidden hand of the same global conspiracy that is creating all the world’s problems. “Climate change is the new covid,” said Congresswoman Greene; “Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled.” It’s not fake, it’s a plot, one getting worse with each upward tick in global temperatures.
Of course, misinformation comes in a variety of forms — some downplayed Milton as a way of arguing that the elites are trying to frighten you — and even debunkings can be a path to elevated social media clout when so much focus is on these events.
It may be, as Tomson argues, that it takes something like an impending election to turn conspiracy theorizing around disasters up to 11. “We’ve never seen such an opportune moment to repackage disaster for political gain,” she told me. But the effects of climate change will only grow more intense and dramatic, and there will be political actors looking to turn them against their opponents — and frightened people ready to believe the worst.
