The Future Is Named Helene

The messages of Hurricane Helene lie inscribed in the muddy debris of Asheville, North Carolina, and other wrecked towns of Appalachia.

Helene, powered by warming waters in the Gulf of Mexico, dumped 700 millimetres of rain in several states over three days. The surreal deluge drenched the ground and then it swelled creeks. The creeks supercharged rivers, and these muddy waters tore like a torrent through the hills, breaking all previous records of mayhem.

One of those rivers, the Swannanoa that passes through Asheville, and on whose shores another civilization thrived 2,000 years ago, crested at eight metres. The last previously recorded high was 6.3 metres in 1916.

The water washed away human infrastructure like twiddle sticks. Highways gone. Homes swept away. Communities upended. Hundreds dead. There is catastrophic devastation, and then, as they say in North Carolina’s Buncombe County, there is “biblical devastation.”

It shouldn’t be hard for British Columbians to appreciate the scale of this disaster. All they need do is jog their memories back to 2021 for a moment.

That’s when an epic atmospheric river blackened skies and flooded communities. It dumped 100 to 200 millimetres of water over two days in places like Merritt and Princeton. Now imagine a deluge three times greater — on the scale of Hurricane Helene. The floods of 2021 would appear to be just a small a taste of what is headed our way.

I don’t know if it matters anymore that scientists predicted where we’ve arrived. We are, after all, a short-sighted, irrational and reactive species, and gamblers to boot. Fossil fuels remain the fentanyl powering our energetic conquest of everything.

In any case, Hurricane Helene has spoken. As has Typhoon Yagi in Vietnam. Or the downpour in Nigeria. Or Storm Boris in central Europe. Like her multiplying relatives, Helene leaves behind in her swollen debris seven critical truths that bear reflection if we are to temper some of the devastation heading our way.

1. Physics cannot be wished away.

For years now reality has pounded on our doors, shouting the fact that the burning of fossil fuels warms the oceans and the atmosphere. That warming intensifies storms with heavier rainfall.

There is an equation governing this phenomenon that dates to the 19th century: Whenever fossil fuel emissions increase temperatures by one degree Celsius, that change results in an increase in atmospheric humidity of about seven per cent. Civilization then experiences about one to three per cent more precipitation on a global scale. Or greater.

There is also the flip side: rapid evaporation caused by a warming climate can redistribute rainfall and accelerate drought and fire weather.

In a recent social media posting, German physicist and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf boiled down the physics of Hurricane Helene:

“Ocean warming from burning oil and gas fuels stronger hurricanes and rising seas. The longer we ignore the science, the more we lose. You can’t win against the laws of physics.”

2. Climate change invites a game of weighted choices.

In 2007 the U.S. physicist John Holdren called the phrase “climate warming” a terrible misnomer. “It implies something gradual, uniform and benign. What we’re experiencing is none of these.” Just ask the citizens of Asheville, North Carolina. Or Jasper, Alberta.

Holdren warned that climate destabilization gave civilization a mix of three unequal choices. None were without limitations and problems because climate change is a predicament with no easy fix. The choices, argued Holdren, boiled down to mitigation, adaptation and chronic suffering. “We are already doing some of each and will do more of all three,” warned Holdren.

Mitigation meant reducing fossil fuel consumption in a systematic way with clear targets, as well as shrinking the magnitude of civilization’s impact on the biosphere. It was clear to Holdren that

“the more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”

The second choice, adaptation, meant changing crops, cities and infrastructure to deal with a flood of extreme events from wildfires to hurricanes. Holdren noted, however, that adaptation gets costlier and less effective the more climate change accelerates.

The third choice, ongoing suffering in widely separated geographies, would be the product of repeatedly making bad choices on mitigation and adaptation.

“There is no panacea,” he added.

Hurricane Helene suggests civilization has chosen, for the moment, not only more suffering but an ongoing emergency that could last decades. To date, most political parties both north and south of the border pay little attention to adaptation and continue to minimize or avoid our most impactful choice: reduction of fossil fuels and containing the assault on the biosphere.

3. Climate change wields the energy of atomic bombs.

The oceans largely control the Earth’s weather because they cover 71 per cent of the planet. But as they absorb most carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, they have become warmer and more acidic. When the oceans warm, they transfer heat and humidity to the atmosphere. In turn, more heat and moisture generate more extreme storms. The heat being absorbed by the oceans is now momentous or “equivalent to the energy from five Hiroshima atomic bombs being detonated every second, day and night, of every day, for the entire year,” according to one study last year.

From this hot energetic soup emerges extreme events like Helene.

4. Extreme storms kill slowly.

Just as Helene began to recede from the picture, two researchers published the results of a remarkable study that looked at the long-term impact of tropical cyclones in the United States. It turns out that immediate deaths are only the tip of the iceberg. They tracked 501 tropical cyclones from 1950 to 2015 and found overall death rates rose dramatically after a storm ripped through a community the same way accidents multiply after a snowfall.

They estimated all tropical storms over that period took a significant toll: somewhere between 4,600 and 7,300 excess deaths per month in the contiguous United States. On average a typical storm results in 24 official deaths, but the study found that such events actually generated 7,000 to 11,000 deaths over a 15-year time period. The researchers attributed the deaths to the sad song of displacement and loss: injury, disease (storms move around pathogens and pollution), psychological trauma, loss of income, loss of access to health care, loss of home, loss of caregivers and so on.

So events like Hurricane Helene, just like a pandemic, have very long tails. The implications are plain: over time extreme events including wildfires, heat domes and floods will cause thousands of deaths many years after the event.

5. Our slowness to adapt incurs tremendous future costs.

Before Hurricane Helene dropped its waters on North Carolina, a group of economists at the private U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research asked a basic question: “Are we adapting to a changing climate?”

They started by acknowledging that most economists assume the markets are clever and will somehow limit further disruptions. A minority, however, disagree. They point to rising damage to basic economic infrastructure accompanied by denial and stupidity.

The NBER economists then looked at a broad set of data to determine if investments in flood insurance, drought-tolerant seeds, cooling centres, sturdier homes, better health care and the construction of seawalls were being made. What they concluded will be of no surprise to the residents of Florida or North Carolina.

“The net effects of existing actions have largely not been successful in meaningfully reducing climate impacts in aggregate. To avoid ongoing and future damages from warming, our results suggest a need to identify promising adaptation strategies and understand how they can be scaled.”

A recent study by the prestigious Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research went even further. It found that climate change will cause an estimated $38 trillion worth of damage each year by 2050 due to rising temperatures and increased rainfall. Furthermore, this constant and unrelenting Sturm und Drang will reduce global income by 19 per cent.

According to the study, it would take about $6 trillion to limit global warming to two degrees. That’s about one-sixth of the forecasted losses.

6. Every event reveals another fragility.

Hurricane Helene upended a community that hardly anyone knows about but which supplies an element that determines the pace of modern life. In Spruce Pine, a small North Carolina village of 2,000 people, miners extract 80 per cent of the globe’s high-quality quartz. High-tech industries use it to make semiconductors and solar panels. No other region in the world produces such an ultra-fine quartz, the crucial ingredient for silicon wafers. As a result, some analysts have dubbed Spruce Pine the most important town to the global economy on a per capita basis.

But the hurricane shut down the town and its mines. It damaged railway infrastructure, power lines and homes. The storm is just a reminder that climate change can and will continually disrupt fragile and overextended global supply chains as expertly as pandemics and wars.

7. The climate crisis grows exponentially.

Events like Hurricane Helene are now occurring in a climate that has warmed 1.3 degrees since the pre-industrial era. Hottest-day records are now shattered on a monthly basis. In one of his engaging podcasts the social critic Nate Hagens recently asked Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the world’s foremost climate scientists, what a three-degree temperature rise would mean for civilization.

His answer, basically, was that we will see a succession of North Carolinas. Helene’s brothers and sisters will visit ever more frequently. The damage from extreme events, explained Rahmstorf, will not grow linearly but exponentially — meaning by a fast and increasing rate.

Rising sea levels will flood coastal communities. Heat and drought will disrupt food production. Extreme weather visitations, once assumed to be thousand-year rarities, will occur every 50 years. Most of the thresholds for operating civic infrastructure from roads to power lines will be exceeded. “Every additional inch of higher storm surge is more expensive than the previous inch.” Heat waves in the tropics will last months. The absolute amount of rainfall coming down in higher latitudes will be, yes, biblical. Millions of people will lose or flee their homes because of flood, heat or fire.

And here’s where that delivers us. The global economy will probably collapse before reaching the threshold of three degrees. As a result, CO2 emissions will stop not by design but by disaster.

“We simply wouldn’t reach three degrees because… we’d be in such deep trouble that basically the economy collapses.”

All of the above is what Hurricane Helene has told us, as if to test our ability to listen and comprehend.

We can accelerate the devastation by ignoring reality and hope against hope that we won’t be swept away like towns such as Asheville. Or we can belatedly take substantive action to sharply curtail the amount of fossil fuel carbon humanity pumps into the atmosphere.

If Helene could speak in plain English, she would echo the options starkly arrayed by John Holdren: “The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”