Is There Anyone Left...

 That believes Climate Change is a Hoax?

 Why was Hurricane Helene so bad? Fossil fuel pollution.

From Angela Fritz, CNN Senior Weather & Climate Editor

My Note: Simply put, I had been watching the global models (mostly the GFS) for the last 10 days. On several model runs the predicted central pressures were off the charts. Had there been categories 6 and 6.5 that is what the computers saw. Hurricane Helene was bound to be a major disaster. The early tracking ran close to actual; even 10 day out. Have our extreme climate chances become that predictable? 

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CNN: The atmosphere, warmed by more than a century of fossil fuel pollution, is hotter now than it was in pre-industrial times. That means it can hold more moisture, which wrings out as torrential rain in storms like Helene, triggering deadly flooding not just in Florida but across the Southeast.

Helene also rapidly intensified twice before it reached Florida, because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is off-the-charts warm — much like the rest of the Atlantic. More than 90% of warming around the globe over the past 50 years has taken place in the oceans, and it’s making storms more likely to undergo these rapid intensification cycles.

Sea levels in Florida are as much as 8 inches higher than they were in 1950. The speed of that rise is increasing too. This translates to higher storm surge.

Across the board, Helene was a hurricane supercharged by climate change.

“For decades now, scientists have been warning us that extreme weather events will be exacerbated by this blanket of carbon pollution we’ve been wrapping around our planet,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “But as a human, it is shocking to see the devastation occurring in front of our eyes, affecting the people and places we know and love.”

Hurricane expert Jeff Masters tallied up some numbers last night that speak for themselves:

There have now been eight Category 4 or 5 hurricane landfalls on US soil in the past eight years. That’s as many as the entire 57 years that came before it.

 

His cult still believe that.