You wonder how the hurricane Milton can hit so hard while Florida is barely recovering from the passage of Heleneabout ten days ago? The answer is in the graph below.
And it comes down simply: too much energy. The Gulf of Mexico is unusually warm this year, both at the surface and at depth. It is the same thing for the Caribbean Sea and the entire tropical zone of the Eastern Atlantic.
This heat is energy. And this energy is fuel for tropical storms and hurricanes. A storm “sucks thermal energy out of water like a straw sucks up liquid,” explains the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on its website.1.
It is this same excess energy that we see today carrying away buildings, uprooting trees and killing human beings. The heat also encourages the evaporation of water, filling hurricanes with humidity which ends up pouring out in the form of torrential rains.
We all know where this excess heat in the oceans comes from: it is the heat that is trapped near the Earth’s surface by the greenhouse gases that we still emit in too large quantities.
Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene would do well to look at the chart instead of suggesting, as she did on X, that it’s the Biden administration that’s causing the hurricanes2…
1. Watch the NOAA video
2. Check out Marjorie Taylor Greene’s post