Consider This from NPR - How Climate Change Is Making Storms Like Ida Even Worse

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Hurricane Ida's winds intensified rapidly as the storm approached coastal Louisiana over the weekend — making landfall at its most powerful. NPR's Rebecca Hersher explains how Ida was supercharged by climate change.Now the hurricane's remnants are moving north and east, where millions are bracing for flooding and tornado threats. Janey Camp with Vanderbilt University tells NPR why climate change means flooding will become more common in areas where people haven't been accustomed to it in the past. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org Louisiana's Lafourche Parish has a motto, Feeding and Fueling America. And that's because it's home to one of the largest shipping ports on the Gulf Coast, Port Fouchon, a port that will likely be shut down for weeks. There's vessels, you know, in places that they're not supposed to be.

Chet Shashon, the executive director of the port, told NPR he wouldn't be surprised to see gas prices rise. Fouchon services a lot of deep water oil production. There is no electricity. There will not be electricity for a long time. And in our area, in our community, we have no running water. As of Tuesday afternoon, more than a million customers in Louisiana were still without power and could be for weeks. And the power outages continued to increase as the storm moved through Louisiana into Mississippi. Rod West is group president of Utility Operations for

Entergy Corporation, which provides power to four states, including Louisiana. He told NPR that damage assessments alone would take days. We were asked, even while the storm was still ravaging the service area, we were asked, well, how long is it going to take to restore the power? And the honest answer is, we won't be able to know that until we know exactly what the damage is. Loss of power was a big concern for area hospitals, many of which are overwhelmed with COVID patients. And it's an especially trying time, being fairly full throughout the pandemic and particularly now. Dr. John Heaton, chief medical officer at LCMC Health, says his hospital system has kept the lights on.

But the ICUs, they're full. If neighboring hospitals dealing with storm damage need help in the coming days, things will get really hard. You know, when a small rural hospital 70 or 80 miles away needs to transfer some patients, we have no ICU capacity. It's hard to say no. Consider this. Shipping, fuel, electricity, health care, essential workers and systems straining after a powerful storm that millions more will feel in the coming days. It's exactly the kind of storm that climate change is making even worse. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Tuesday, August 31st.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time, mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Maddie Safaya here, host of Shortwave, the daily science podcast from NPR. Listen for new discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines,

all in about 10 minutes every weekday. It's a great addition to your daily listening, whether you're a science nerd or, you know, just a little science curious. Subscribe now to Shortwave from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. Now, you might remember a few weeks back, we told you about a landmark report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It warned that human-caused climate change is accelerating and that we're running out of time to avoid its most catastrophic effects,

and that extreme weather events are more likely as a result. Right now, Hurricane Ida is making its dangerous trek towards the U.S. Gulf Coast. Hurricane Ida is exactly the kind of event that scientists were talking about. On Saturday evening, Ida was a modest Category 2 storm. With 105 mile per hour winds, but it's poised to rapidly intensify. And that's what it did, just as forecasters predicted. So Hurricane Ida has strengthened to a Category 3 storm with winds of 115 miles an hour. From Saturday night. Maximum sustained winds of 130 miles an hour. From Saturday night.

Maximum sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. Into Sunday morning. It's now up to 145 miles per hour. Ida got stronger by the hour. The storm has strengthened yet again. The last time we spoke, sustained winds were 145. They're now up to 150. All of this set the storm up to be at its most powerful,

just as it made landfall over Louisiana. Bringing as much as 20 inches of rain to some areas with the potential for destructive storm surge and strong winds. So how did Ida get so powerful so fast? So climate change is basically supercharging this storm. That's Rebecca Herscher, correspondent for NPR's climate team. We spoke on Monday. What climate change does is it adds fuel to a hurricane, fuel in the form of heat. So hurricanes form over water. You can think of them like engines spinning up like a propeller on a plane. And the energy for that propeller comes from the heat in the water. As the earth

gets hotter because of climate change, the water on the surface of the ocean, it also gets hotter. So there's more energy for storms like Ida to get really big and really powerful. What's the evidence for that? How do we know this happened with Ida specifically? So we can basically observe it in real time, which is pretty terrifying. So, for example, let's talk about the wind. On Saturday, the day before Ida made landfall, it had top wind speeds of about 85 miles an hour, which is pretty serious. It can remove shingles from a roof or snap off the limb of a tree. But overnight, the storm got a lot more powerful. The top wind speeds jumped to about 150 miles an hour. That is fast enough to tear whole roofs off of houses, snap power poles, you know, uproot

entire trees. And that extra power, it came from the water in the Gulf of Mexico. What do you mean by that? How, like, warm was that water? It was basically like a bathtub, about 85 degrees, which is a few degrees warmer than average if you look at measurements from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So weather forecasters could watch the storm feed on that heat. And when a hurricane gains that much power that quickly, scientists call it rapid intensification. So studies have found that hurricanes are more likely to rapidly intensify because of global warming. And people who live on the Gulf Coast of the U.S., they are on the front lines of this. You know, Hurricane Harvey did this in 2017,

Michael in 2018, Laura in 2020, and now Ida. They have all rapidly intensified. Does the speed of the intensity translate to a more powerful storm? Yes, yes, it does. And it also gives people less time to prepare. So when we're talking about these really fast wind speeds that come really quickly, you know, there's less time. There might not be time to evacuate by the time you know the storm is going to be that powerful. And the National Weather Service tries to get around this

by putting out warnings saying basically, you know, the storm is likely to get a lot stronger before it makes landfall. But it can be really hard to convince people to take a storm seriously when it intensifies really late. Ida, at this point is a tropical storm. It's heading northeast. Is climate change playing a role in kind of what happens next, how it's moving? Yes, absolutely. So the hot water in the Gulf of Mexico also helped the storm suck up moisture. That falls as rain. It is really important to remember that these storms can cause flooding really far inland.

So in Mississippi, we're going to see a lot of flooding. And then the track goes through central Tennessee, where they just had a lot of deadly flash floods. So people in the path need to take those flood warnings really seriously. Rebecca Herscher with NPR's climate team. The good news emerging after Ida's landfall is that in New Orleans, the levee system held. That's unlike, of course, what happened during Hurricane Katrina 16 years ago, when a storm surge breached levees and inundated the city. In the flooding and aftermath, more than 1,500 people died in Louisiana alone.

Ida, so far, has been blamed for four deaths in Louisiana, a number that the governor warned may rise considerably. But now, people there face a new threat. Many could be without power for weeks in stifling summer heat. As the remnants of Ida spread farther north and east, millions of people are bracing for the threat of flooding or tornadoes. And that includes Middle Tennessee, which, as you just heard, is still recovering from a catastrophic storm that dumped 17 inches of rain in 24 hours.

That killed at least 22 people. Climate scientists say storms like these are not just freak events, even if that's how people see them. I think it's more seen as an anomaly, even though we've had several pretty significant flood events in the past decade. Janie Camp, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University, told NPR that flooding is becoming more common in areas like Tennessee

where people haven't had to worry much about it in the past. She spoke to NPR's Ari Shapiro. It's becoming a regular thing, but it's hitting different people in different ways. So I don't think the general population is seeing this as the norm yet. Even to describe it the norm doesn't quite capture it because climate change means the definition of normal is just going to keep getting worse, right? Absolutely. I think we're going to see more extreme events, and we're going to see flooding in areas that we historically have not, and at levels that we haven't seen. Explain why that's happening in Tennessee, because I think many people associate climate-related flooding with coastal areas like Miami, New Orleans, cities that get hit by hurricanes.

Explain why a landlocked state like Tennessee is seeing more of this. Well, Tennessee may be a landlocked state, but we have a lot of surface waters and rivers and streams and tributaries to the rivers and streams. But we also see low-lying areas where a lot of precipitation accumulates and we don't have adequate storm water infrastructure and drainage to convey that water away. That can happen in landlocked states like Tennessee. So let's say you identify your house as being in a flood-prone area. Maybe the city is even offering to buy out houses in those neighborhoods. How likely are

people to actually relocate based on a forecast of what climate change is going to do in their part of the country? So in the Nashville area, we've had a pretty proactive home buyout program in place for over 30 years. And the city of Nashville has a wish list of properties that they know have potential flood risk. The challenge is that not everyone that is offered a buyout participates because of their connection to their home and their community. And then what we've seen in Nashville and other areas is there's limited housing stock for people to relocate to that's at a comparable value without having to move away from their local community and that network of social connections that they are tied to. I wonder whether you think these programs

that are going to require major adaptations and big adjustments in people's lives are likely to succeed without that buy-in from the local population? The timeline for the projections is often challenging for individuals, especially if you think about someone that may have lived in their home 50 or 60 years. When you say, well, with climate change, you can't live here anymore in the next 10 or 20 years. It's hard for them to kind of grasp that and think about starting over somewhere. Professor Janie Camp of Vanderbilt University, who studies climate change and risk management. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Audie Cornish.