One month away from the official start of the Atlantic 2020 hurricane season, experts at Colorado State University predict a bumper harvest of eight hurricanes between June and November. Four of these will become major Category 3 to 5 storms. Predictions are confident, due to the lack of El Niño conditions that complicate the forecast.

As CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller said, “The last season with four or more major hurricanes was the record damage-causing year of 2017 that saw Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.”

These three brutes unleashed devastation across the Caribbean and the USA, and rank in the top five most destructive Atlantic hurricanes recorded. So far, that is.

Harvey, Irma and Maria totalled up damages of $265 billion, according to the US National Hurricane Center, and killed 3,200 people. Hurricane Katrina, the nemesis of New Orleans in 2005, still tops the list, at $160 billion (adjusted for inflation to 2017 dollars), and 1,833 fatalities.

Three years later, it is still an astounding fact: one quarter of all Category 5 hurricane landfalls on record in the Atlantic occurred in the 2017 season.

That is, since 1851. In other words, over a period of 166 years. I long ago forgot all of my undergraduate statistics, but I can still add. Depicting this outlier would result in a pretty crazy upward veer in a distribution graph. A bit like those we’ve seen for the increase in Covid-19 cases in some parts of the world. Or, er, the famous climate change hockey stick.

It was Jason Samenow’s article in The Washington Post on 22^ndSeptember 2017 that first alerted me to the hurricane fact, under the stark headline: ‘Category 5 hurricanes have hit 6 land areas dead-on in 2017, more than ever before’.

That was true in September 2017, with a month still to go in the official hurricane season.

Harvey punched first, hitting hard on 26^thAugust 2017 and staying the course over Texas for four days, leading to biblical flooding.

Next came Irma, the first Category 5 hurricane on record to strike – and demolish – the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean. That was on 5^thSeptember.

And then came Maria, less than two weeks after Irma, pounding Dominica, St Croix and Puerto Rico into a shattered submission.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbNFfnVbvis&w=560&h=315]

I was gobsmacked by the images of Barbuda before and after Irma hit the island, gusting at 257 km/h, on 5^th September 2017. Parts of the island looked like a not-so-friendly giant had stomped down hard on some elaborate balsa wood models of neighbourhoods, and then sloshed over truckloads of mud and dumped the contents of a few waste sites on the area; then, on leaving the neighbourhood, tripped and uprooted parts of the main road, which it kicked into oblivion in annoyance.

Gaston Brown, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, described the scenes as “absolutely heart wrenching”. With 95% of properties damaged in some way, infrastructure knocked out, and much of the island under water on the day after Irma’s landfall, he said that Barbuda was “barely habitable”. And Hurricane José was whirling its way towards the island.

On 6^thSeptember, now over St Martin and Anguilla, Irma was still not inclined to be forgiving. Aerial footage taken by the Dutch Defence Ministry showed sheets of twisted metal and cars lifted up onto broken structures, shipping containers huddled in a heap instead of their usual orderly rows, higgledy-piggledy piles of yachts, and resorts in which not a single palm tree has more than one frond left dangling from its crown.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsAuiL_NVpA&w=560&h=315]

Irma then waved her horrible wand across Virgin Gorda and gave deconstruction a whole new meaning with her treatment of Tortola’s capital, Road Town.

Aerial footage ‘after’ images showed a land stripped of colour – little intact vegetation, painted roofs removed and upended, and a layer of muck smeared over the shaved land.

For some reason Irma disdained Cuba, only scuffing the north coast. The glancing blow did nevertheless kill 10 people and flooded Havana and the western regions in great lakes of storm surge.

Downgraded from Category 5 to 3 after her skirmish with Cuba, Irma blustered onto the US mainland, blowing up again to hit Category 4 wind speeds. Due to last minutes twists and turns in her course, Florida was relatively “lucky” – apart from major damage to the beautiful coral cay archipelago of the Florida Keys, where a quarter of structures were demolished.

Irma avoided a direct hit of the cities of Miami and Tampa. Destruction was concentrated on less developed parts of the Keys and the western stretch of the Florida coast from Everglades City up to Marco Island. But I am sure the relatives of the eight elderly people in the Hollywood Hills, Florida nursing home who died as there was no power and so no functioning air conditioning or other needed machines, did not see any consolation in this.

By the 12^thSeptember, evacuees from the Florida Keys were being allowed back in to start cleaning up those homes not completely devastated. Irma was moving up through Georgia and had been downgraded to a tropical depression. But the worst was not over.

On the 18^thSeptember 2017, Hurricane Maria rotated across Dominica, leaving a debris-strewn landscape with some houses on stilts toppled right over, buildings torn in half and swung around, and no mercy for the graceful palms.

While lacking Irma’s longevity, Maria was intense and deadly. Much of Dominica’s houses and infrastructure were irreparable and the island’s lush vegetation eliminated.

Puerto Rico, the US unincorporated territory, endured the worst humanitarian crisis. If anyone still thought that advanced economies would be spared the worst of climate change’s brunt – well, there is plenty to disabuse those views. The hurricane completely destroyed the island’s creaking power grid, and 80% of its agriculture.

Seven months after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, 150,000 people across the island still had no electricity. Roads had been rebuilt, but health care was not functional in many parts of the island. Maria killed more than three thousand people, and instigated a large spike in suicide rates post-hurricane. Ten months after the hurricane, some families still had no power.

By April 2018, at least 135,000 people had left the island for the American mainland – climate migrants, or just victims of US lack of concern for its citizens on the island?

Many people were already considering leaving Puerto Rico because of the parlous state of island politics and its debt-laden economy. Only a tiny part of the requested disaster relief money had been provided by the US administration by April 2018. Perhaps Puerto Ricans are not American enough?

But even in Texas, six months after Hurricane Harvey hit the state on 26^thAugust 2017, disaster relief was slow. People in the small island community of Port Aransas, hit by three metres of storm surge, were saying that they had been forgotten. Let us not forget that Harvey, a Category 4 hurricane, triggered 57 tornadoes inland, almost drowned Houston in a one-in-a-thousand-year event, and resulted in at least 68 direct deaths.

A rare event, but three times as likely due to climate change, according to the World Weather Attribution group. Even at 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the upper limit of the Paris Agreement temperature goal, that probability would be tripled again.

The unprecedented flooding came from Harvey stalling for four days over or near the Texan coast – a phenomenon that has been linked to how climate change is altering weather systems. The prodigious rainfall prompted the National Weather Service to add two more shades of purple to its maps to depict Harvey’s downpours.

There is no doubt that global heating is resulting in increased storm surges, via sea level rise, which exacerbate the destructive force of hurricanes. Higher sea surface temperatures contribute to more moisture in the atmosphere, which means – yes, more intense rainfall. It’s a perfect storm, so to speak.

And take the fact that in May 2018, eight months after Hurricane Irma, the Florida Keys canals were still clogged with debris – some kind of wrangle between local government agencies and federal emergency managers, or was that just the infamous ‘lack of political will’?

Irma also killed off 40% of the mangroves in Florida Bay. So there will be more shoreline erosion, which will hamper the recovery of seagrass beds – large swathes of which died off in 2015. The seagrass beds emit oxygen, provide habitat for juveniles of many important fish species, and also absorb carbon dioxide emissions.

And why did the seagrass die off? Well, in our infinite wisdom, people have been toying with the hydrology of the Everglades for the last 100 years. The normal southerly flow of surface waters from central Florida and Lake Okeechobee that feeds the sea of grass has been diverted so that enclave after enclave of housing can be developed.

This hugely decreases the amount of fresh water flowing into Florida Bay. The south Florida drought of 2014 – 2015 dried up the diminished flow to critically low levels, wreaking havoc with the already fragile estuarine ecology.

The result: brief temperature, salinity, and oxygen extremes, also linked to the 2015 El Niño. When lots of heat and salt was trapped in the water of Florida Bay, oxygen levels dropped, suffocating over 16,000 hectares of turtle grass. A yellow hydrogen sulphide haze hung over mats of floating vegetation, as the dead sea grass rose up to the surface and began to decompose.

In 1987, the last time a similar die-off happened in the bay, the $1.2 billion sport-fishing industry was sunk.

The wind speed of Atlantic hurricanes is accelerating more rapidly than it was 30 years ago. This has to do with changes in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a natural climate cycle. The heating of the oceans is playing a killer role in how hurricanes develop now. And the weakened state of protective ecosystem services like seagrass and mangroves reduces the natural resilience of coastlines all over the world.

If we do not pull back emissions, floods that occur once in fifty years now will happen every day along much of the US coastline by 2100, according to a new study. So expanses of the coastline will become uninhabitable. It might happen sooner in Bangladesh, but it’s coming too to a US coastal city near you.

Temporary lower levels of pollution during the economic shutdown are very unlikely to dent atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Lockdown will not slow the warming trend – we need concerted and deep emissions cuts for that to happen.

Back to the present in 2020, we are a month out from the start of the Atlantic hurricane season. We are expending our stocks of global resilience on dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. But record sea surface temperatures are building in the tropical Atlantic, regardless. We have just had the second hottest year on record in 2019, with the hottest upper levels of the ocean. Scientists predict an above-average chance that major hurricanes will hit the coastlines of the Caribbean and the continental United States.

I hope not, but it looks likely that the region will have to deploy simultaneous disaster responses. The IMF foresees that the tourism-dependent Caribbean economy will contract by 6.2 % due to the coronavirus pandemic. Caribbean leaders will be under no illusion of the heightened risks from the hurricane season.

The US too is in deep recession, and still battling with a heavy death toll from Covid-19, together with, to employ a useful euphemism, ‘governance challenges’. Time perhaps for a message to be beamed out on all available emergency frequencies. Earth to Trump: multi-tasking is fundamentally different to a short attention span. Ask any stable genius.

[1]Harvey is second, Maria third. Then comes 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, followed by Irma.