No havens from Climate impacts. Two words that normally don’t go together are “Maine” and “hurricane”, but that’s where we are.
Models showing Lee could maintain hurricane strength right up into Northern waters and the Maine to Nova Scotia coastline.
Looks like this is going to be a thing. Last year, Hurricane Fiona slammed into Canada leaving record damages, but then continued on to bring an atmospheric river on to the Greenland Ice Sheet, as Jason Box describes below.
As ocean temperatures rise, big storms can remain powerful even as they move further north, potentially creating yet another unforeseen feedback effect, accelerating the melt of Greenland ice. Below, quick animation vividly illustrates the process Jason describes.
As ice melts and polar regions become more accessible, authorities have become more and more aware of the potential risks for tourists, in particular, cruise ships, visiting in remote areas. Glaciologist Jason Box calls it “Disaster Tourism”. Now a cruise ship has become stuck in Northwest Greenland, rescuers are far away, some passengers have Covid. All that is needed for the movie version is an escaped serial killer on board. Anyone that’s visited Greenland in recent years cannot fail to notice how tourism is reshaping the society. Below, the flashy Best Western Hotel has popped up in contrast to more traditional architecture in Ilulissat.
Best Western hotel rises above Ilulissat, Greenland.
It’s a concern that scientists have expressed, in particular a few years ago, when a cruise ships started navigating Canada’s Northwest Passage. A ship like this could be carrying thousands of people – traveling well beyond the reach of organized rescue efforts should anything go wrong. A mishap in one of these areas could make the Titanic seem like a walk in the park.
Two people on board a cruise ship run aground in Greenland’s Alpefjord national park have Covid-19, according to an Australian passenger on board, but everybody remained in “good spirits”.
The 104m-long ship, which departed from Norway on 1 September and runs until 22 September, remained stuck after the high tide on Tuesday failed to lift it free.
However, authorities in Denmark said that a scientific fishing vessel was scheduled to arrive later on Wednesday and would attempt to pull the Ocean Explorer free at high tide.
“A cruise ship in trouble in the national park is obviously a worry. The nearest help is far away, our units are far away, and the weather can be very unfavourable,” Cmdr Brian Jensen of the Danish navy’s joint Arctic command said in a statement on Tuesday.
“However, in this specific situation, we do not see any immediate danger to human life or the environment, which is reassuring,” he added.
Australia-based Aurora Expeditions which operates the ship, said that all passengers and and crew were safe. Many of the passengers are believed to be Australian, along with a mix of tourists from other countries including New Zealand, Britain, the United States and South Korea.
“We are actively engaged in efforts to free the MV Ocean Explorer from its grounding. Our foremost commitment is to ensure the vessel’s recovery without compromising safety,” Aurora said.
Gina Hill, an Australian who is on board with her husband, said they felt a shudder, then what sounded like scrape when the ship ran aground.
She said the passengers were in good spirits and were being entertained by lectures and stories of expeditions by the crew. .
Disinformation about deadly wildfires in the United States and Canada has run rampant across social media, with posts falsely blaming coordinated arson, lasers—and plans to develop “smart cities.”
Allegations that the fires are a deliberate policy to clear areas for urban redesign deploy screenshots of government websites or headlines about everything from traffic monitoring to conferences about new technology.
“So what are the odds that we have two fires in two places within a week’s time, and both of these places have initiatives to become smart-intelligent cities?” says a woman in a TikTok video, pointing to Lahaina, Hawaii and West Kelowna, British Columbia—both of which were ravaged by wildfires in August.
Some of the videos fact-checked by AFP are no longer available on TikTok, but copies continue to circulate on Facebook, Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter.
Kelowna did publish an “intelligent city” strategy in 2020, but there is no evidence that ground is being cleared on purpose—a theory that has amassed millions of views in clips shared across platforms.
“I cannot conceive why a government would intentionally burn down a city to increase its use of smart city technologies,” said Harvey Miller, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at The Ohio State University.
“There is no reason to destroy infrastructure to rebuild it smarter.”
The conspiracy theories come amid widespread distrust in digitizing urban areas. A 2022 Axios-Momentive poll found only half of Americans are comfortable with the prospect of living in a smart city.
Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said claims that fires are being used to force changes on communities were “utterly baseless.”
“It is really horrific to think that anyone would intentionally burn a community to the ground so that they could install technology,” she added.
Dead still being counted in Libya, where a massive system of repetitive storms has been dropping record precipitation for weeks.
The killing mechanism in Libya was the failure of 2 dams sequentially above the city of Derna. Similar event happened not far from me in 2020 – in the video above, I’ve set the start time to Megan Kirchmeier-Young’s description of her research, showing the expectations for more frequent severe weather events in a warming environment. (should start at 3:38)
“A heavy rainfall event that would have occurred about once every hundred years on average, in a world without human influence, is now occurring about once every 20 years on average. If we continue warming, at 2 degrees of global warming from pre-industrial, that same precipitation event, will be occurring about once every 5 years on average.” New research from American Geophysical Union adds more depth.
The deadly firestorm in Hawaii and Hurricane Idalia’s watery storm surge helped push the United States to a record for the number of weather disasters that cost $1 billion or more. And there’s still four months to go on what’s looking more like a calendar of calamities.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Monday that there have been 23 weather extreme events in America that cost at least $1 billion this year through August, eclipsing the year-long record total of 22 set in 2020. So far this year’s disasters have cost more than $57.6 billion and claimed at least 253 lives.
And NOAA’s count doesn’t yet include Tropical Storm Hilary’s damages in hitting California and a deep drought that has struck the South and Midwest because those costs are still be totaled, said Adam Smith, the NOAA applied climatologist and economist who tracks the billion-dollar disasters.
“We’re seeing the fingerprints of climate change all over our nation,” Smith said in an interview Monday. “I would not expect things to slow down anytime soon.” –
“Exposure plus vulnerability plus climate change is supercharging more of these into billion-dollar disasters,” Smith said.
NOAA added eight new billion-dollar disasters to the list since its last update a month ago. In addition to Idalia and the Hawaiian firestorm that killed at least 115 people, NOAA newly listed an Aug. 11 Minnesota hailstorm; severe storms in the Northeast in early August; severe storms in Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin in late July; mid-July hail and severe storms in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee and Georgia; deadly flooding in the Northeast and Pennsylvania in the second week of July; and a late June outbreak of severe storms in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.
“This year a lot of the action has been across the center states, north central, south and southeastern states,” Smith said.
Most coastal communities will encounter 100-year floods annually by the end of the century, even under a moderate scenario where carbon dioxide emissions peak by 2040, a new study finds. And as early as 2050, regions worldwide could experience 100-year floods every nine to fifteen years on average.
The city of Derna has been most acutely affected, after raging torrents of water tore through two dams and swept entire buildings into the sea. Othman Abdul Jalil, health minister and spokesman of the U.N.-recognized government in west Libya, told local television channel al-Masar that the situation continues to deteriorate in the western city, and at least 2,000 have been found dead.
“I expect numbers of dead will rise to 10,000,” he told the channel early on Tuesday, adding that there is yet to be any confirmed final death count as many parts of the city remain inaccessible. Derna is estimated to have had around 90,000 residents.
Libya’s eastern city of Derna has buried 700 people killed in devastating flooding and 10,000 were reported missing as rescuers teams struggled to retrieve many more bodies from the horrific deluge, officials said Tuesday.
Authorities estimated earlier that as many as 2,000 people may have perished in Derna alone. Mediterranean storm Daniel on Sunday night caused havoc and flash flooding in many towns in eastern Libya but the worst destruction was in Derna, where heavy rainfall and floods broke dams and washed away entire neighborhoods, authorities said.
Tamer Ramadan, Libya envoy for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said 10,000 people were missing after the unprecedented flooding. Speaking to reporters at a U.N. briefing in Geneva via videoconference from Tunisia, he said the death toll was “huge” and expected to reach into the thousands in the coming days.
Speaking about the fallout from Friday’s devastating earthquake in Morocco, on the other side of North Africa, Ramadan said the situation in Libya was “as devastating as the situation in Morocco.”
Ossama Hamad, prime minister of the government in eastern Libya, said that many of the missing were believed to have been carried away after two upstream dams burst. He said the devastation in Derna is far beyond the capabilities of his country.
A survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that about a quarter of Texas businesses said the hot weather has negatively impacted their revenue and production this summer.
“We heard back from about 350 businesses and about a quarter of them said that they were negatively impacted by this recent heat wave,” said Emily Kerr, a senior business economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
She said the extreme heat prompted them to get a better understanding of how the triple-digit weather was impacting business in the region.
In mid-August they put out the survey after hearing from businesses about the problems they were having. They haven’t asked the specific questions in the past, and this will be their first benchmark to use as a comparison in the future.
“Leisure and hospitality were hit hardest, but also retail, and then manufacturing as well,” explained Kerr. “And for leisure and hospitality and retail, the driving factor was lower customer demands, you know, people don’t snap getting out in the heat as much those businesses rely much more on foot traffic and people coming into their establishments.”
She said regarding manufacturing, it had to do with productivity.
The same storm that pummeled Greece in recent days reformed itself as a cyclone – “Medicane” – over the Mediterranean, and hit Libya. Mass casualties feared after apparent dam collapse.
A powerful storm that unleashed torrential rain and extreme flooding across eastern Libya has devastated entire communities on its Mediterranean coastline, causing widespread destruction and an unknown number of fatalities, officials said.
Authorities declared the city of Derna a disaster zone after dams burst and floodwaters inundated neighborhoods early Monday, washing away cars and city blocks and leaving a muddy, churning river in their wake.
At least 150 people were killed in Derna as a result of the tropical-storm-like storm, named Daniel, an official with the Libyan Red Crescent said to Reuters, adding that the organization expected the death toll to rise.
Libya is politically and geographically split between east and west and ruled by two rival governments, including a United Nations-backed administration in Tripoli. In eastern Libya, officials said that thousands were believed dead or missing in Derna.
The Hong Kong Observatory said that 6.22 inches of rain had fallen in the hour from 11 p.m. Thursday (11 a.m. ET Thursday) to midnight, the highest recording since records began in 1884.
It also issued its highest “black” warning for the first time in two years, lasting for more than 15 hours from 11:05 p.m (11:05 a.m. ET) — the longest “black rainstorm” in the city’s history.
The Hong Kong Observatory, the government department responsible for monitoring and forecasting weather, said a trough of low pressure associated with remnants of Typhoon Haikui brought heavy rain and thunderstorms to the Pearl River Estuary. More than 600 mm of rainfall were recorded at the Observatory in the past 24 hours to 08 September Rainfall totals exceeded 800 mm over the Eastern District and Southern District of Hong Kong Island, the Observatory said. The monthly mean rainfall for September in Hong Kong is 321.4 mm.
A little over a year ago, Peter Gardner, a Louisiana developer, completed rehabbing an apartment building with 144 units and got a surprise so ugly it made him decide to move his business out of town.
When the project began, his broker estimated the annual cost of insuring it would be $75,000. But by the time Gardner finished it, the insurance cost had risen to $175,000. He paid it, but when he went to renew the policy this past July, he got another shock. The broker now said it was $275,000. An alternative broker could only find policies over $300,000 per year.
Gardner bought his first house for renovation in New Orleans in 1999 when he was still in college. Over the years, he’s tackled roughly 100 projects. He currently owns about 400 apartments that he rents. He survived the downturn after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but now the market impacts of climate change have become so inexorable that he sees no choice but to start again in another city to the north.
“I’m a business climate refugee, because if I can’t make a profit here, I don’t feel comfortable buying new projects, investing here any further.”
Reeling from four hurricanes in 2020 and 2021 that caused $23 billion in damage, Louisiana is undergoing an insurance calamity that is harming the state’s economy and even reducing its population.
“There’s no question we’re experiencing a crisis in the insurance availability in our state,” said James Donelon, commissioner for the state’s Department of Insurance, who notes the crisis extends not only to property insurance for homeowners and businesses, but also to car and flood insurance, which are sold separately. “It’s certainly causing some people to turn in the keys and give up their homes and to shut the doors on their businesses.”
