Otis/Acapulco a Preview of Coming Coastal Attractions
Incredible catastrophe still playing out in Acapulco, following devastating Hurricane Otis last week. The storm’s rapidly intensification is likely a preview of future attractions along the US Gulf and East Coasts, as the video above discusses. Otis and its implications have largely disappeared from the mainstream media radar.
Nearly a week after Hurricane Otis blew uplike an atomic bomb and then slammed intoMexico’s iconic Pacific resort city of Acapulco with 165-mile-per-hour winds, grief-stricken residents are still pulling dead bodies from the city’s main harbor.
“It was really horrible,” Luis Alberto Medina, a fisherman, told the Reuters news service. “We’ve already found the bodies of others.” But six other people that Medina knew or worked with on the waterfront are still lost, as authorities now concede the toll of the dead or missingon the Mexican coast is nearing 100 and could go higher, as thousands continue to suffer without power or provisions.
In normal times, such death and destruction in a North American citythat’s long been a hugely popular tourist destination for U.S. citizens would be a Page 1, top-of-the-hour story. But in a crazy, mixed-up world from Maine to the Middle East to Capitol Hill, Hurricane Otis barely dented American news media. And that’s a shame — not only because of the human tragedy getting ignored, but because the massive storm may have been nature’s most powerful warning yet that climate change has quickly shifted from a scientific theory to a five-alarm emergency.
Less than a day out, weather forecasters were describing Otis as a tropical storm that might bring heavy rain to Acapulco, but little more. But in the course of 12 hours over the overheated Pacific waters — in what some meteorologists are calling the most extreme example of “rapid intensification” they’ve ever seen — Otis gained an astonishing 115 mph in wind speed to become a major hurricane, in what National Hurricane Center forecaster Eric Blake called “a nightmare scenario.”
“Something like this was bound to happen,”Michael Mann, director of Philadelphia’s Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, told me, as he noted that the Pacific Ocean near Acapulco was unusually warm for this time of year, the result of both record temperatures linked to fossil-fuel pollution as well as the El Niño weather pattern. “It’s going to happen to Miami.It’s going to happen to Tampa,” Mann said.
💔🚨Seven days have passed, and families are still living amidst mud and rubble, illustrating the reality left by Hurricane Otis. The video was taken in the Fraccionamiento Arboledas neighborhood in Acapulco, Guerrero. The lack of media coverage is astounding 😡
Remarkably, the Hurricane Otis catastrophe happened less than a week after publication of a major report from New Jersey climate scientist Andra Garner of Rowan University, which found that instances of rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin have doubled over the last half-century, and manmade climate change is almost certainly the culprit. In releasing her paper, Garner noted that oceans have absorbed some 90% of global warming.
With so much more work to do on governmental and societal changes to drastically curb greenhouse-gas pollution, you might think Hurricane Otis and its assault on Acapulco would be a tipping point. But then you might have thought that about the Maui wildfire, or the choking wildfire smoke that darkened the eastern U.S., or any of the other floods or calamities that struck in the summer of 2023, as Planet Earth shattered all-time temperature records.
Instead, the status-quo, big money fossil fuel interests who care more about quarterly profits than your grandchildren have been taking advantage of a distracted world. ExxonMobil just spent a whopping $60 billion to buy a major U.S. shale oil producer, Pioneer, in a deal that is doubling down on fossil fuels as scientists plead for them to be phased out. The new U.S. Speaker of the House, Louisiana GOPer Mike Johnson (who believesthe earth is only 6,000 years old), is a climate-change denier who’s received about $240,000 in campaign cash from Big Oil and Gas since 2018— meaning that ignorance will continue to hold swayover science in Congress.
