Ian may bring «historic» devastation, but it likely won’t be the last storm supercharged by a warming world.
Hurricane Ian was upgraded to a Category 3 hurricane early Tuesday morning ahead of making landfall in western Cuba. This distinction means that the powerful storm is producing winds with speeds between 111 and 129 miles per hour, according to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Such speeds are strong enough to uproot trees and cause major infrastructure damage to buildings and roads, as well as electricity and water sources. And that’s not all.
Ian is expected to be the first hurricane to make landfall in Tampa since 1946. In anticipation of this likely devastation, President Joe Biden has reached out to local officials in the Sunshine State. Meanwhile, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., has warned residents to brace themselves for power outages, gasoline shortages and downed cell phone towers. He has also declared a statewide emergency, calling attention to the potential for «historic» flooding.
«What we have here is really historic storm surge and flooding potential,» DeSantis said at a Tuesday morning news conference. «That storm surge can be life-threatening.»
Last year, DeSantis unveiled «Always Ready Florida,» a three-year plan to «enhance efforts to protect our coastlines, communities and shores.» Yahoo News senior editor David Knowles reported at the time that the governor had taken «pains to keep from framing the plan in terms of climate change mitigation.»
«What I’ve found is when people start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways,» DeSantis then said. «And so we’re not doing any left-wing stuff.»
However, a major factor contributing to the rapid intensification of Hurricane Ian is the same one that fueled other destructive storms before it, such as Hurricanes Florence and Maria in the Atlantic Ocean and Hurricane Agatha in the Pacific Ocean. «Rapid intensification» refers to the process in which a storm’s maximum sustained winds increase in speed by at least 35 mph in a 24-hour period.
