August 25, 2017

Hurricane Harvey Is Something We’ve Never Seen Before

“The meteorological equivalent of a White Walker from Game of Thrones.”

NASA

This story was originally published by New Republic and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There’s a good reason why Mashable’s Andrew Freedman dubbed Hurricane Harvey—now barreling toward Texas and Louisiana—“the meteorological equivalent of a White Walker from Game of Thrones.” The storm was alive, but then appeared to die as it hovered over the Yucatan Peninsula earlier this week. Over the past two days, however, it has spawned from the dead, emerging even more powerful than it was before. Hurricane Harvey is coming, and those in its path have had little time to prepare.

There are also good reasons why everyone is talking about this storm (except, of course, President Trump, who until Thursday afternoon was busy tweeting memes). The first is obvious: Harvey is likely to be the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2005. But the second is more complicated. According to Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, hurricanes usually come with only one of two awful characteristics—either heavy, persistent rainfall or strong, violent winds and storm surge. It looks like Hurricane Harvey could have both, because unique wind patterns may prevent the storm from moving quickly out of the region.

“[Harvey] has the dual threat of both being very intense at landfall and producing widespread flooding at the same time,” Nielsen-Gammon told me. “It’s a lot easier to deal with one type of natural disaster than it is to deal with two different kinds of natural disasters at once.”

As for Harvey’s intensity, the hurricane is now at Category 1—the lowest category. But, according to the Weather Channel, “With a favorable environment that includes deep, warm Gulf of Mexico water, and low wind shear, Harvey will continue to strengthen rapidly, and could be a Category 3 hurricane at landfall along the Texas coast overnight Friday night or early Saturday morning.” And rainfall looks like it could produce truly unprecedented flooding, as meteorologist Eric Holthaus has pointed out:

In response, Texas has issued disaster declarations for 30 counties and urged thousands of residents to evacuate their homes.

That’s pretty scary, but what’s even more unsettling is that the government may not be prepared to deal with the effects of the storm. President Trump’s reaction to Harvey has so far been underwhelming. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders addressed the storm in Thursday’s press briefing, saying Trump was “aware” of it, “has been briefed and will continue to be updated as the storm progresses.” Later in the day, the president himself tweeted a somber call to action, urging people to “plan ahead.”

The irony here is that while Trump urges residents in the path of the storm to prepare themselves, he has failed to follow his own advice. He is greeting this storm without key administrators in place. This could very likely be the first major natural disaster of Trump’s presidency, and with agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, NOAA, and NASA still without leaders more than seven months into the presidency, the least he could do is offer some reassurance that he is moving quickly to fill those positions. As former American Meteorological Society president Marshall Shepherd wrote for Forbes in April, there is a “strong working relationship between the weather community and emergency managers” during disasters. And while Trump’s FEMA administrator has extensive experience in emergency management and the other agencies have interim chiefs, “strong and decisive leadership is always vital when our nation faces tragedies,” Shepherd wrote.

What’s more, it’s terrifying to think that Trump will be handling this crisis while he continues to deny the existence of human-caused climate change, which makes heavy rainfall events like this one more likely. “Climate change is definitely impacting the maximum intensity of rainfall,” Nielsen-Gammon told me, explaining how the warmer atmosphere is able to hold more moisture and therefore release more rainfall during storms. It’s clear Trump doesn’t accept this reality, or any concept of preparation for any climate change-fueled disaster. He recently rolled back flood standards that required new federal infrastructure be built with sea-level-rise in mind. He’s not exactly inspiring confidence that he knows how to prepare for natural disasters.

Of course, there is a chance that something could change—that winds could shift and that Hurricane Harvey could change course, perhaps missing some of Texas’ most populated areas. “There’s a wide range of what could still happen,” Nielsen-Gammon said. There’s also a chance that Trump’s appointees and interim agency chiefs could work together seamlessly, mitigating damage to the best of their abilities. But considering we have both an unpredictable storm and an unpredictable president, we’ll just have to wait and see.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate