Throughout the past year over six major hurricanes have slammed the country, destroyed entire towns, and anything and anyone in their paths. With more hurricanes projected to barrel across the Gulf of Mexico before the end of 2024, many have called this bad luck and unfortunate planning, while scientists sit back, knowing they have been warning society about this for the past 20+ years.
Hurricane Helene has taken the nation by storm, literally. Entire neighborhoods wiped off the face of the earth, a death toll of over 130, and hundreds of people missing with no clue of where the storm drove them.
Yet, blame for this situation has been forced onto all the wrong people, with comments like “citizens didn’t prepare enough,” or “politicians didn’t set aside enough money.” This is something that has been snowballing for over a decade now. Global warming has made its presence very evident, and after decades of ignoring the data, we are now all
feeling the consequences with record high heat and sea levels.
Warm waters and dry air only intensify the weather, with more rainfall, stronger winds, worse flooding, and according to the IPPC the warmer the Earth gets the more extreme these side effects will become. But how could we have avoided this? How could we have known climate change would worsen not only our weather and planet, but our day-to-day life? Other than the hundreds of thousands of protesters that have said this for years, scientists have been putting out projections of our fate as far back as 1989.
All around the world for decades there have been some (not) so subtle alarm bells going off for over twenty years, all that have been ignored or belittle- resulting in hurricanes that cross over three states in the span of days and annihilate towns that had been standing for centuries before that, and as they were saying in as far back as 1989, “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
