Counting the human, environmental and political cost of Hurricane Milton

Hurricane Milton ripped through Florida on Wednesday night and yesterday morning, causing at least four deaths and leaving chaos in its wake. As America woke up, three million households were without power, and harrowing footage continued to emerge throughout the day of wreckage-strewn highways and flood water sloshing through homes and shops.

The second hurricane to make a direct hit on the sunshine state in 12 days, Milton is yet more evidence of the devastating impact of our global climate crisis. Yet in the highly partisan political atmosphere of the US, the storm’s arrival has been marked by false claims and crazy conspiracy theories.

For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Oliver Milman, an environment reporter for Guardian US, to assess the human damage wrought by Hurricane Milton, and its political impact.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘One climate scientist told me it’s like a powder keg just waiting for a spark’

Mass evacuations from heavily populated areas in Hurricane Milton’s path helped to limit the death toll, with 80,000 people in shelters overnight. But homes were destroyed, construction cranes collapsed and high winds ripped the roof off Tropicana Field, home to baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays. At a news conference, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said the storm had thankfully weakened by the time it made landfall, avoiding the “worst case scenario” but had still caused “much destruction and damage”.

DeSantis is himself a climate sceptic, whom campaigners blame for failing to prepare the state adequately for volatile weather events. But Oliver Milman suggests the increased frequency and seriousness of hurricanes may be changing some people’s minds.

“I’ve been speaking to climate scientists who are increasingly hopeful that people are joining the dots on this,” he says. “The ramifications of climate change are incredibly stark when something like this happens.”

A World Weather Attribution group study published this week suggested the warm sea temperatures that fed last month’s deadly Hurricane Helene had been made 200 to 500 times more likely by human-caused global heating. “The heat in the Gulf of Mexico is essentially spawning these huge hurricanes: one climate scientist told me it’s like a powder keg just waiting for a spark,” Oliver says. “The warmth in the atmosphere fuels the storms, makes them more powerful, provides them with far more moisture.” In the case of Hurricane Helene, in North Carolina exceptional levels of rainfall fell many miles from the coast, causing widespread flooding.

A greater risk

Hurricanes are far from unknown in Florida, with some longtime residents regarding them as a tradeoff for the sunshine their state is otherwise blessed with. But a rapidly increasing population over the past decade has put more people in the path of these potentially deadly storms, just as global heating is making them more frequent and more severe.

At the same time, Oliver says climate-sceptic officials in this and other Republican states have been reluctant to tighten building regulations to insist that new homes are future-proofed. “It’s a huge confluence of different things: you see failures all over the place. It means more people at risk; you’ve seen lots of development in areas that are vulnerable,” he says.

The strains have begun showing in the economy, including in the insurance market, with some providers withdrawing from hurricane-prone areas – as well as, for example, from parts of California, where wildfires have become increasingly prevalent. “They’re just refusing cover. So that is potentially existential for the housing market.”

The dangers of conspiracy theories

Rather than confront the severity of the human and economic costs of global heating, however, net zero sceptic Donald Trump and his supporters have been promulgating a series of false claims about the government’s response.

Trump has repeatedly suggested the president, Joe Biden, has been slow to react to Hurricane Helene – despite Republican state governors saying they had received all the help they needed.

More perniciously, the former president has falsely claimed money earmarked for Fema (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) has been “stolen” by his rival for the presidency, Kamala Harris, to spend on housing illegal immigrants.

On the (even) more conspiracy-minded fringes of the Maga movement, the claims are even wilder. In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested the government could somehow “control the weather”.

Oliver says she has been generally ridiculed – but some of the misinformation from Trump and his allies may be hitting home. The mayor of Asheville, North Carolina, which was hit hard by Helene, told him some victims were being discouraged from asking for help because of false information circulating online. Some wrongly believed they would be forced to pay back the $750 emergency grant given to affected homeowners, for example.

The climate crisis agenda

While Biden and Harris have been quick to push back on false claims about the administration’s hurricane response, Oliver says the climate crisis has barely featured in the presidential campaign. Even as two hurricanes have ripped through Florida, he says, “Harris hasn’t really leaned in on climate change”.

Arguably one of Biden’s greatest achievements was passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which included billions of dollars in taxpayer support for green technologies. Yet Oliver points out that it has barely been mentioned. In the television debate, confronting Trump, whose climate policy amounts to “drill baby drill”, Harris boasted about how new leases have recently been opened up for oil extraction, and even fracking.

“It’s the whole reassurance thing that Harris is trying. She wants not to scare moderate Republicans that she’ll stop fossil fuels overnight, or force them to put a windmill in their back garden,” he says.

As the emergency services in Florida work to clear away the devastation left by Hurricane Milton, then, there is little sign as yet that this US storm season will sharpen political debate about the climate crisis.

What else we’ve been reading

“There was a year when I could neither write nor read fiction”: Han Kang has won the Nobel prize in literature, making this an ideal time to acquaint yourself with the South Korean writer and the books that have shaped her life, as told to the Guardian last year. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters

This piece about a long-term reforestation project in and around Rio de Janeiro, and the local community’s role in it, made a heartening contrast to the grim news this week about the rapid pace of deforestation elsewhere in Brazil and across South America. Heather

The Guardian’s new home for consumer reviews and recommendations, The Filter, is here. And if, unlike me, you’re gearing up for an outdoorsy autumn (good for you!), you can now check out the best hiking essentials, as chosen by intrepid writer Paddy Maddison. Sign up here, too, for the soon-to-be-launched Filter newsletter. Hannah

Private equity firms have been on a rapacious buying spree in recent years. In yesterday’s Guardian long read, Alex Blasdel takes a close look at the industry, its super-wealthy owners, and whether they are really the financial geniuses they clam to be. Heather

While they’re usually associated with reluctant school kids, I really liked Sally Howard’s piece on doing a language exchange in her 40s. Hannah

Sport

Football | Lee Carsley suffered his first setback as England’s interim manager as his side lost 2-1 to Greece in the Nations League at Wembley. Here is a full roundup of all the other results – among them, Robbie Brady and Liam Scales spared Nathan Collins’ blushes as the Republic of Ireland fought back to claim victory in Finland. Preston defender Brady smashed home an 88th-minute winner to snatch a 2-1 win.

Tennis | Rafael Nadal, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, has announced he will retire from professional tennis at the end of the season after next month’s Davis Cup finals. Nadal has won 22 grand slam titles, placing him second on the men’s all-time list behind Novak Djokovic with 24. Fourteen of those came at Roland Garros, a tournament he has dominated unlike any player in the sport’s history, compiling an unprecedented 112-4 French Open record.

Football | Greek police say there is no evidence that criminal activity caused the death of the former Sheffield United defender George Baldock. The death of the 31-year-old Greece international, who signed for the Athens club Panathinaikos in the summer, was confirmed in a family statement on Wednesday. According to police sources, his body was found in a swimming pool at his home in Glyfada, southern Athens.

The front pages

The Guardian leads with “UN says Israel deliberately fired on its peacekeepers”. Also on the front, Hurricane Milton’s impact, of which the Metro says “Phew! … Florida dodges ‘worst case scenario’”. “Smiling, caring, hugging Kate is back” – that’s the Daily Mirror on the princess’s “return after cancer fight”. She “dazzles” on the front of the Daily Mail where the lead story is “Reeves tax hike plan that will cost billions”. The Times has “Workers bill set to help unions raise Labour cash” while the i goes with “Carers set for pay rise under new Rayner law”. It’s an “‘Impossible choice’ to heat or eat” this winter for pensioners, the Daily Express claims after the cut to fuel payments. “Private hospitals to rescue the NHS” says the Telegraph.

Something for the weekend

Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read and listen to right now

Music
Jelly Roll – Beautifully Broken
Just past the halfway mark on the country artist’s new 22-track album, he grapples with his current celebrity, via sagas of homesickness for Tennessee. You can forgive DeFord for dwelling on the subject – before his 2020 track Save Me propelled him into the spotlight, he had spent more than 15 years on the margins. The stadium-ready pop-rock here is well written enough to carry you along, but the originality comes from his gravelly, untutored voice. Alexis Petridis

TV
Disclaimer (Apple TV+)
Alfonso Cuarón’s new series sees Cate Blanchett play garlanded TV documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft, who receives a copy of a novel called The Perfect Stranger. It becomes clear that the protagonist of the book is her, and that the author knows the secret she has been keeping for 20 years. Disclaimer asks questions like: who gets to tell stories? And what kind of idiot starts frying sole meunière when it’s obvious her husband is going to be late? Lucy Mangan
Film
Timestalker
Film-maker Alice Lowe dreams her way into a cosmically recurring persona in this likably chaotic, flawed comedy. She plays a woman who regenerates Blackadderishly throughout the years, from the 1680s to the 1980s, forever in love with the same man, almost but not quite in possession of the knowledge that this guy is unworthy of her. The throwaway gags and throwaway ideas reminded me pleasantly of the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled from 1967: Lowe’s comedy has bite. Peter Bradshaw

Podcast
Mag Hags
Widely available, episodes weekly
Problem pages, sex tips and advertorials for lamb: vintage women’s magazines are a rich landscape. Journalists Franki Cookney and Lucy Douglas ask what’s changed as they flick through an issue of Cosmopolitan from October 1982 with all its sex tactics, advice from men and – in what was an enduring staple of the genre – the promise of a flat stomach. Hannah Verdier

Today in Focus

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

A rewilding charity is releasing a herd of large cattle-like tauros into the Highlands to mimic an ecological role played by their extinct wild ancestor, the aurochs. The tauros have been “back-bred” to replicate the behaviour of the extinct cattle species in order to increase biodiversity and wildlife in the region.

Steve Micklewright, chief executive of the charity, said: “Introducing the aurochs-like tauros to the Highlands four centuries after their wild ancestors were driven to extinction will refill a vital but empty ecological niche – allowing us to study how these remarkable wild cattle can be a powerful ally for tackling the nature and climate emergencies.”

Tauros move around in large social groups enabling a “mosaic of diverse habitats” across landscapes. Rutting tauros form “bull pits”, bowls of bare earth carved out by bulls’ horns and hooves, which support invertebrates and pioneer plants.

Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday

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