A MAGA Storm Surge: Machinations About Hurricane Milton

“Nobody Can Control the Weather"

As a huge hurricane heads towards the west coast of Florida, the MAGAites are frothing, triggered by claims about government malfeasance in recovery and relief efforts in the wake of Helene and weather modification in the creation of Milton.

Of course, they are not frothing about scientists estimating that climate change increased Hurricane Helene’s rainfall by up to 50% in parts of the Carolinas and Georgia, dumping more than 40 trillion gallons of water.

And they’re certainly not talking about how FEMA asked for more money last year, as the U.S. experienced a record number of disasters costing more than $1 billion — 28 in all. As of August of this year, we’ve had 19 billion-dollar events, not counting the recent hurricanes, and with a relatively mild fire season.

But conversations about how their imagined version of the Deep State used up all the disaster relief money on immigrants… you betcha.

The shitstorm’s gotten so bad that even Republicans are stepping up to denounce the numerous conspiracy theories. North Carolina Republican Congress member Chuck Edwards issued a remarkable statement dispelling rumors and saying "nobody can control the weather."

Via CBS News:

• Some of the most bizarre conspiracy theories that have spread online claimed politicians manipulated the weather to target Republicans areas in the battleground state and that the federal government was trying to seize land in the town of Chimney Rock to mine lithium. 

• "Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock," Edwards said, adding that there is no technology that can geoengineer a hurricane and local officials confirmed the government is not taking control of the town. 

• He also denied that local officials were abandoning search and rescue efforts to bulldoze the town, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was blocking donations from reaching survivors and diverting disaster funding to the border and foreign aid. The federal agency could not seize residents' property and the Federal Aviation Administration is not restricting access to airspace for search and recovery operations, he said. 

The White House committed to yet another social media platform on Tuesday, launching a Reddit page, in part to "correct misinformation" about storms.

Jonathan Katz wrote about this malicious propaganda effort:

• But just as disaster-response systems are most effective when they coordinate and combine local and organic efforts, it’s impossible to miss the ways that the messaging is being weaponized and amplified from the top of the ticket.

• Trump and his allies clearly want to use these hurricanes to create confusion and distrust, which they hope to exploit to win votes. If they are successful, then the one thing we can be sure of is that the disasters of the future will continue to worsen: not just because climate change will get worse, but because — as laid out in Project 2025 — the very agencies that prevent, mitigate, and respond to disasters, including the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, and FEMA, will be gutted, defunded, and stripped for parts. 

• Because while governments can’t direct the weather, they can leave us more vulnerable to it — especially by turning us against one another. That’s why it’s so important to fight the lies, and to remind ourselves and each other of the biggest fact of all about disasters and crises of all kinds: we get through them better, together.

The weather modification theories preceding hurricane Milton have oozed into some mainstream media reporting.

The “fun” part of the weather modification claim is the “why?” question. Pick one: 

• a) because the impacted counties are heavily Republican (Central Florida has both Red and Blue counties) 

• b) “Climate change is the new COVID” says Georgia GOP Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (It’s setting up a dictatorship for Democrats).and 

• c) voting becomes impossible just before elections (includes both Helene and Milton)

Authorities in counties projected to be impacted by the (probably) category 3 storm once it makes landfall have been unequivocally saying people need to leave, like yesterday. About one in five won’t, if past evacuations are any indication.

One wannabe victim is even staying behind to promote her upcoming book, according to Taylor Lorenz, who’s graduated from the Washington Post to her own Substack (User Mag).

• Naturally, Caroline is already using the impending danger to promote her book.

• “I’m not evacuating for the hurricane. I live in Sarasota, on the beach, in evacuation zone A,” she tweeted on Tuesday. “For more great advice, buy my second book! It’s called Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life. It’s about to come out if I survive! It’s an advice book ;-) Cute!!!!! <3”

• As with everything Caroline does, it’s unclear how much of this is performance art and how much she’s risking her own life.

Once the storm waters recede, you can be sure that the rumors about government indifference, migrants looting, etc., will flood the MAGAspere.

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At this point I’m sure many readers are ready to throw up their hands in frustration with the flat earthers and their tales of woe. However, there are things YOU can do; today, even.

1. Vote, If you live in Congressional District 51, make sure to mark your ballot for Sara Jacobs. In addition to having a good environmental voting record, her opponent, El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells is a climate change denier. The Democrats running in other  Congressional districts are all way better than their Republican opponents.

2. Vote for Proposition 4, authorizing the state to issue bonds for needed infrastructure and climate risk mitigation.

3. Vote for Measure E, the City of San Diego half cent sales tax increase; the money needed for near-term maintenance and repair of local infrastructure will be there when we need it, which will be sooner than you think.

4. Vote for Measure G, the county-wide half-cent sales tax, putting money into the pot for transportation infrastructure. I know there’s been plenty of badmouthing on this one, thanks to mismanagement at SANDAG and those who want more freeways, but the fact is the region will need to have funds available to create the commons needed to help mitigate climate change. And every year we delay will be another “we shoulda” regret larger on.

5. Finally, the obvious step, remember that every vote for the GOP Presidential candidate is validation of the one billion dollars he asked dirty energy companies to provide for his campaign.

If there’s one positive aspect to the natural disasters occurring on the other side of the country, it’s that the conversations about climate change have been elevated. Keep talking, folks, they’re listening.

From How Fossil Fuels Mutated Milton, via Arielle Samuelson at HEATED:

• It’s easy to understand how pollution heats the ocean. Oceans are one of the Earth’s greatest carbon sinks, absorbing 93 percent of heat trapped by greenhouse gases since 1970. That’s helped keep temperatures on land lower than they otherwise would be, but there’s a tradeoff: Research suggests that warmer sea temperatures may lead to more rapidly-intensifying tropical cyclones, which include tropical storms and hurricanes.

• “Really warm ocean waters are an ideal fuel source for a hurricane like Milton,” said Andra Garner, a hurricane scientist at Rowan University.

• In the past two weeks, ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were about 30-31 degrees Celsius (86-88°F)—about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius above average. The climate crisis made these extraordinarily high ocean temperatures at least 400 to 800 times more likely over the past two weeks, according to a rapid attribution study from Climate Central.

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Wednesday News to Peruse

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Helene Should Trigger a National Rethink of Home Insurance by Kate Aronoff at The New Republic

• Given the sheer extent of uninsured flood losses that Appalachians, especially, could be facing, Hurricane Helene could provide an opportunity to discuss more transformative reforms to the program than just raising rates to better reflect risk. “If there’s an understanding that there are no safe places, then maybe we’ll see a reckoning with the possibility that this is a risk and a cost that needs to be socialized much more broadly,” Elliott added. “Extending mandatory coverage to all property owners,” in line with the approach taken in New Zealand, “could become thinkable in a way that it never has been before.”  

• Absent serious investments in risk-mitigation efforts, the home insurance crisis is only likely to worsen: leaving the least risky policies to private insurers, overburdening public insurers of last resort, and displacing lower-income renters and owners who can no longer afford their homes—all trends exacerbated by wide-reaching disasters like Hurricane Helene. “The idea that you need to pool risk smartly is a smart one,” Taylor tells me. “At the same time, I think there are limits to the extent to which a world of growing risk and growing exposure and loss can continue to be a lucrative for-profit financial market without something else changing.”

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El Salvador faces scrutiny for ‘political’ trial of five environmental activists by Nina Lakhani at The Guardian

• The five activists are among more than 70,000 people detained since Bukele declared a state of emergency and suspended basic rights after a surge in gang violence in March 2022.

• Since sweeping to power in 2019, Bukele and his allies have taken steps to “effectively co-opt democratic institutions”, replacing independent judges, prosecutors and officials with political allies, according to Human Rights Watch.

• In a letter to the government in March 2023, a group of UN special rapporteurs and the vice-president of the UN working group on arbitrary detention, said: “We fear that the case is an attempt to intimidate those who seek to defend the environment in the country, and especially those who defend human rights from the negative impacts of mining.”

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Chief Justice Roberts said to be 'shaken,' 'weary' after public criticism of his crap decisions and crooked court By Hunter Lazzaro at The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places

• Really now. Really, Roberts was "shaken" by the public outrage—the most vocal of it coming from legal and Constitutional experts—that followed his bizarre and thoroughly unasked for treatise vastly expanding the abilities of presidents to commit crimes and snub their noses at anyone who tries to hold them to account. When faced with the first genuine attempt to overthrow the United States government since the Civil War, all of it for the purposes of soothing a rich asshole's inflated ego and allowing his collection of assembled fascist toadies to ignore a constitutional election and remain in power regardless of their election loss, Roberts chose that moment and that case to wax on about how Gosh, Actually, perhaps launching a coup against the government could be considered an official presidential duty if the shitbird in charge scribbled out the plan on an "official" White House napkin...

• ...and Roberts was, we are to believe, caught off guard by the vast majority of legal scholars and public non-scholars seeing it as an egregious and crooked attempt to immunize the coup-attempters and describe a path by which they could best succeed in their ongoing attempts this time around.

• That claim, if it is indeed accurate, leaves us with only two possible interpretations of events. Either Roberts is, truly, among the most vapid, hollow-headed and stupid Americans to ever be appointed to the bench, to be caught so unawares, or the man has crawled so far up his own colon that he no longer can see the sky. Dear God, he was surprised by this outcome?

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