Andrew Revkin

And the most illuminating body of science that I've dug in on, literally, related to hurricanes is this field that's emerged.

It gets a tiny bit of money compared to climate modeling.

It's called paleotempestology.

It's like paleontology.

They look for evidence of past hurricanes along coasts that we care about.

And they dig down into the lagoons behind, like the barrier beaches along Florida or the Carolinas or in Puerto Rico.

And what you have is a history book of past hurricanes.

So there's mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud.

And when you look at that work, I first wrote about this in 2001 in The Times, a long story, and then I kept track of these intrepid scientists putting these core tubes down.

It shows you that we're in a landscape where big, bad hurricanes are not, they're the norm.

But something that's rare and big is something that's extreme.

When you think about the word extreme, right, it means it's at the end of the spectrum of what's possible.

They're rare.

Rare in human timescales.

Hurricane Michael, four years ago, devastated.

Category 5 came ashore in the panhandle of Florida.

Leveled that much photographed town, Mexico Beach.

And actually, the Tallahassee National Weather Service said, unprecedented hurricane.

And the damage was unprecedented because there hadn't been a community there before.

But the hurricane was not unprecedented at all.