Andrew Revkin

If you look at the history, and this is published research, it's just that no one bothers to... We have this blind spot for...

The longer timescale you need to examine if you're thinking about big, bad things that are rare, and hurricanes are still rare.

I was recently covering Fort Myers, the awful devastation.

There's a young climate scientist at Florida Gulf Coast University, Joe Muller,

who's done that paleotempestology work there, right in Fort Myers.

She lives there and she was away in London at a meeting of reinsurance companies that reinsure all the world's big bad risks when this was happening.

But she has done the work that shows it's a thousand year record of past hurricanes and it's super sobering.

When you consider how fast people have moved into Florida and built vulnerably in an area that hurricanes will hammer, that's part of the fundamental dynamics of the Gulf of Mexico and the storms come off of Africa.

It's a place where they will come.

Now, the question of global warming impact is subtle.

There are aspects of hurricanes that haven't changed.

There's aspects like rainfall that seem pretty powerfully linked to global warming.

A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so when you have a big disturbance like the heat engine of a hurricane comes through it, you get more rain.

This rapid intensification, how quickly these storms

jump from category one to five or four before they hit is a new area of science.

So I think it's still early days in knowing, because no one was looking for that.

There were no data back 300 years ago when these big, bad previous hurricanes came to know whether they were rapidly intensified or not.

So as a journalist, I try to

you know, keep track of what we don't know, not be too constrained and think about new science as being, you know, robust unless it's considering and actually actively stating we don't really know what's going on with earlier hurricanes.

And all of that is swamped ultimately, literally, by the vulnerability, building vulnerability in these areas.