Andrew Revkin

You know, if there's a marginal change in a storm,

and you've quadrupled or sextupled how much stuff and how many people are in the way, and if some of those people are poor and vulnerable or elderly and can't swim, you're creating a landscape of destruction.

You added intensity.

Let me just get into this a tiny bit more.

I mean, hurricanes...

I grew up with them in Rhode Island in my youth, and there was a very active period of hurricanes in New England in the 50s and 60s, 70s.

And then in the North Atlantic, generally, it was very, very active in the 50s when I was a kid.

And the dynamics of them forming off of Africa and coming here, circling up the coast, was just prime time.

Then there was like what Kerry Emanuel, who's the most experienced hurricane climate scientist around at MIT, he's in this story, he's in my 1988 article.

He and colleagues have found and others that,

There's what they call a hurricane drought from like the 70s through about 1994 in the Atlantic, specifically the Atlantic Basin.

And there's been a lot of questions about that.

People thought it was ocean circulation, something about the currents.

There are these multi-decadal variabilities in the oceans, right?

And then now it looks robustly, I can't find a climate scientist who disagrees that the thing that caused the drought was pollution, smog.

And significantly in Europe.

And you say, well, how did smog in Europe relate to hurricanes crossing the Atlantic and getting to the United States?

It's because of the smog was changing the behavior of the Sahara Desert, which is just south of Europe.

And the Sahara Desert kills hurricanes.

Sand and dust coming off the Sahara.