As reported in DK, we’re seeing that when apocalyptic smoke and dangerously humid heat hits the eastern part of the U.S., the nation’s corporate-media storytellers may actually begin to take global warming seriously. This afternoon in the headquarters cities of the corporate press, New York City and Washington DC, the Air Quality Index reached a cough-inducing 145 and 166, respectively. In the nation’s third most populous city, Chicago, the AQI today hit a (literally) eye-watering 285, courtesy of Canadian wildfire smoke.
While the deep South sizzles and the northeast quadrant of the nation chokes on particles and smoke, the western side of North America, which endured a long, cold winter, so far has not started to heat up much except in the expected locations in California’s inland valleys and deserts. However, the U.S. West Coast likely will have its day in the sun, so to speak, before long.
Meanwhile, hotter-than-usual ocean water in the Eastern Pacific basin is having a predictable effect: cranking up the hurricanes.
This satellite photo shows that today in the eastern Pacific basin there is one full-on hurricane, which was named Adrian, and a former tropical depression by the coast of southern Mexico that just earned the name Beatriz by becoming a tropical storm.
The blue image in this post shows the names selected for tropical storms in the Pacific (left) and Atlantic (right), presented like a scorecard for those who want to keep track as summer progresses.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center reports that based on records made between 1990 and 2020 we should expect two named storms, one of which becomes a hurricane, in the eastern Pacific basin by June 29. So the situation sounds pretty normal so far, right?
Not quite. According to the 1990-2020 baseline, one would not expect a second full-on hurricane until July 15, yet Beatriz is forecast to spin up into a hurricane within 24 hours, fueled by very warm sea surface temperatures that are typical off Mexico’s southern Pacific coastline.
More importantly, I’ll bet there is very little precedent for two named storms to be churning along in the eastern Pacific at the same time while it’s still June. That alone is nerve-wracking.
Worse yet, hurricanes these days have a disquieting habit of intensifying rapidly to major hurricanes that no one predicted, thanks to all that heat we fossil fuel users have pumped into our oceans over recent decades. Will Beatriz give Cabo vacationers and the nearly 400,000 residents of this rapidly growing region an unpleasant surprise and show up not as a mere tropical storm as presently forecast, but a powerful hurricane?
I see two reasons to predict otherwise: First, the storm is grinding its way up Mexico’s southwest coastline, and while its eastern flank is over land, it may draw less energy from ocean heat than if it were moving over open tropical ocean. The second reason is that the waters west of Cabo are still cold, and south of the tip of the Baja California peninsula there are some patches of water under 80 degrees. Sure enough, a few dozen miles NW of Cabo the storm is forecast to have devolved to a mere tropical depression. However, this is no time to get comfortable. The story could be quite different a couple of days from now.
Unless some U.S.-citizen vacationers run into trouble in the upcoming storm, I doubt the corporate media even will mention Beatriz or the fact that two named storms are spinning their way through the eastern Pacific in June, or that this phenomenon, too, may well be the product of global warming.