Hurricane Helene reminds us there are no climate havens

If you were asked to draw the front lines of climate change on a map of the US, you’d probably include all the coasts, along with Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana and Texas. It might not occur to you to include western North Carolina, a temperate, mountainous place hundreds of miles inland.

And yet the climate emergency, in the form of Hurricane Helene, has come to this idyllic region of the Appalachians. Some places there received more than 2 feet of rain before and during the storm, causing biblical flooding that has taken at least 40 lives, wiped away towns and roads and lifted houses from their pilings to float away downstream. It’s stark evidence that no matter how insulated people might feel from the global heating humanity has caused by burning fossil fuels and otherwise generating planet-warming gases, there are no real safe havens.

Nearly half a million people in North Carolina were without power days after the storm, along with more than a million others in states from Florida to Ohio. At one point, every North Carolina road from Catawba County to the state’s far western corner, a distance of about 200 miles, was closed to traffic. Even the lucky few who could drive couldn’t get gasoline. That left many people trapped in disaster areas with no mobile-phone service and dwindling supplies of food and medicine. Grocery store shelves were stripped clean for miles around, in scenes reminiscent of the pandemic. Some people were running low on water, their local sources contaminated by flooding.

AccuWeather, a private forecasting company, on Monday morning raised its estimate of Helene’s total economic damage to up to $160 billion from an initial estimate of up to $110 billion, partially because of the scenes in the Appalachians. This estimate includes not only the initial physical destruction but the loss of businesses, jobs and productivity. That would make it one of the most destructive hurricanes on record, joining the ranks of such infamous names as Katrina, Harvey, Sandy and Ian.

But those storms struck heaviest in the places you’d expect, along the shores of the Gulf and Atlantic. Helene wreaked havoc there, too, hammering Florida’s Gulf coast, but still had enough destructive force to devastate places hundreds of miles inland.

For all of this we can thank a warming planet. Climate change didn’t create Helene, but it turbocharged it. Superheated waters in the Gulf of Mexico, 80 degrees Fahrenheit at 300 feet of depth by AccuWeather’s estimate, helped turn a tropical storm into a widespread, Category 4 monster over just a few days. The water it carried to the Appalachians joined with creeks and rivers already swollen with earlier rainfall to create unimaginable floods.

I’m a frequent proponent of managed retreat from climate-vulnerable areas. If you had asked me a week ago, I would probably have recommended Asheville, North Carolina, as an ideal spot to ride out the climate emergency. It’s a lovely, vibrant city far from the ocean, with plenty of fresh water and not so vulnerable to heat. I wasn’t alone; Asheville often pops up on lists of possible climate havens. All of us were tragically wrong.

Science-fiction author Jeff VanderMeer wrote in the New York Times about evacuating from Tallahassee, Florida, ahead of Helene and heading for Greenville, South Carolina, for safety. Surely 400 miles would be enough distance to escape the worst of the hurricane. Instead, he found himself trapped in the same disaster, one the National Weather Service in Greenville and Spartanburg called “the worst event in our office’s history.”

So what are we to do? First, we must recognize that hotter air and water is a recipe for chaos anywhere, turning formerly ordinary storms into billion-dollar disasters in unexpected places, and prepare ourselves and our communities accordingly. Some places truly are more vulnerable to storm surge, heat waves and other climate-fueled catastrophes than others, and we should avoid those when relocating. But we should also avoid any false sense of security wherever we are.

Second, we must stop the behavior that has already warmed the planet 1.3 degrees Celsius, on average, above preindustrial averages. Any further warming will only make these storms more destructive.

Our personal choices can help on the margins and build demand for cleaner solutions, but our greatest superpower to fight climate change is political. American voters have a stark choice this November, between one candidate who cast the deciding vote for the most significant climate action in history, the Inflation Reduction Act, and another who would hamstring the National Weather Service because it talks too much about climate change. I’ll give you one guess who that latter candidate is, and his name rhymes with “Donald Trump.”

Most voters think the economy is a more immediate concern than fighting climate change, when in fact the two are inseparable. Just ask the people whose homes and businesses have just been erased from existence and whose insurance rates are about to surge. Some of that $160 billion in possible economic damage might be recouped by rebuilding, but the lost economic potential of human lives and industry is irreplaceable.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.