Hurricane Beryl and Other Storms
Since we last spoke, climate change has really stomped around and fucked shit up in the United States. There have been virtually continuous heat waves across the country, potentially the fastest wind speeds ever recorded in a tornado, and the earliest category 5 hurricane since we've been tracking such things. Hurricane Beryl in particular is a truly potent bellwether for how our world is beginning to operate. I think we very well may come to realize that we are already post-1.5C–that is to say, crossing the threshold temperature set by the IPCC measured against pre-industrial times to prevent catastrophic warming. Crossing that threshold and staying past it means we're in truly uncharted territory, and all we can hope to guess about how our world will change with this much trapped thermal energy is that it is likely to be very, very bad, and likely to only get worse.
So let's talk about Beryl, and about the heatwaves across the US, and about how people are responding to these things–because it's indicative of how disappointing our government is and how resourceful people are. It's a weird world we're living in, but it's not all bad news. Well, it's mostly bad.
Oppressive Heat
Across the country, heat waves have come and gone and come back again, breaking records or, at least, making life miserable in a more regular way. Personally, I haven't seen Ohio this dry and hot this early in recent memory–it's not truly an exceptional drought or, really, an exceptional heatwave, but it looks like late August if my yard were any indication*, which is classically a very hot, very dry month. We have seen rain and storms, and a windstorm took down about a quarter of my corn crop–truly a blow as I had planted some "ultraviolet" and was looking forward to the harvest. Even still, our rainfall for the season is below where we need to be, and the corn I've still got up is very thirsty.
Elsewhere, where the heat is more dangerous, deaths have been racking up. The heat has been breaking records in the West and the Northeast, with temperatures in Death Valley scraping the all-time high and ditto for Maine, of all places. It's also been wreaking havoc on our infrastructure, both on the ground and in the sky. Much like the PNW heat dome of 2021, public transit was hobbled by heat, delaying tens of thousands of commuters in New Jersey and New York. For air travel, which is just a bad idea all around anymore, heat waves require planes to lighten loads or burn much more fuel. Delays abound, and at times flights are outright canceled if the temperatures are high enough.
Trying to keep my garden alive, I get the sneaking feeling–bolstered by quite a bit of science–that this is how things will be. These heat waves, especially here in Ohio, will blur into a haze of general high temperatures. Rain will come and go, more and more often in harmful deluges instead of showers, and in between the land will dry up and critters will look to your garden for food. Bear this in mind as I learned the hard way.
*Written in mid-July
Beryl
Hurricane Beryl began as most do–a relatively unassuming disturbance. With super-charged heat in the Atlantic in late June, Beryl quickly graduated to a hurricane in the Mid-Atlantic, where it garnered the attention of scientists who saw the makings of a powerful storm. Within about a day, Beryl went from a Category-1 storm to a heavy Cat-4, striking the Yucatan Peninsula before strengthening into a full-blown Category-5 hurricane in the Caribbean.
Hurricane Beryl is exceptional for its longevity, its phenomenal acceleration from a no-name disturbance into Category-5, and its arrival in the season; Beryl is the earliest recorded Atlantic Cat-5. It is believed to have killed over fifty people and caused more than six billion in damages. And that's not all. After making landfall in Houston as a Category-1 storm, Beryl contributed to the ever-increasing stack of crises that occur everywhere on the planet–and in Houston in particular. It continued north, losing most of its considerable strength, before it was considered fully dissipated in Canada. That's a big ride for a July hurricane.
For damages and loss of life–though I hate to minimize any–Beryl was not especially remarkable. But it is a very ominous storm in its arrival date, its rapid intensification, and its context as a disaster among disasters. The hurricane season this year is predicted to be especially brutal, and that may yet bear out, but I think we can set Beryl as something of a marker in the turn of meteorological history, along with a handful of other storms in the recent past, toward unpredictability.
Where we leave the Atlantic at the moment is having dropped off from record-high heat thanks to a wave of Saharan dust blanketing the skies, and Beryl having stirred up relatively cooler waters, temporarily blunting any developing storms. But with the planet still exceedingly warm and another El Nino likely only a few years away, we're not that far off from our next surge in heat.
Houston: the City of Tomorrow
Houston, unfortunately located in the infrastructural Kafka-scape of Texas, has had a bad few months. In May, Houston flooded after torrential rains dropped 23 inches of water on the city. Weeks later, a derecho blew through town and caused a ton of damage, only to be followed up with another severe storm and tornadoes at the end of the month. There was not much time to recuperate before Beryl struck.
Beryl walloped the already vulnerable city, and dropped power for three million people. The storm surge flooded the coast, and even more rain and wind struck a region that really didn't need any more. To make matters worse, Beryl was followed by a prolonged heat wave that has killed at least 23 people. That may not seem like a lot to you, but consider that in the face of three waves of storms, it was the heat after the fact that killed the most–effectively a knock-on event that on its own would have likely killed next to no one.
But Houston, as previously established, is in Texas, where ERCOT reigns and, one assumes, infrastructural analysts draw all their examples of what not to do. To be sure, three powerful storms in a row is not a cakewalk. But Houston, and Texas in general, is prepared so poorly and responded so poorly that, if you haven't already heard, Houstonians had to rely on a Whataburger location app to get updates on power outages. That is fucked–there's no other way to put it. You should be able to rely on your government and power company to provide you with updates on outages, and you should not have to rely on one of the nation's superior burger joints for the same. Having to do so means that capital has truly won and our government is so much wasted space.
Where We're All Headed
Houston is what the future looks like for a lot of us. There is really no region in the US in which we will see an increase in atmospheric stability–meaning we're all going to see more storms, not fewer, as climate change continues to worsen. We will all, also, increasingly see our infrastructure crumble and fail as the government is forced to sink more money into cops in order to keep "order" as everything else in the country fails. A summer like Houston's is not far off for anyone, in short.
I'm finding myself more and more preoccupied with this kind of an emergency, as these situations seem to crop of with a frequency in the real world and, of course, a to-come predicted frequency. While Trump and JD Vance and Project 2025 grab headlines–and rightfully so, as they are frightening and ridiculous–it's street-level trouble like this that will get you killed or strike you down with organ failure. There is literally nowhere in the lower 48 safe from this kind of weather, so don't act like you're immune. Stock water, find an alternative power source for keeping yourself cool if possible, and get in touch with vulnerable members of your community. It might not come for you this year, but it's coming.