Vermont Conversation: Where are all these superstorms coming from?

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and citizens who are making a difference. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts or Spotify to hear more.

What used to be called 100-year floods are now annual occurrences. Summer 2023 was the wettest ever in Vermont , with 2 feet of rain falling on the state. One storm submerged the capital of Montpelier. This July saw towns such as Plainfield ripped apart by raging rivers . In Connecticut this month, a storm dropped more than a foot of rain, leading to deadly and destructive flooding.

Author Porter Fox says the source of these deluges — as well as heat waves, fires, and floods — is the ocean, where about 90% of global warming is occurring. This is the inexorable consequence of human-caused climate change. The top layer of the ocean has warmed about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which is “large enough to transform marine biodiversity, change ocean chemistry, raise sea levels, and fuel extreme weather,” reports the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute .

Fox explains the connection between oceans, climate change and extreme weather in his new book, “ Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them .”

Fox has a personal connection to the ocean. He grew up on Mount Desert Island in Maine, home to Acadia National Park. His father was a renowned boat builder, and Fox learned the craft of ocean sailing by trial and lots of error.

He later attended Middlebury College and wrote about skiing adventures all around the world as an editor of Powder Magazine but has now returned to his first love, the sea. Fox’s other books include “The Last Winter” and “Northland.”

In “Category Five,” Fox captures the awesome power of the ocean by profiling a legendary storm sailor, a mapmaker and a maker of sailing drones, among others.

“The ocean is the mother of all weather. It’s like a battery that is getting charged up by this excess heat that we have,” Fox said. This is creating squalls and hurricanes with “metrics that we’ve never seen before.”

These monster storms are “traveling farther while moving slower, thus dumping more water and the ferocity of their winds has more time to wreak havoc as they go,” Fox said.

“A full throated ocean gale is absolutely terrifying,” he said. These storms have an “explosive sound and shrieking and raging wind and waves that are so powerful they can toss around a 30,000 pound boat like it’s a little toy.”

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Even landlocked places such as Vermont are experiencing the power of the ocean.

“Most of the rain that you see in Vermont comes off of the ocean and evaporation. So we have a hotter climate over the ocean. We have more evaporation. We have more energy being infused into the atmosphere,” Fox said. “So every front, every thunderstorm, every squall, every rainstorm is directly connected to the ocean.”

The warming ocean has transformed how and when storms occur. “Hurricane season used to be roughly from June to November,” Fox said.

Hurricanes have recently occurred in January and May. “Now there is no off season,” he said.

What would it take to fix what is broken?

“It’s kind of an obvious answer: just a little bit of everything,” Fox said. That includes “changing how we create and consume energy around the world, closing down coal-fired power plants, changing from gas cars to electric cars or hydrogen batteries.”

“Without the ocean, we’d be gone by now,” Fox said. “That 90% of the heat that it is absorbed (by oceans) would be right up in the atmosphere. Temperatures would be unbearable. Storms would be so much more powerful. And yet the ocean is this buffer.”

“There’s a lot of checks and balances, and it’s perhaps the reason that this little blue ball of a planet has maintained life for so long,” he said.

“If we can just be aware of that and kind of nudge some of those balances,” Fox said, “you could bring the planet back to the way it was pre-1800s.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Where are all these superstorms coming from? .