plenty of experience...pfft...you are cluelessEveryone knew that...

plenty of experience...pfft...you are clueless

Everyone knew that a storm this size would eventually hit the city of Tampa on the west central coast of the Floridian peninsula, and that the cost to human life and property could be catastrophic.

As far back as 2015, the Boston-based disaster modelling firm, Karen Clark & Company, issued a report saying that Tampa, which is both low-lying and heavily populated, was the US city most vulnerable to a hurricane. It estimated the cost of a large hurricane to the area’s residential and commercial property to be about $US175 billion ($260 billion).

Scientists warned that climate change was speeding up sea-level rise such that the storm surges caused by the hurricanes that formed each year over the Gulf of Mexico were rapidly becoming more destructive.
As the warnings kept coming in, the former governor, Republican Rick Scott, responded by banning state officials from using the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in official communications.
The current Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, followed up by banning the use of the terms in state laws. The same legislation also prohibited offshore wind turbines and cut restrictions on gas pipelines. “I’m not a global warming person. I don’t want that label on me,” he explained in his 2018 campaign.

The data that was causing Morales such distress was the storm’s intensification. Milton grew in intensity at a speed that has shocked observers, growing from category 1 to 5 in just 24 hours.


A study last year suggested that storms originating in the Atlantic Ocean are now more than twice as likely to strengthen from category 1 to category 3 in just 36 hours, based on data from 2001-2020, compared with 1971-1990, Reuters reported this week.