The death toll from Hurricane Helene has risen to 200 as rescuers continue to search for survivors from the storm that tore across the US south-east.
More than half of the deaths were in North Carolina, where entire communities were uprooted and devastated by the deadliest mainland storm since Katrina in 2005.
Hundreds of people are still missing and nearly a million homes are without power nearly a week after Helene made landfall.
I swear this is something people are missing with climate change. Yeah, 1.5 degree warming of the land, water and air isn’t alot… until you realize how much energy that takes at a regional or global scale…
And that is added to every natural disaster.
There is just no way to communicate these numbers effectively to the masses 😕
The minute you mention 1.5 degrees people turn their brain off, as “that can’t possibly be a problem”
You have to spend like 2 weeks explaining weather, climate and history before somone is educated enough to understand the problem.
Meanwhile bad actors can just say it was cold today in August! Where’s your global warming??
And all your work is undone in 2 seconds…
It’s fucking frustrating
I really like the way Katharine Hayhoe communicates this…
She explains how normal temperature fluctuations in the climate system are actually pretty similar, scaled down, to temperature fluctuations in your body throughout the day. You don’t typically worry if your body gets slightly warmer than average, but if it’s a a couple of degrees, suddenly you’re wanting to see the doctor, wondering who coughed on you, staying home from work, etc
Maybe we should report this as some “the global warming till now is equivalent to throwing x atom bombs in our frickin atmosphere” and people may start realizing.
Atmospheres with frickin atom bombs attached to their heads!
Never thought about that way, very good point. Pretty disastrous
How many more are predicted this season? I thought I read they feel it’s probable at least another hurricane will hit the US this season. Isn’t that why FEMA is freaking out because they don’t have the money/resources to handle another?
There’s been a 40% chance of another storm right in the gulf for the last week. It’s possible that the same devastated area gets hit again before they’ve even had a chance to figure out what happened last week.
Here’s the thing: I think the Republicans are going to try to human sacrifice in Florida for votes.
They’re already spinning the FEMA funding issue as being because FEMA “spent all their money on immigrants,” and another devastating hurricane where FEMA can’t help as effectively would allow them to run with the idea they’re already currently (ineffectively) trying to push, which is that FEMA isn’t helping.
They’re already saying they won’t vote for additional FEMA funding due to the bullshit “immigrants” thing. So they’re going to try to flat-foot FEMA, hope for a horrifying national disaster, blame FEMA for letting people die while spending money on immigrants, and then attempt to pin it on (Biden) Harris.
They’re trying to position themselves so they can let people die in order to win an election. And it’s very possible it will work.
Well they sacrificed 4,000 of my friends for votes so that tracks.
I’m fully confident that Republicans in Florida would support this idea. I think they’d literally be willing to die to make Biden look bad. Fucked up world.
The worst of Helene hardly scratched Florida compared to what happened in Western North Carolina. Cities and towns entirely wiped out.
Most of these places are so devastated that there is no infrastructure left to allow voting to happen with. Many of the hit places are republican strongholds. Withholding funding will only hurt Republicans.
So let them try this, it’s their own asses on the line
Asheville is the hardest hit area from what I understand and it’s extremely blue.
Yet we send 20 billion to Israel to murder more brown people with.
When is America gonna start caring about Americans?
It’s absolutely wild that the brunt of the impact was clear on the opposite end of the state from the coast.
It would be great if more people could look at this as “there but for the grace of God go I” and less as an opportunity to take a fat fucking dump on the unburied corpses of people they know nothing about.
I hope to shit people aren’t dunking on the victims - it fucking sucks.
Most people with an axe to grind on this story that I’ve seen are pissed off about constant climate change denial from GOP politicians and how much worse it’s making this situation… or about fucking clowns like Matt Gaetz who voted against continued FEMA funding less than 48 hours before landfall.
I’m quite sad people lost their lives due to a storm that our shitty fucking politics absolutely made more deadly than it had to be - its the same with antivax shit… those fucking clowns in the GOP directly killed hundreds of thousands by making masks and vaccines political.
Literally had someone tell me they loved (exact words) seeing towns in Tennessee flooded out response to my recent microblog memes post 🙃 I also can’t tell you how many snide ass Dems I see saying that they brought it on themselves by living in a red state, like there aren’t people voting Dem there anyway, or like voting Dem is a magic ward to stop climate disaster from affecting you.
Well that person is a fucking asshole. I’m glad they’re an asshole voting for Harris but they’re still an asshole. I’m sorry you ran into them. I’ve got liberal family in deep red states and nobody is more fucking pissed off than them.
You’re the one in here trying to turn this into a bashing Dems post. You have all this opportunity to focus solely on the victims, and you don’t. It makes what you’re actually doing quite obvious and pretty gross.
I am from the south and my fucking family is affected by Helene dude. Sorry for not being thrilled when Dems (would you prefer I say libs, even when it’s entirely along party lines?) jerk off about how the stupid southerners deserve to die for voting for Republicans.
It’s more, “they know not what they do.”
Many are too shortsighted to grasp that their own beliefs fuel their own pain.
Still, I don’t blame the grifted as much as I do the grifters.
