Katia and Jose? Seriously?
As if it were not bad enough that Houston is still drying out from Hurricane Harvey and South Florida is hunkered down in the midst of Hurricane Irma, last week found the newly formed hurricanes Katia and Jose, respectively spinning in the Gulf of Mexico and whirling west across the Atlantic.
We face multiple, simultaneous catastrophes.
But it’s not just their timing that has some of us watching weather maps with fearful speculation. It’s also the record-shredding ferocity of the two storms that have so far impacted the United States. They’ve produced superlatives like a Donald Trump press conference.
Harvey dropped more rain on the continental United States than any storm ever has. At about the size of Texas, Irma is a behemoth, not to mention one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded.
And the timing of them, combined with the historic awfulness of them, feels more sinister than simple coincidence, does it not? You find yourself wondering if this might not be a consequence of that inconvenient truth Al Gore has been warning about — if, thanks to global warming, this is just a preview of our ghastly new normal — record-breaking storms lining up like cars at a toll booth to take turns smashing the American coast.