Hurricane Otis is a wake-up call

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/10/2023 (935 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Out of sight, unfortunately, doesn’t always mean out of mind.

Just ask Acapulco, Mexico, which was hit by an unexpected — and almost, until the last few hours, unpredicted — Hurricane Otis.

There’s a significant issue about Hurricane Otis that wasn’t the significant damage that it did to Acapulco. The results of a Category 5 hurricane hitting a major city are, well, what you could expect a major hurricane to do to an urban centre.

What’s significant is wrapped up in why we didn’t see more in the news about this specific hurricane before it hit the Mexican coast.

Usually, major hurricanes are tracked as they slowly build in size — as a storm lurches towards Category 5 status, news and weather networks track the progress, and roll the dice on whether or not the coverage of the impending storm is worth their time and effort. Meteorologists calculate the probable tracks of storms and their potential strengths, and warnings are issued to areas that may be affected with Hurricane Otis.

But Otis strengthened from an expected tropical storm to an extremely large and dangerous hurricane in just 12 hours. In just 24 hours, wind speeds in Otis increased by 180 km/h.

When you’re looking at a very long timeline, like Earth’s, it’s hard to say when something is unprecedented. But it’s worth keeping in mind that Otis was the first Category 5 hurricane to hit a region of Mexico that has never seen a hurricane larger than a Category 1.

The reasons for the rapid intensification? Well, a much warmer ocean, for one.

Pacific waters near the equator waters were, on average, three degrees Celsius warmer than usual. Coastal waters near the Mexican coast were a staggering 31 C. And warm ocean water is the engine that drives hurricane intensification.

So far this year, 80 per cent of Pacific hurricanes have undergone rapid intensification.

It’s bad enough to be in the path of a destructive hurricane — but what about not knowing about the potential strength of an approaching hurricane until it’s too late to effectively evacuate or protect yourself?

Many of significant differences as a result of our changing climate are happening out of sight: at the bottom of the sea, with massive die-offs of marine life. In Antarctica and on the world’s glaciers, with permanent ice fields retreating at an unprecedented rate. In dramatic changes in the range of species — some moving, others getting squeezed out of existence.

Those changes also don’t always happen at a speed that’s conducive to being seen with our own eyes: a rise of a few 10ths of a degree in temperature may leave a global mark, but not a personal one. When, for example, was the last time you set foot on a shrinking glacier? You don’t step out your front door and exclaim, “Well, it’s 1.5 degrees C warmer today than I’m used to”, though you may be willing to admit that, over the last few decades of your life, there have been significant changes in the weather overall.

Otis is proof that it’s not always about what you can see. It’s what you don’t see, as well.

And what, in the future, may be harder and harder to predict with the accuracy to which we’ve grown accustomed?

It’s also worth keeping in mind that all of the things we’re seeing now — more intense rainfall and overland flooding in new areas, more powerful storms that develop more quickly, and a general instability in our weather — were predicted well over a decade ago as the direct impacts of climate change, not only by climate scientists, but by the normal stolid and absolutely pragmatic insurance industry.

The new weather constant may be change.