SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Millions of Floridians are without power after Hurricane Milton stormed across Florida during the early morning hours today. The storm was notable for its size and intensity as it approached Florida, which scientists say is tied to increasingly warming oceans. Prior to making landfall, one meteorologist got emotional as he reported on Milton.
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JOHN MORALES: It's just an incredible hurricane. It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours. I apologize. This is just horrific.
DETROW: John Morales is a veteran meteorologist in south Florida known to millions for his years with NBC 6. He joins me now. Welcome.
MORALES: Oh, thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me here.
DETROW: I know you've been talking about this a bit at this point. You've had time to think about it, but can you tell us what was going through your mind at that moment?
MORALES: Well, I mean, it's - as you look back on it, it's kind of humorous that I'm breaking down over millibars, right? But, you know, millibars means something to meteorologists, and 50 millibars in 10 hours means a lot. It was an impressive drop in barometric pressure. And what happened was I was about to be the lead story, of course, in the new newscast on Monday. And just as they punched me up to be on air, the National Hurricane Center issued an urgent bulletin indicating that the hurricane had become a Category 5.
So my eyes widened. I looked at the pressure drop. I looked at the intensity, keeping in mind that just the previous morning, it was a mundane, 50-mile-per-hour tropical storm, and here was, suddenly, a 160-mile-per-hour Category 5 hurricane in just the span of a day. The 50 millibars struck me. I think there's a lot of things - and I've done some introspection, both this occasion and also really leading up to this. I've written a lot about - is how the increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather events has changed me. You know, in other words, these are climate-driven...
DETROW: Yeah.
MORALES: ...Events, and I just simply cannot be the same non-alarmist guy...
DETROW: Yeah.
MORALES: ...That I was in the 20th century.
DETROW: Can you just help some folks connect the dots one more time about why it is that a hotter planet, a hotter ocean in particular, is leading to more hurricanes and more intense hurricanes?
MORALES: Of course, yes. So the Gulf of Mexico, where Milton was formed, is at record hot levels, both sea surface temperature and ocean heat content, the hottest it's been for this time of the year. And by the way, that has been made more likely - 400 to 700 times more likely by climate change, according to Climate Central's Climate Shift Index ocean product that they offer real time for us to track the changing climate.
So as you have a warmer surface of the ocean, the liquid water that is there at the surface of the ocean with that higher temperature is easier to evaporate off the surface of the ocean. And with greater amounts of water vapor entering the atmosphere and that warm and moist air becoming buoyant and rising into the atmosphere, it cools down. The moisture condenses again into liquid form, and that releases energy into a fledging tropical storm or hurricane, increasing its intensity. And that is why hot oceans leads to stronger hurricanes.
DETROW: So this is happening. There's a clear track record as to why it is happening.
MORALES: Of course.
DETROW: Especially living in South Florida, you know that when that intersects with politics, there's a lot of people who just don't want to hear that, right? So how do you think about your job differently? How do you think about what changes when it comes to explaining these weather patterns and the context they're happening in?
MORALES: It does not stop me. You know, I've been communicating or, let's say, providing climate context to weather. I've been doing that for over 20 years. You know, is it frustrating to see that, you know, when you call for climate action, not enough has been done? And has that led up to these multiple violent hurricanes? Yes, it has, and that is peer-reviewed science. You know, the group that you are describing, the climate dismissives, is a very small group. Ten percent of the survey population is a climate dismissive. However, politicians like to play up to that tribe - right? - to those worldviews because those worldviews are part of a certain political sector in the U.S. And that's how you see some of the things that happened in Florida, the things that might happen in Texas and some of the disinformation being put out there by, well, some pretty radical extreme politicians.
DETROW: Meteorologist John Morales. John, thank you so much for talking to us.
MORALES: It was great to be here. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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