Paradise lost: Hurricane Milton bashes Florida

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. We've been reflecting this week on how the October 7 attacks last year shattered the Middle East. Today we hear from a correspondent who's been reflecting on the Palestinian experience. And are you obsessively punctual, like really, really concerned about whether you're going to be late? Well, maybe you need a nuclear clock. It's so good at keeping time, it may even help us solve the secrets of the universe. But first, Hurricane Milton has shocked everyone, both with its intensity and the speed at which it developed.

We are tracking a dangerous hurricane that.

Is heading towards again.

Florida winds are now sustained at 180mph.

This morning it hit Florida. Videos show the roof of a baseball stadium blowing away and trees being bashed over. A storm surge has already flooded areas of Tampa. Soon Milton will hit Orlando. It will be a while before we know the true impact of this storm, but early reports already suggest a terrifying toll. Oliver Morton, our planetary affairs editor, has.

Been keeping track as we record in London this morning, we still know very little about what has actually happened in Florida. We know that the hurricane hit, but it is still nighttime and at least 2 million houses are without electricity. It's still about 4. 4 hours till dawn. Many people chose to stay in place, many people evacuated, possibly more than you would normally see.

President Joe Biden has warned that leaving now is a matter of life and death.

We know that there's been damage to some major buildings, including a stadium. But what the actual final toll is in terms of both lives and in terms of property, we won't know for many days.

Ollie, Storm. Milton seems to have accelerated very fast. On Monday, we thought it was a regular storm. Now some people are calling it the storm of the century. Why has it accelerated so fast?

Well, it intensified very quickly on Monday, and that's largely because it was over very, very hot water. The energy in a hurricane is drawn from the waters underneath it. And so when water is very hot and other conditions are met, a hurricane can intensify at a remarkable speed. And that's what we saw with Milton. It went from not being a storm at all to being at the highest level of what's called the Safir Simpson scale in just over a day, which is not entirely unprecedented. But when you saw clips of Florida meteorologists breaking down in tears during a broadcast, it was the sight of that extraordinary intensification that had moved him. So it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours. I apologise. This is just horrific. Now, when Middleton hit Florida, it was not as powerful as that. It had gone from a 5 to a 4 to a 5 to a 4 to a 3 by the time that it actually hit the coast. But the intensity as measured that way is only one part of a hurricane that measures mainly the wind speeds. The hurricane also does a lot of its damage by pushing forward front of water. And that was made particularly worrying this time because Milton hit the west coast of Florida pretty much perpendicularly. So, you know, like a bulldozer coming straight in. And also the amount of rain that it carries, and quite often a storm does most of its damage through rain. And the most famous storm of many years, Katrina, was also a Cat 5 that went down to a Cat 3 before landfall and did inordinate damage. When people say storm of the century, I think that that's, among other things, a little premature. It's not the storm of the century. The storm of the century is coming later and will be considerably worse that we know, because the temperatures have risen, they will continue to rise. Even if the world gets really serious about emissions reduction, they will still be hotter than they used to be, and there will be worse storms than this.

So, Ollie, these storms seem to be coming more frequently and more intensely. What role does global warming play in.

That frequency doesn't seem to be really changing. I think we're noticing more computer models tell us that as global warming continues, the number of storms which reach these very highest levels on the Safir Simpson scale will become more frequent. And so you can expect not more hurricanes in general, but more of them to reach these particularly destructive peaks of power. We do seem to be seeing more hurricanes quite late into the season. We had Hurricane Helene just two weeks ago, which hit the Florida Panhandle rather than the Peninsula, and moved up into the Carolinas and Appalachia. And that was a terrible example of one of the ways in which hurricanes can become more destructive in a warmed world. It's not just that warm seawater drives a more powerful hurricane. Warm air can carry more water vapor. And so when such a hurricane starts losing that water vapor, as water, as rain, as torrential rain, there can be more of it. And that's what was seen over the southeast United States when Helene went over. More than 100 billion tons of water falls out of the sky. It's quite the most terrifying phenomenon.

And how equipped are people in the US to deal with the consequences of these very intense hurricanes?

That's a question that really depends quite a lot on geography. People tend to underestimate where hurricanes are going to do all their damage because some places get lashed fairly regularly. Parts of Florida, some, it's much rarer. I mean, Bashville, North Carolina, which saw terrible flooding under Helene, some people thought that was a safe retreat. But there was a hurricane caused flood flood in Asheville in 1916. It's not like these things don't happen, but they happen rarely and they can be very destructive. For instance, the reason there's a National Hurricane Service in the United States is because in 1954, a hurricane really gave a bashing to Maine. At which point the senator from Maine decided his opposition to a National Hurricane Service had been foolhardy and changed his mind. So some parts of America are at spasmodic intense risk. Some parts of America, like Florida, are at fairly constant risk. The only real way to deal with that is through strong building codes and insurance.

And you mention insurance there. I mean, we don't yet know what the human toll of this hurricane is, but we do know that it's going to have destroyed masses of homes, livelihoods in infrastructure. Who bears the cost of that?

In the case of Helene, it appears some mixture of the public purse and the people afflicted, because it's a peculiarity of America that flood insurance is basically not available on the private market and people don't buy the federally available flood insurance. So although the damage done by Helene was by some estimates over $200 billion, it's being suggested that the insurable damage is going to be less than a tenth of that. So there's a lot of suffering. There's also you can insure and people do insure against hurricane damage. But again, the true cost of that insurance ends up being hidden in various different ways. And so to some extent that will end up with the public purse. And if you were to make insurance premiums reflect the real value of what's at risk, those premiums probably increase prices of property that are built to code to resist all but the worst of hurricanes. They go up too. And so life in a place like that becomes fundamentally more expensive and you then have a political battle as to whether to pay for that, who should pay for that, or whether you're going to try and muddle on as before.

Ollie, we're within weeks of the election. The candidates appear to be very evenly matched at the moment. How could this storm affect that?

I think the previous hurricane Helene is revealing the Republican campaign in its true colours with a large amount of disinformation, outright lying about what is going on in terms of fema, the emergency administration, providing money for people and it's being said that they're buying their houses for peanuts and that they're stopping a going through and these ideas are being spread by Donald Trump himself. It's a quite extraordinary farrago of disinformation. And so I don't know whether that influences the election. It certainly makes some of the differences between the sides disturbingly clear. People may or may not vote on the basis of the hurricane, but it does add to a sort of slight end of times vibe which probably isn't healthy.

Ollie, thank you so much for talking to me.

Well, it was a sad occasion but a pleasure as ever.

This week. On the intelligence we've been looking Back to the October 7th attacks by Hamas in Israel last year when more than 1,000 people were killed and 250 hostages taken. Many are still being held today. Our Middle east correspondent Nick Pelham, who's been in and out of Israel and the west bank many times during the conflict, reflects on the destruction in Palestinian territories and the resurgence of the Palestinian cause globally.

The fighting in northern Gaza all but subsided a month ago, but the misery has only intensified. Gaza City, the largest and most developed Palestinian city, resembles a Landfill. Mountains of smouldering garbage and tins compete with mounds of rubble for space. A few young people try to clear up until the sounds of another bombardment scatter them. The tall eucalyptus trees that once shaded Gaza's streets have gone. Those that the bombs didn't get. Palestinians chopped down for firewood to make up for the shortage of cooking gas. People scavenged in abandoned bombed homes for furniture to slash and burn. Still, perhaps a third of northern Gaza's population have refused to budge.

The situation in Gaza before the war was to some extent normal.

And we had Isa Mata and his family are one of them. He's a friend I used to visit often in Gaza before Israel hermetically sealed off the Strip a year ago.

After the war, things have changed dramatically. No water, no electricity, no medical care, no education as well. And all the basic goods are not available at all in the market. And if you find some of the.

The nine month Palestinians had dared hope something better might emerge from the devastation. The world, they thought, might force Israel and impose a solution. UN peacekeepers might arrive in preparation for a fresh start. But last summer, most finally realized that they had hung on, waiting for a ceasefire in vain. A world in the rubble with no electricity, no water, no Internet, and for most, no shelter, public sanitation or privacy was the new normal. As the tanks still crawl through the cities, life is beginning again. And so Palestinians who'd put off getting married are now holding weddings. It's a similar story in the West Bank. Most Palestinians there fear Israel's operation in Gaza could be a dry run for the West Bank. The warplanes and combat drones that are used to bomb Gaza are now in regular action there. Armed settlers and soldiers, and it's increasingly hard to differentiate between them, are evicting Palestinians from area C, the 60% of the west bank that is officially under direct Israeli control. Many fear that under the COVID of a regional war, the Jewish supremacists in the Israeli government might go further and push them across the frontier into neighboring Jordan. Periodically, Israel stops the transfer of tax revenues, which are the mainstay of Palestinian government. But the bars and cafes in that Palestinian seat of government, the city of Ramallah, are still full. As if Palestinians want to say they're going to go on enjoying the good life while they still can. Before October 7, the Palestinian cause had begun to fade. Palestinians felt bypassed and forgotten. Israel's offensive has brought back their cause with a vengeance. Palestinian flags fly from every European capital. Marches fill the streets, cinema staged Palestinian film weeks. It's become the cause of the global south par excellence. Given the repression Palestinians face, to differing degrees, under Israeli rule, one of the impacts of the past year has been to shift the Palestinian center of gravity back into the diaspora, perhaps for the first time since the Palestinian leadership returned to the west bank and Gaza after the oslo Accord in 1993. Palestinians in New York told me that they used to bury their origins for fear of being labeled terrorists. Now they say they're considered cool.

Yes, we are weak, but we will never be defeated.

Each Sunday, Osama Kashu hosts brunch in his new cultural center, Palestine House, in the heart of London. It's decorated like a traditional Arab courtyard, replete with a gently playing octagonal fountain. Osama describes himself as a carrier of the Palestinian story. Each bomb, he tells me, amplifies the Palestinian narrative and creates new activists devoted to the cause of Palestinian self determination. Millions of Algerians, one of them told me, had died in their struggle for liberation against colonialism. But for all the pain and mourning of the past year, they all insisted that tens of thousands of Palestinians would not have been killed in vain.

No matter how fancy your watch is, it will slowly fall behind and lose a millisecond every six weeks. Your manager may not be that much of a timekeeper, but if your task is to unlock the workings of the universe, you may need something that's totally precise. Introducing the nuclear clock.

We already have some really good clocks. They're called atomic clocks.

Emily Steinmark is a science correspondent for the Economist.

But now we have something that's even better that's just about to come on the horizon, and that's the nuclear clock. It's really the beginning, the starting shot of a new era of clocks.

Emily I've heard of atomic clocks, but what's a nuclear clock?

Well, an atomic clock works by the electronic transitions in an atom, whereas a nuclear clock works using the nuclear transitions in an atom. And it's just that much more accurate because the nuclei are shielded within the atom. So that's the big difference. We don't have one yet. It was first sort of practically proposed about 20 years ago, but now we basically have the prototype. We have all the different bits that we need to make one. It's essentially a system where we just need to press start. That's what we have at the moment. So it's really almost about to happen.

Emily, why do we need such precise measurements? What's so great about a nuclear clock?

Well, the thing is, for most purposes, the atomic clocks are really very, very good, and they make everything work from the Internet to GPS to stock market trading, they're super accurate. So it's not really the situation that once we have the nuclear clock, it's like, okay, we're going to swab everything out and the whole world will just become that much more accurate. And it's more. The situation that physicists are excited about is that now they have two independent ways of measuring time. And what do I mean by two independent ways? Well, because the atomic clocks depend on the electronic transitions, and the nuclear clock depends on nuclear transitions. Those are two different physical measurements. Because the electronic transition depends on the electromagnetic force. That's the thing that describes how electrons react to the incoming radiation. And the nuclear clock is guided by, or it has to obey the strong nuclear force. So those are two different physical forces. And that means that if you can measure time by both these things, you can compare them, and you can compare how time should work within big important physical theories.

Give me an example of that.

Yes. So, for example, in Einstein's theory of general relativity, clocks are exposed to different relativistic effects. So, for example, that clocks will tick more slowly in a stronger gravitational field. Well, now you can test that because you have two different clocks that are really, really very good, and they depend on different forces. And so all clocks should be subject to these relativistic effects. But you can test that. Another thing that they're excited to do is that because of these different forces, they depend on different theoretical constants, things that we have not just assumed to be constant for a very long time, but they have looked to be constant for a very long time. But that's kind of strange, considering our entire universe is expanding and speeding up. So there's no particular reason why we think that these constants should actually be constant. With two different clocks, we would actually be able to say, okay, well, if we measure them at this time and they're exactly the same, and then we'd return to them in a year, and then one of them maybe is a little bit off from the other. That would suggest that the underlying constants are affecting the clocks differently, and so maybe are sort of very, very, very slowly drifting in time. So that's the stuff that they're really interested about.

So what you're telling me is that a nuclear clock might help us unlock the secrets of the universe?

Well, potentially it's one of those things where we're just going to have to wait and see, you know, only time will tell.

Emily, thank you so much.

Finished.

Bang on time.

Excellent. Thank you very much for having me.

That's it for this episode of the Intelligence. But of course, there's so much more to listen to. With a subscription to Economist Podcast plus, you have access to all our shows. Subscribing helps make our journalism possible. So thank you. Search Economist Podcast plus for a free trial, and if you have any comments on today's show, you can get in touch@podcastconomist.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.