A scientist is calling out media coverage of Hurricane Helene, which devastated the American Southeast and left parts of Tennessee and North Carolina flooded and without power.
Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, joined Truthout to discuss the lack of coverage of the cause of the uptick in massive storms battering the Eastern Seaboard.
"I was reading some articles about the flooding in western North Carolina in The New York Times," Kalmus said, "The articles did not even mention climate change, not a single mention. This is what's driving it."
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Move somewhere else 🌎 Kalmus was quick to call out the fossil fuel industry, noting that it has engaged in a 50-year-long campaign of lies and deceit to keep making money off of planet-warming fuel sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas.
He pointed to the planet's continual heating due to greenhouse gases as the primary cause of massive storms such as Helene.
"Hotter ocean fuels these storms, causes them to intensify more rapidly, causes them to get much more powerful," Kalmus said, "And a hotter atmosphere, because we're living on a currently overheating planet — hotter atmosphere holds more water, so we get these intense, intense rainfalls, which cause the sorts of flooding that's happening right now. It's still high waters in the western part of my state."
Oil and gas companies have faced criticism in recent years due to their behavior around the climate crisis.
Shell has drawn considerable ire for its decision to pull back from its renewable energy initiatives, especially offshore wind development. Exxon Mobil has been accused of greenwashing in its climate plans, using carbon capture technology without properly investing in it, and touting a push that may never be fully viable. Australian oil giant Santos has been sued for greenwashing in its ad campaigns.
Kalmus warned that continued inaction in the face of a warming planet would only result in things getting worse.
"This impact will get worse," Kalmus said, "We'll see even worse storms in the future. It's all, like, the gradation of climate impacts, everything we've been seeing around the world, happening more frequently, more intensely, until global systems of infrastructure — food, water — start to break down in ways that are hard to imagine for us right now. This all gets worse as things get hotter and hotter, driven by the fossil fuel industry, which has been lying."
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