Hurricane season on the Atlantic Coast has long been a June through November stress test, but the season is expanding on both ends. And even when storms aren’t being named, they’re producing substantial winds and buckets of rain.

Recently, in the span of two weeks, two named hurricanes (Helene and Milton) combined to kill at least 250 people and cause an estimated $100 billion in property damage. The latter’s arrival in Florida was preceded by tornadoes.

In July, Hurricane Beryl became the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded. Last year Louisiana state climatologist and Louisiana State University professor Barry Keim and a group of researchers found hurricane season is becoming longer in duration, with the season beginning earlier and ending later.

“Seven of the last eight years we’ve had named storms form before hurricane season officially began,” according to Keim. “We technically had a named storm in January of 2023.”

Our record-setting burning of fossil fuels and our rampant consumption have made Mother Nature sick, or perhaps mad. The natural world’s vital signs have hit record extremes, and that’s bad news for humankind’s future, as well as that for most life on this rapidly warming sphere.

A recently published report by a group of some of the world’s most prominent climate experts begins with this:

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

The 14 scientists noted record emissions and temperatures and a growing human population point to societal collapse. They assessed 35 vital signs in 2023 and found that 25 were worse than ever recorded, including carbon dioxide levels.

“Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions,” the authors wrote. “That would likely lead to greater geopolitical instability, possibly even partial societal collapse.”

Among the Oct. 8 report’s other alarming findings: the temperature of Earth’s surface and oceans hit an all-time high, with billions of people now exposed to extreme heat; the hottest Northern Hemisphere extratropical summer in 2,000 years; and increasing emissions from melting permafrost, which could help trigger the collapse of the massive Greenland icecap.

Greenland sits between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, and a massive ice sheet blankets about 80% of the land surface. In recent decades, however, the ice has been getting thinner, glaciers are retreating, and it’s melting at the top.

While Earth’s average temperature has increased by 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century, air temperature in Greenland has increased by about 7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1991, according to the UCAR Center for Science Education.

If Greenland’s ice sheet was to completely melt and flow into the ocean, the global sea level would rise by about 23 feet and Earth would rotate more slowly, with the length of the day becoming longer than it is by about 2 milliseconds, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Global heating is driving increasingly deadly extreme weather across the globe.

Beyond the loss of life, both human and wild, hurricanes and other extreme weather events pose an immediate threat to infrastructure and property and cause long-term economic distress.

As severe storms, floods, and wildfires grow in intensity and frequency, a new financial practice is leaving many communities unable to afford insurance, or insurers are pulling out of areas that they perceive to be at greater climate-changing risk.

Bluelining is a practice with similarities to redlining — the racist government-backed practice of financial institutions denying mortgages and credit to Black and brown communities. These communities were often marked by red lines on a map.

Today, financial institutions are now circling many of these same communities in blue, restricting insurance based on growing environmental risks. Worse, many of those same financial behemoths are bankrolling those risks by financing and insuring the fossil fuel industry.

“Though redlining is now illegal, its legacy endures. These neighborhoods’ growing exposure to climate-related damage has left them vulnerable to other financial risks,” according to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). “Not only are homes in these areas more likely to be damaged by climate hazards, but insurers are more likely to increase insurance rates if they determine that properties are more likely to suffer environmental damage.”

While not illegal, bluelining disproportionately impacts communities of color and lower-income families, according to CIEL. This “new redlining is now placing both the physical and financial burden of climate change on those least equipped to deal with its impacts.”

A 2021 study found that $107 billion worth of homes in formerly redlined neighborhoods face high flood risks — 25% more than in non-redlined, predominantly white neighborhoods.

Other studies have found that formerly redlined neighborhoods are more vulnerable to extreme heat and more likely to experience prolonged power outages during a storm, according to CIEL.

Bluelining originally referred to flood risks, but the term now includes other climate-related disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms. In fact, last year the latter was responsible for about 60% of insured natural catastrophe losses.

Thunderstorms in North America and Europe are more destructive than ever before, with overall losses of $76 billion last year, according to the Munich Re Group, a German-based multinational insurance company.

The corporation noted that worldwide natural disasters in 2023 resulted in losses of about $250 billion, with insured losses of $95 billion. “Overall losses tally with the five-year average, while insured losses were slightly below the average figure of US$ [$105 billion]. Unlike in previous years, there were no mega-disasters in industrialised countries that drove losses up (such as Hurricane Ian in 2022).”

The report published earlier this month titled “2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth” doesn’t sugarcoat the crisis we face.

“For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed — and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies,” the 14 authors wrote. “Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024, and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius peak warming by 2100.

“Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo.”

Perhaps it’s time we start taking this growing emergency seriously, before Mother Nature uses more extreme measures to reduce her fever.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.