Opinion: Perhaps this is how the world ends: with comprehensive coverage and compelling real-time graphics.
As Hurricane Milton gathered itself for a run at the west coast of Florida, YouTube was thronged with organisations and individuals bringing us weather news. Dozens of local TV channels streamed live to the internet. There were also the YouTube weather nerds, with more complex numbers and less charisma, and their foolhardy brothers, the storm-chasers. Even New Zealand’s own WeatherWatch pitched in with videos and maps, helpfully expressing the fluctuating wind speeds in miles per hour for American audiences.
There were silent witnesses, too. Twenty-four years after a handful of webcams bore accidental witness to the 9/11 terror attacks, there are cameras everywhere connected to the internet – overlooking turbulent shorelines and deserted streets, or built into doorbells purchased at hardware stores. We see the power of nature so well now.
Meanwhile, TV meteorologists got death threats. “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes,” tweeted Katie Nickolaou, the Emmy-winning meteorologist for a CBS affiliate in Michigan. “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”
Their supposed crime was to do their jobs in a febrile political climate. It wasn’t just that they brought climate change into the conversation, it was that they failed to credit the absurd idea that the giant hurricane was the result of weather manipulation by the federal government. As WeatherWatch’s Philip Duncan observed, the energy embodied in an average hurricane is “around 1.5 trillion watts of power – equivalent to about half the world’s entire electrical-generating capacity in a year”. Any government capable of marshalling that much natural energy surely has more lucrative things to do than cook up hurricanes to annoy its political rivals.
Yet, when Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that of course “they” could control the weather and “it’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done”, she had millions believing her. Such are the times that President Joe Biden eventually felt the need to publicly state that he could not summon hurricanes.
The TV weather presenters carried on, as light on their feet as boxers, pointing at their vivid meteorological images and rattling off the latest numbers like auctioneers.
As the storm passed over, another element of American broadcasting became clear: its enviable localism. Affiliates of the big TV networks delivered updates, warnings and community notices on what sometimes seemed like a street-by-street basis.
We, the world, also saw the commercials paying for it all. Alongside brutal advocacy ads connected to Florida’s ballot initiatives on cannabis and abortion were ambulance-chasing insurance lawyers and local companies touting replacement roofs and whiteware to the stricken.
America may not be in control of its many crises, but it is quite adept at making money from them.
It could be a hard trick to sustain. Milton, on the heels of Helene, tied the record for landfalls in a single hurricane season and set records for tornado warnings in a single day (126) and, in several cities, for rainfall. CNBC quoted Wall St analysts who thought the insurance cost could reach US$175 billion. The six most costly US hurricanes, in inflation-adjusted dollars, have all struck since 2000, five since 2010. Floridians face the highest home insurance costs in the nation and 20% of homeowners there now simply go without.
Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis championed a law removing most references to climate from the state’s laws and regulations.
Gil Scott-Heron may have been right when he famously declared that the revolution would not be televised. But in the 2020s, catastrophic weather makes great TV in a way that moral crises do not. Perhaps that’s where it’s going. Perhaps the end of the world as we know it will not only be televised, it’ll be pay per view.
