THE ENVIRONMENT

Why You Should Care About the 2024 Hurricane Season

Some areas in the Atlantic breeding grounds for hurricanes are now, in late May, as warm as is usual in late August

NOAA’s GOES-16 satellite captured Hurricane Idalia approaching the western coast of Florida while Hurricane Franklin churned in the Atlantic Ocean at 5:01 p.m. EDT on August 29, 2023. (source: NOAA)

If you are from my generation, with the first grey hairs highlighting your age, you are likely among the millions of people who grew up with the regular appearance of David Attenborough as the voice for nature on television.

But as a child growing up in the Netherlands, I had never heard of him. In the limited hours per day of broadcasting in the Netherlands, Jacques Cousteau made us aware of nature’s beauty and fragility. And since practically every household watched the same television program collectively, it’s unlikely to find a Dutchman of my generation who doesn’t have recollections of watching the Calypso sailing to its next adventure somewhere on the world’s oceans.

The Calypso in Montreal, 1980 (René Beauchamp, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Decades before climate change slowly became a thing, either feared or ridiculed, Cousteau already warned of the dangers that warming oceans and associated risks would have on maritime life and — ultimately — on us.