From Ian to Helene to Milton: Extreme weather is anything but ‘natural’ [Video]

What do you do when people aren’t taking the climate crisis seriously? You make them part of the problem. 

That’s the narrative-altering tack taken by Act of Man, a new nonpartisan climate coalition and social activation that’s shifting the vocabulary around so-called “natural” disasters to center the increasingly essential role of human climate change in extreme weather — weather that should more accurately be called “unnatural.”

Getting real on the state of the climate

The scope and frequency of “unnatural disasters” is convincing enough for the linguistic shift. In 2022, Americans endured the most active year for extreme weather events ever recorded in the U.S. Among drought, wildfire, and winter storm crises, the country fielded nine severe weather events, two tornado outbreaks, three tropical cyclones (hurricanes), and one mass flooding event — these 18 events totaled $165 billion dollars in damage.

This year, as two life-threatening hurricanes touched down on the southeastern United States in the span of just one month, the country has already broken that record. …