Hundreds of people have died in Florida

[Hortensis]

47. And virtually all were the result of inadequate understanding

of what was coming.

People everywhere, against all the new evidence, still tend to assume that what happened in the past will continue and that if it didn't happen before it won't.

Climate change means that mindset really needs to change. We're not talking any more about "100-year" and "500-year" chances to make tragic mistakes but potentially any year, and this goes for all climate-related disasters, including fire and disease.

Cataclysmic wildfires in eastern forests and wildfire sweeping across midwest metropolitan areas haven't started yet, but they will, sure as...climate change. And when they do, many who didn't evacuate because it'd never happened before will die.

Fortunately, Floridians actually have far more experience than most of their fellow Americans with disaster, so a lot of the needed modern infrastructure and all of the government and private planning and response resources were in place -- and people who'd been there a while knew hurricanes kill.

That's why the numbers of deaths from this giant hurricane, tragic and mostly avoidable as they are, are actually extremely low.