How climate change could be changing our everyday lives in South Florida
This collection of stories explores the practical effects of climate change on various parts of life in South Florida.
Researchers in Miami have identified that around half of the city's signature native trees, such as live oaks and sabal palms, face risk from increasing temperatures due to climate change. And frequent extreme weather events have prompted spikes in food prices on South Florida menus.
Read the stories below.
Kenneth Feeley, UM biology professor and Director of the Gifford Arboretum Department of Biology, measures a tree on campus. His research found that more than half of Miami's trees will be stressed by rising temperatures. By Ashley Miznazi
NO. 1: ABOUT HALF OF MIAMI'S NATIVE TREES AT RISK FROM RISING TEMPS. WHAT SHOULD WE PLANT NOW?
'Unfortunately many trees will be lost and that's a consequence of modern climate change' | Published December 6, 2024 | Read Full Story by Ashley Miznazi
Chefs Val and Nando Chang at the counter of the original Itamae at the former St. Roch Market (now MIA Market), where they opened in 2018. Val Chang hosted the James Beard Foundation at her restaurant, Maty's, on Jan. 22 to discuss how climate change is disrupting the restaurant and farming industries. By MATIAS J. OCNER
NO. 2: RISING PRICES ON SOUTH FLORIDA MENUS? RISING COSTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE CONTRIBUTE
'Climate change has a direct impact on the supply chain that your favorite chefs depend on.' | Published January 24, 2025 | Read Full Story by Ashley Miznazi
No children were playing on the dinosaur or pony ride at the Little River Pocket Mini Park Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 9, 2021, after the park was flooded with King Tide waters. This type of flooding could be much more common in the future as sea levels rise. By Emily Michot
NO. 3: WE ANSWER YOUR CLIMATE QUESTIONS: HOW MUCH SEA LEVEL RISE IS MIAMI EXPECTING?
Exactly how high will the tide rise? Scientists have a prediction. | Published April 1, 2025 | Read Full Story by Alex Harris
A resident walks with her belongings through the flooded N 15th St in North Tampa, on Thursday, October 10, 2024, a day after Hurricane Milton crossed Florida's Gulf Coast. By Pedro Portal
NO. 4: FLORIDA MOST AT RISK OF 'SEVERE COASTAL FLOODING.' NEW RESEARCH SHOWS WHERE
'This is a level of exposure that's going to require a massive amount of planning and investment in coastal resilience.' | Published April 2, 2025 | Read Full Story by Denise Hruby
The summary above was drafted with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists in our News division. All stories listed were reported, written and edited by McClatchy journalists.
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Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Miami Herald
Elon Musk's brain chip was put in a patient at Miami-area hospital. What to know
A paralyzed military veteran is one of seven people in the country — and the first patient at a Miami hospital — to be implanted with an Elon Musk-backed brain chip as part of a clinical trial underway in South Florida. The goal is to test whether the chip, created by Neuralink, a company co-founded by Musk, can give people who are paralyzed the ability to use their mind to control computers, smartphones and other electronic devices. Surgeons at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine implanted the device, known as the Link or Telepathy, in the patient's brain as part of the FDA-approved clinical trial. And so far, the tech seems to work. Video recently shared by UM shows the veteran, who was only identified as RJ, using his mind to wirelessly play a video game on a computer. Photos posted online also show Musk making the 'U' sign in celebration with UM medical staff at the hospital. 'They're giving me my spark back … my drive back. They've given me my purpose back,' RJ said in a statement. RJ, who has a spinal cord injury stemming from a motorcycle accident, received the Neuralink implant in April at UHealth Tower, the Miami flagship hospital of the University of Miami Health System. As of last week, RJ was one of seven people in the country who have received the Telepathy implant since clinical trials began last year, according to Neuralink co-founder and president DJ Seo. He's also the first patient to get the implant through The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at UM's medical school, which was tapped earlier this year to be the second site in the country to test the safety and effectiveness of the chip. The first patient, Noland Arbaugh, had his Link surgically implanted last year at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. 'We're very cautious with Neuralink in humans' and are working closely with regulators, Musk said during a June update on Neuralink's progress creating devices that improve or restore movement, vision and speech. 'That's the reason we're not moving faster than we are, is because we're taking great care with each individual to make sure we never miss and, so far, we haven't.' READ MORE: What's it like to use Elon Musk's brain chip? How does it work? 'Like using the Force' For the Telepathy trials, researchers are looking for volunteers 22 to 75 years old who have limited or no ability to use both hands to participate in the clinical trial. The paralysis must be from a cervical spinal cord injury or from ALS, a rare disease with no cure that causes nerve cells to stop working and muscles to become weak, leading to paralysis. Neuralink has also received approval to launch similar trials in Canada, the United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates, according to Seo. 'We hope this partnership is another significant step in finding meaningful solutions for the millions living with paralysis and other significant motor deficits,' Marc Buoniconti, president of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and the son of the late Miami Dolphins linebacker Nick Buoniconti, previously told the Miami Herald. Marc Buoniconti became a quadriplegic following a spinal cord injury while playing in a 1985 college football game. His father helped establish the Miami Project. And unlike other types of brain surgeries, the surgical implant of the Link is not as invasive, according to Dr. Jonathan Jagid, UM's principal investigator for the clinical trial and part of RJ's surgical team. How does Neuralink's brain chip work? Surgeons made a relatively small incision to implant a wireless, rechargeable coin-sized brain chip in the part of RJ's brain that handles thoughts and body movement. A Neuralink surgical robot with a needle that's thinner than a human hair is used to implant more than 60 flexible ultra-thin 'threads.' The threads are so fine that they can't be inserted by human hand, according to Neuralink. 'The surgery went perfect,' Jagid told the Herald in a phone interview this week while discussing RJ's procedure. The veteran was discharged from the hospital a day after his surgery, he said. The device records electrical signals sent between brain cells and wirelessly transmits it to Neuralink's software, which will be running on a computer or another device. The software will then decode and translate the neural data into actions, such as moving a cursor or a chess piece on a computer screen, playing video games and even using design software. Neuralink is also testing whether its brain chip can help patients control a robotic arm. 'I think my favorite thing's probably [being] able to turn on my TV, like the first time in two and a half years I was able to do that. That was a pretty sweet move,' RJ said during a recorded video call with several other Telepathy users. The recording was played during Neuralink's June 27 event. RJ, who identified himself as the fifth person in the country to receive the Link, was also shown playing Call of Duty and Mario Kart with the other Neuralink patients. All of it was done wirelessly using their minds. 'I like shooting zombies. That's kinda nice,' said RJ, whose shirt read: 'I do a thing called whatever I want.' For Jagid, the UM doctor, the technology is a step in the right direction for The Miami Project's mission to find a cure for paralysis from spinal cord injuries and help improve patients' quality of life. And RJ's involvement in the trial will help 'move the science forward in order to help everybody else who suffers with these types of injuries,' he said.
Atlantic
3 days ago
- Atlantic
Hurricane Science Was Great While It Lasted
Clouds are the bane of a hurricane forecaster's existence. Or they were, until about 20 years ago, when forecasters got access to a technology that Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona, told me to think of as cloud X-ray vision: It cuts through the cloud top to help generate a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of what's happening below. Known as the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder, or SSMIS, it rides on a series of satellites and allows forecasters to see a storm's structure, which might otherwise be invisible. The Hurricane Hunter planes that fly into storms can also be used to generate three-dimensional storm images, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for hurricane forecasting, has only two of those aircraft. They can't be everywhere at once. With the SSMIS, forecasters had an autonomous, powerful eye in the sky. But now the Department of Defense says it will cease processing and distributing the crucial imagery from this sensor at the end of this month. Losing these views threatens the National Hurricane Center's ability to see what's forming, Wood told me. For years, the National Hurricane Center has been improving the accuracy of its forecasts, and one short year ago, the United States was better at predicting storms' tracks than it had ever been. But the Trump administration has been cutting the forecasting staff and budgets. And now these satellite data will be missing too. The U.S. is rapidly losing state-of-the-art hurricane forecasting, just in time for hurricane season's busiest months. The data were nice while we had them. After all, no one likes a surprise hurricane. When the sun goes down, convective storms over open ocean often grow stronger, juiced by the changing temperature dynamics. But that's also when types of storm surveillance that rely on what's visible are least able to determine what's going on. Infrared imaging can see in the dark, but the picture is typically low-resolution and grainy, and can obscure key shapes. When the sun comes up, forecasters can suddenly be looking at a fully formed storm eye. Forecasters dread the 'sunrise surprise,' which is exactly the sort of thing that the microwave imagery from SSMIS is most helpful in preventing. It gives a clearer picture, even through clouds, and even in the dark. Plus, the technology is vital to picking up on telltale signs of rapid intensification, a phenomenon that has become more common in recent years, most notably with Hurricane Otis in 2023 and Hurricane Milton in 2024. Storms that intensify faster and reach higher peak intensities just before hitting land are a nightmare for forecasting, and climate scientists worry they will become only more common as the planet warms. Research suggests that certain signature formations in a storm could indicate that it may intensify rapidly, Andrew Hazelton, an associate scientist working in hurricane modeling and research at the University of Miami, told me. Those structures are simply easier to see with the SSMIS images. A few other satellites can provide microwave imaging. But, as the meteorologist Michael Lowry has pointed out, their instruments either are orbiting more infrequently or are inferior to the one being discontinued. NOAA suggested to Lowry that its Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder instrument would be able to fill the gap, he wrote. But that suggestion is misleading, Hazelton said: The information from that satellite is so low-resolution that the eye of a hurricane looks like just a few pixels instead of a more detailed image. 'It's really hard to pick out details,' he told me—including the aspects of a storm's structure that may signal that it could rapidly intensify. Plus, having fewer microwave instruments operating in the sky means fewer snapshots of oceans where hurricanes might form. Without SSMIS, the number of microwave-image glimpses that forecasters get over any given spot will be essentially cut in half, Lowry wrote; many more hours could go by without observations when they're most needed. (I reached out to NOAA for comment, but the agency redirected me to the Department of Defense.) SSMIS is part of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program; a Navy spokesperson told me the entire satellite program is slated to be discontinued in September 2026. When I asked about previous reports citing cybersecurity concerns as a reason for the closure, the Navy spokesperson responded only that the satellite program is 'no longer compliant with Department of the Navy information technology modernization requirements.' In the meantime, the Defense Department will just stop processing and distributing the data it collects. A spokesperson from the U.S. Space Force also told me the satellite system will be replaced by two other satellite systems, the second one of which is slated to be operational in 2027. But that still doesn't explain why this data stream is being cut off now, more than a year before the satellite program is slated to be decommissioned, Hazelton said. 'We need all the microwave data we can get while it's available.' These aren't the only data forecasters have lost, either: Right now, across the U.S., fewer weather balloons are being launched because of staffing shortages at National Weather Service forecasting offices. Balloons offer insights into how the atmosphere is behaving; data picked up on the West Coast are the East Coast's business, too, as they'll predict the weather coming just hours in the future. 'We want the complete picture of the state of the atmosphere so that we have a way to then estimate the next step,' Wood said. 'Upstream information is often just as critical as information right at the point where the storm might be.' NOAA is losing the experts who can interpret those data, too. And cuts to staff this year already mean that more duties are piled higher on individual people, 'which means they may be less able to properly use the data once it comes in,' Wood said. Those cuts extend all the way to the people who work on underlying weather models. Hazelton, for example, was on a team at the National Weather Service where he worked to improve hurricane modeling. In February, he was axed along with some 800 employees who had been recently hired; he'd worked for NOAA as a contract employee for nearly a decade, on Hurricane Hunter missions and improving storm modeling. He was part of the group of fired NOAA employees who were hastily rehired after a judge temporarily blocked President Donald Trump's cuts, and was refired after a subsequent Supreme Court ruling. At the University of Miami, he's now continuing his work on hurricane models through a federal partnership. The latest proposed NOAA budget for 2026, released Monday, aims to remove even more workers, along with whole programs. It zeroes out, for instance, the line item for the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office, a network of federal research centers whose work helps develop new techniques and tools for forecasters and improve weather models. If this budget passes, the forecasts of the near future—three, five, 10 years down the line—will suffer too, Hazelton said. This year has been a miserable cascade of losses for the American hurricane-safety apparatus. Any one of these losses might have been papered over by other parts of the system. But now it's just losing too many components for that. As James Franklin, the former chief of the National Hurricane Center's hurricane-specialist unit, put it in a post on Substack, 'Resiliency is being stripped away, piece by piece.' What's easy to see coming now are the possible consequences: at best, a needless evacuation. But just as easily: a rushed evacuation, a surprise landfall, a flattened house.
Miami Herald
28-06-2025
- Miami Herald
With more intense hurricanes, do we also have to prepare for more tornadoes in Florida?
We know that the warming climate, driven largely by fossil fuel emissions, are intensifying hurricanes. But what about tornadoes? To answer our readers' questions on the links between climate change and tornadoes and how we can improve safety, the Herald spoke spoke to hazards geographer Stephen Strader, who studied meteorology and geography at Northern Illinois University, and holds degrees in both. He also researches tornadoes at Villanova University in Pennsylvania., where he's an associate professor of geography and the environment and geography program director. How is climate change affecting the risk of tornadoes? Stephen Strader: We actually know a lot more about climate change and hurricanes than we do tornadoes, because tornadoes tend to be very small – the widest tornado ever recorded is two and a half miles wide, and most are only a few 100 yards wide. Our models are not at that resolution. What is concerning, though, is that it's not uncommon to have tornadoes associated with hurricanes because you have a very violent environment, and you have a lot of moisture. These ingredients tend to produce tornadoes. Now that the rapid intensification of these hurricanes is becoming more frequent, where I'm going to bed and the hurricane is at Category 1, and I wake up and it's a Category 4, the question becomes: how are hurricanes changing and will that produce more tornadoes? If we end up with stronger and slower moving hurricanes producing more precipitation, the guess would be that tornadoes would also increase when they're associated with hurricanes. The scary thing is: We really don't know yet. How far away from a hurricane can tornadoes spawn? Hurricane Milton made landfall on the Gulf Coast, but on the Atlantic Coast, we saw a local record of 46 in a day, with five deaths in St. Lucie County alone. Strader: They can occur 50 to 100 miles away from the center of the hurricane. When we think about a hurricane's impact, it's not just the eye wall. The tornadoes typically are further away from the eye wall. They have to be, because they need a lot of different ingredients than the hurricane. What's scary about that to me is that the hurricane made landfall on the west coast of Florida, so on the east coast, people let their guard down. 'Oh, we're on the safe side of Florida'. But then here come the tornadoes. I think that contributed to a lot of the deaths and damages that we saw. What can we do to better protect our communities from tornadoes – can we zone for them? Strader: We can build stronger structures, enforce codes, retrofit structures – and we do that, but we need to do more of that. You can bring a manufactured home up to really strong codes, above and beyond what is required. It's just expensive. So the question now is, who pays for it, and how do we do that? Zoning is difficult, and frankly, tourism reigns king. No one's going to not build in an area that's going to make them money every day. No developer, no business is going to do that. Tornadoes are rare, hurricanes are fairly rare. So you're asking people to stop doing something that's going to make them money day to day, in favor of being worried about a low probability event. That's tricky. People tend to gamble. But Florida is going to have to start asking the question: Do we zone? And really, it's because of sea level rise and flooding. The insurance companies have pulled out in a lot of states, and that's because it's just too risky. So, are people going to move away, or are they gonna be forced to move away? This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. This story is part of a periodic Miami Herald series where we answer reader questions about climate change. Send us yours at climate@ This climate report is funded by Florida International University, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the David and Christina Martin Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald retains editorial control of all content.
