Acapulco shows signs of Hurricane Otis’s devastation on Wednesday.Photograph by Francisco Robles / AFP / Getty

While Acapulco got pummeled, a climate denier was elected to lead the majority party in the US House of Representatives, a different kind of gut punch. Thanks to Elizabeth Kolbert for this juxtaposition of facts:

Hurricane Otis and the World We Live in Now

The unexpected Category 5 storm is just the latest in a series of unprecedented climate disasters this year.

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Hurricane Otis crashed into the western coast of Mexico, just north of the resort city of Acapulco. A Category 5 storm, Otis brought sustained winds of a hundred and sixty-five miles per hour, with gusts that were even deadlier. “A nightmare scenario is unfolding,” the National Hurricane Center reported shortly before the storm made landfall. “There are no hurricanes on record even close to this intensity for this part of Mexico.” The storm knocked out electricity and phone service in the region, and landslides closed the main highway, so it was difficult to assess how much damage had been done. At least two dozen people were killed, a toll that seems likely to rise as more information trickles out. Images that emerged on Thursday showed utter devastation along Acapulco’s normally crowded beaches. “I don’t know how we are alive, but we are alive,” a survivor of the storm said in a video obtained by the BBC.

What made Otis so dangerous was not just the fact of its strength but the surprise of it. As recently as Monday evening, it was classified as a tropical storm, and forecasts had it strengthening only slightly before hitting the coast. It wasn’t until after midnight on Tuesday that the first hurricane warning for the region was issued; at that point, Otis was expected to make landfall as a Category 1 storm. Then Otis really got busy. The National Hurricane Center defines a storm as undergoing “rapid intensification” if its wind speeds increase by thirty-five miles an hour in the course of a day. Otis’s wind speeds increased by a hundred and fifteen miles an hour in a day. What do you call something that’s three times faster than “rapid”?

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