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The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season starts on June 1, and forecasters are predicting an exceptionally active season.

If the National Hurricane Center’s early forecast, released May 23, is right, the North Atlantic could see 17 to 25 named storms, eight to 13 hurricanes, and four to seven major hurricanes by the end of November. That’s the highest number of named storms in any NOAA preseason forecast.

Other forecasts for the season have been just as intense. Colorado State University’s early outlook, released in April, predicted an average of 23 named storms, 11 hurricanes, and five major hurricanes. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts anticipates 21 named storms.

Colorado State also forecasts a whopping 210 accumulated cyclone energy units for 2024, and NOAA forecasts the second-highest ACE on record. Accumulated cyclone energy is a score for how active a given season is by combining intensity and duration of all storms occurring within a given season. Anything over 103 is considered above normal.

These outlooks place the 2024 season in league with 2020, when so many tropical cyclones formed in the Atlantic that they exhausted the usual list of storm names: A record 30 named storms, 13 hurricanes, and six major hurricanes formed that year, combining for 245 accumulated cyclone energy units.

So, what makes for a highly active Atlantic hurricane season?

I am a climate scientist who has worked on seasonal hurricane outlooks and examined how climate change affects our ability to predict hurricanes. Forecasters and climatologists look for two main clues when assessing the risks from upcoming Atlantic hurricane seasons: a warm tropical Atlantic Ocean and a cool tropical eastern Pacific Ocean.

Warm Atlantic water can fuel hurricanes

During the summer, the Atlantic Ocean warms up, resulting in generally favorable conditions for hurricanes to form.

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When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donors to undermine public education in Texas and install a voucher system in which public money flows to private and religious schools.

Gore points to West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, who have contributed to various political action committees that have poured millions into legislative candidates who have promoted vouchers. The men also fund or serve on the boards of a host of public policy and advocacy organizations that have led the fight for vouchers in Texas.

In recent years, the largesse from Dunn and the Wilks brothers has reached local communities across Texas, including Granbury, near Fort Worth, where fights over library books, curriculum, and vouchers have dominated the community conversation.

Gore said that she believes school board candidates are being recruited, at times without their full knowledge, in an effort “to cause as much disruption and chaos as possible” and weaken community faith in local school districts.

In 2021, two local men — former state representative Mike Lang and political consultant Nate Criswell — asked Gore to run for school board. At the time, the three were co-hosts of a web-based talk show that targeted local officials they believed were insufficiently conservative and were straying from GOP platform positions. They took frequent aim at the Granbury school district, which they alleged was allowing explicit sexual content into school libraries and teaching divisive ideas about race.

Gore broke from the group shortly after taking office in January 2022, when she concluded that the materials she had warned about on the campaign trail were not present in Granbury schools. She claims the men and other leaders of the far-right faction in Hood County, home to Granbury, dismissed her findings. They continued to pummel the district over books and curriculum, supported school board candidates who sought to remove a growing number of titles from library shelves, and worked to derail three bond elections that would have funded new and renovated buildings for the overcrowded district.

That’s when Gore said she began to piece together connections that hadn’t been previously apparent to her.

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Courtney Gore, vice president of the Granbury Independent School District Board of Trustees, listens to public comments during a February meeting.  Credit: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and Texas Tribune

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In new research, scientists have shared data from a special observatory, and it’s lead them to theorize that dark energy may be weakening. This data all comes from the first year of observation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), an array of 5,000 robots that have worked together to map the cosmos in more detail than ever before.

While we don’t yet fully understand dark energy, a shift in our core understanding of the concept—from thinking of it as constant to thinking of it as weakening—could affect all of physics, and influence how our universe eventually ends.

When talking about the history of the universe today, scientists use a paradigm called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model—a mathematical equation that works out in harmony with our current understanding of the Big Bang origin of the universe. And an essential part of it is the cosmological constant, lambda, which dates back to Albert Einstein but has evolved over time in its purpose. Lambda’s constancy is essential to our understanding of the ΛCDM model, and the constant is closely linked with dark energy, which was also suggested to be constant.

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DNA Of Enslaved Workers From The Industrial Revolution Unveils New African American History

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A person in Texas has tested positive for the highly pathogenic avian influenza A virus (H5N1), also known as bird flu, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed. This individual, who was exposed to cattle that were believed to be infected with the virus, reported eye redness—a sign of conjunctivitis—but no other symptoms. The patient is being treated with antiviral medication and is recovering.

Avian flu has been ripping through farmed poultry and wild bird populations around the world in recent years. It has also infected mammalian species ranging from foxes, bears, and seals to cats and dogs. And in recent weeks, infections have been found in cattle in six U.S. states: Kansas, Texas, Michigan, New Mexico, Idaho, and Ohio.* There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission so far, and the CDC says the risk to the public remains low.

The new human case is the second known to occur in the U.S. The first was in 2022, when a person in Colorado tested positive for the virus via a nasal swab after having direct contact with infected poultry. That patient reported mild fatigue and later recovered. Previous cases of avian flu in humans were deadly, but they involved a different form of the virus than the one that is currently circulating.

Scientific American talked to Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, about the latest human case and the risk to human health more broadly.

How worried should we be about the human bird flu case in Texas?

First of all, there’s some clarification here. Neither of these two cases [in the U.S.] has been an actual influenza infection, as you think of a respiratory infection. They both have been basically either a nasal swab detection, for the previous one, or in the case of this one, a conjunctivitis—an eye infection. So this isn’t classic influenza at all.

The first one was just someone who was tested routinely. They were working in a barn, depopulating the birds that were dying from flu, and they had some mild symptoms, and they just got tested. They don’t know if the symptoms were related to it, and it could have been that the virus was just picked up in the nose because of just inhaling it in. The second case is a case of conjunctivitis. So that’s not, again, unexpected in that there are receptor sites in the eye for influenza viruses.

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