I’ve been a meteorologist for 40 years. Here’s why I got emotional about Hurricane Milton

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

On Monday afternoon, Miami meteorologist John Morales went viral. In a video that’s been shared thousands of times on social media, Morales gave an emotional briefing on the status of then-Category 5 Hurricane Milton in the Gulf of Mexico, which is now barreling toward Central Florida. “It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible, hurricane,” Morales said on the air for NBC 6 South Florida. Then, getting visibly choked up, he added, “It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours,” a sign the storm had rapidly strengthened. “I apologize,” he said after a beat. “This is just horrific.”

Morales initially debated whether to share the video on X. “I was just kind of embarrassed,” he told me over the phone Monday night. “I was like, how can I lose it like that on TV?”

But after he did, the moment seems to have struck a chord. Morales, a meteorologist with 40 years of experience and the founder of weather forecasting company Climadata, said the feeling was a long time coming—a mixture of anxiety about increasing extreme weather, “frustration for lack of action on climate,” and concern for the people in Milton’s path.

For decades, he said, people knew him as a “just-the-facts” kind of guy. But as climate change increasingly fuels storms like Milton, he says, it’s been harder to stay calm and collected. Climate change, in essence, has changed him. As he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists after Helene hit the Southeast last month, “I look at storms differently. And I communicate differently.”

Below, in his own words, Morales reflect on how the climate crisis has changed his relationship with meteorology. His story has been edited and condensed for clarity:

I grew up in Puerto Rico. So, for years I had been tracking tropical storms and hurricanes. In 1979, there was a big hurricane that passed south of Puerto Rico, and then slammed into the Dominican Republic, a category five hurricane named David. And I think it was the clincher for me in terms of, Hey, this is a field of science that I want to pursue.

[On Monday,] I was at the home office, just as we were about to go on air for the noon newscast, and an urgent bulletin came out from the National Hurricane Center indicating that Milton had become a Category 5 hurricane. I had a chart in front of me, and I looked at the barometric pressure they were reporting at noon, and I compared it to just what had been reported in the pre-dawn hours. And I go, Oh, my goodness.

It’s funny how millibars can get a nerd to lose it. Millibars is a way of measuring barometric pressure. It just absolutely dropped like a rock. I couldn’t believe it dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours, which is an indication of rapid intensification.

People have known me as the just-the-facts, non-alarmist guy. I’ve always been very calm. It’s been very few hurricanes in which I’ve become anxious for. So this was certainly a departure. I think it really shocked a lot of the people that have known me as a weathercaster for 33 years.

So it was a mixture of angst about increasing extremes, frustration for lack of action on climate knowing where we’re going, and just empathy for the victims or future victims in Milton’s path. I was just feeling anxiety about what’s going to happen to them and how nervous they must be.

It was just yet another example, like Helene, Milton, Otis, Dorian, Harvey, Katrina, Irma—I mean, it’s just a whole laundry list of extreme weather fueled by the warming climate. I can tell you right now that the temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico—sea surface temperatures—are record hot, a condition that climate change made anywhere from 400 to 800 times more likely. The number of Cat 4 and 5 hurricanes over the last 20 years is significantly more than over the previous 20 years. The propensity for hurricanes to become extremely intense is just increasing tremendously.

[Climate change] is here, and it’s happening already, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I hope it gets better, if we take the action that we need to take.

I feel different. I have a hard time staying cool when I know what’s about to unfold. Everybody and their brother, every meteorologist I know, knew what this hurricane was going to do. And then suddenly, it does it. And you still can’t help yourself from being astounded that it did happen.

After 40 years in a career, hopefully, I get a little leeway from the folks who are accustomed to seeing me cool as a cucumber. But the truth is that with climate-driven extremes putting us in a place that we haven’t been before, it’s very difficult to stay cool, calm, and collected. It’s a level of agitation and dismay when you know what’s about to unfold and the type of damage and suffering it’s going to cause.

John Morales, as told to Jackie Flynn Mogensen