Doreen Auciello, 63, was finishing a continental breakfast in a hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida – home of the famous speedway races.

As she sat with her good friend Gene, who recently lost her husband, their conversation and that of everyone else in the room revolved around Hurricane Dorian, just offshore.

Floridians are used to dealing with hurricane season. It’s hard to deny that the storms are getting stronger, although there is plenty of disagreement as to why.

Scientists have been warning that warmer ocean temperatures and higher sea levels are expected to intensify the hurricanes’ impacts.

Auciello is retired and lives alone. Her 1967 vintage mobile home, which she bought for $8,000, is all she owns. She knows it could suffer damage and she has no insurance.

Hurricane preparations in Daytona Beach. Photograph: Niall Macaulay/Niall Macaulay for the Guardian

“No one would insure a 1967 mobile home,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if it’s destroyed, I’ll be homeless.”

She came to Daytona to be close to her sister and indulge in the idea of Florida being paradise.

“Florida is like the dreamland. Until you’ve gone through a major hurricane, you don’t know what it’s really like here,” she said.

She accepts the facts of the climate crisis. “It’s just not the same as the years go by, all of these storms are just getting worse and worse. Nobody is really taking it seriously and it’s way too late now. You can’t reverse it – the damage, you know.”

Auciello had lined herself up a coffee, an orange juice and a strawberry smoothie to get through the day.

Regardless of the widespread news coverage of how vulnerable the state is to storm damage, the dream endures: it’s estimated that more than 900 people move to Florida every day.

Dorian’s eye was approaching Daytona Beach on Wednesday but the Carolinas now expect the brunt of the storm.

Stacy Givens, a Daytona local, believes God is trying to tell us something. “He’s shaking up the world,” she exclaimed, as rather terrifying waves surged up to the sea wall. Rather than a climate crisis spurred by human action, Givens thinks the increasingly frequent monster hurricanes are all part of a divine plan.

Many residents on the adjacent barrier island decided not to evacuate. “[The hurricanes] are what they are, they’re going to come whether I’m here or not. I can’t afford to move anyplace else,” said 52-year-old Jim Bordain. He came to the beach to look for any special washed-up shells, which, he said, appear every time a hurricane comes.

Like those of many Floridians, his views on climate science can best be described as conspiratorial. “Organizations that want to have control over other people are trying to make more out of the global warming so that they can dictate how business is run and how we use our vehicles,” Bordain explained.

Florida is a transient place. People often come to escape their past lives or to seek a comfortable retirement.

James Bagwell, 41, has lived in Daytona Beach since 2011. He remodels homes and is struggling financially with being out of work for five days. He thought Dorian was “taking too long” to play out.

As the storm paused, catastrophically, over the Bahamas on Labor Day, nerves were fraying in north-east Florida.

Police prevent access to the barrier island at Daytona Beach as Dorian approaches. Photograph: Niall Macaulay/Niall Macaulay for the Guardian

“I have a little bit of money set aside for emergencies, but not enough for more than five days,” Bagwell said.

He sees this extreme weather as part of the cycle of life. “It’s probably nature. If you look at the dinosaurs, they were wiped out by something,” he says. “Maybe it’s close to the time for humans to be wiped out by something and start the next evolutionary ladder.”

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), five of the 10 strongest Atlantic storms have occurred in the last 10 years. Yet many citizens of Florida are confused when it comes to the origins of hurricanes, and how the human-caused climate crisis is steadily making them more dangerous.

Florida has a long political history of climate science denial, which culminated in the former governor Rick Scott, now a US senator, allegedly banning the words “climate change” from any internal government communications. Scott is evolving, however.

Now, an unwelcome serving of reality is being delivered to those in power, and it’s becoming increasingly hard to sustain the delusion. The Florida senator Marco Rubio, a sharp skeptic in the past, has called recommended actions in scientific reports are “alarmism” but now admits that climate change is a “real problem”.

As a result of these policymakers and their predecessors, the Sunshine state still gets far more of its power from burning coal and natural gas than from renewables, and mass transit systems have struggled to gain traction.

But the ever-stronger hurricanes and rising seas affect everyone, regardless of political persuasion, so the center ground of the discussion is finally shifting, forcing even science deniers to make statements acknowledging global heating is happening.

The recently elected Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has hired the state’s first chief resilience officer. Her job is to “prepare Florida for the environmental, physical and economic impacts of climate change, especially sea-level rise”.



