“You are routinely seeing temperatures in the tropics 1.5 or two degrees warmer than normal,” NASA research meteorologist Scott Braun told Wired. “That tells you there’s more energy out there. The potential is out there for more storms, but it’s just a question of whether the atmosphere provides that favorable window.”

According to the New York Times, 90% of the heat trapped in our atmosphere by greenhouse gases ends up stored in oceans, where it provides fuel for storms. And as CNBC reported, scientists are trying to piece together how these conditions could be leading to slower storms that stall like Dorian did in the Bahamas, generating more damage by staying in place instead of passing through.

But that’s just the meteorological science behind a storm. The impacts on humans are also being studied at length. And AOC is right: Vulnerable communities are often the hardest hit by the disastrous impacts of the climate crisis.

The concept of environmental racism arose from an environmental justice framework to capture the ways in which people of color are often the most impacted by both public health and environmental hazards. The United Nations has warned for years that lower-income and less-developed nations face higher risks when it comes to climate disaster, as we’ve seen in places like Lesotho, Bangladesh, and Malawi.

“For me this is a difficult situation, because those polluters are far away,” Makalo Makara, a herder in Lesotho, told Teen Vogue last year. “We have no way to contact them to tell them or speak with them about it. So what we have to do is focus on planting trees to absorb the carbon emissions. We have to focus on how to be part of the solution here.”

While the storm appears to be moving north along the United States’ East Coast now, the Bahamas faces a challenge in its aftermath like that faced by Puerto Rico after the devastation of Hurricane Maria in September 2017. That storm created climate refugees, resulted in a lengthy recovery effort, and left possibly thousands dead, many not from the storm itself but as a result of a response that couldn’t provide them with the resources they needed for survival.

The same has been true in places like New Orleans, where poverty made escaping Hurricane Katrina harder and the long-term recovery has left black residents displaced, and Houston, where lower-income neighborhoods were slower to recover after Hurricane Harvey.

So when AOC says climate change “hits vulnerable communities first,” she means that these storms not only impact less-developed, lower-income areas, but that those impacts hit harder and last longer because the resources for recovery so often aren’t provided.

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