Hurricanes are back in the news. BBC Weather reports of 14,500mph winds at Finnieston, not surprisingly, turned out to be wrong. Much more seriously, Hurricane Milton has done terrible damage in Florida and lives have been lost, though mercifully not on the cataclysmic scale that looked possible at one stage.

But even if the Finnieston story is just a one-day amusement, there are serious implications for Scotland from Florida’s experience. Hurricanes will be in the news more frequently. They are relatively understandable – as well as dramatic – indicators of changes in weather and we should pay them heed.

As Governor of Bermuda from 2012-16, hurricanes were a regular, sometimes alarming, aspect of the job. We had four. All had to be taken seriously, though some had lighter moments.

I remember giving a cup of tea to a Bermuda police officer, originally from Edinburgh, whose eight-hour shift at Government House had turned into a 24-hour one as we locked down. She and I suddenly realised that the mug she was holding was inscribed “I’d rather be in Killiecrankie”.

 

In 2014, we had two hurricanes, Fay and Gonzalo, within five days. Gonzalo passed directly over the island, and the wind disturbances it caused led to a big storm in Scotland. I felt unexpectedly connected when the BBC showed pictures of waves hitting my home village of Ballantrae from a system we had endured just days earlier.

These hurricane-derived storms can be serious. Michael Fish’s famous non-hurricane of 1987 was an echo of Hurricane Emily, which had made a direct hit to Bermuda, causing serious damage. They are likely to become more frequent.

A simple but compelling fact about hurricanes is that they are directly fed by warm water. If a tropical storm passes over sea which is warmer than 26.5C, it will strengthen. If less than 26.5C, energy is drawn from the storm and it will weaken.

Hurricane Fay approached Bermuda as a tropical storm, over warm sea which strengthened it to a Category 1 hurricane. Hurricane Gonzalo approached as a Category 5 – potentially catastrophic – and bizarrely but helpfully followed for 400 miles the exact path of Fay, which had neatly removed vast amounts of heat energy from the water. As a result, the water temperature had been pushed below the magic 26.5C and Gonzalo came down to a still alarming but less disastrous Category 3.

Not many weather events can be pinned directly to climate change. But the connection between sea temperature and the frequency and intensity of hurricanes is unusually clear. Hurricane Milton and its transatlantic siblings may look like distant events. But the waves bashing Ballantrae after Gonzalo and the Michael Fish “non-hurricane” were very direct linkages.

They underline the concern we should all have about the warming of the oceans, as we make them absorb more and more of our carbon dioxide surplus. Even if Finnieston never gets 14,500 mph gales, we can expect more and worse storms and have the means to do something about them.

George Fergusson is a former British diplomat. He was the British High Commissioner to New Zealand and Samoa, and the Governor of the Pitcairn Islands, from 2006 to 2010. He was the Governor of Bermuda from 2012 to 2016