It may be hard to believe, but about a month ago, people were calling this year’s hurricane season a bust.

Now the U.S. faced a second devastating storm in less than a two week period. In terms of pure quantity of hurricanes, this may still end up being a fairly normal season. But on a heating planet, "normal” is increasingly dangerous.

Hurricane Milton churned through the superheated Gulf of Mexico as a Category 4 storm aimed at Florida’s Gulf Coast, where it made landfall Wednesday night as a Category 3 storm and delivered devastating winds, tornadoes and rainfall. Florida’s beaches were still littered with debris from Hurricane Helene, which made landfall just weeks earlier as one of the deadliest and most destructive storms in U.S. history.