With Hurricane Helene wreaking havoc and causing misery for millions, a new book warns that such terrifying storms are only the beginning. 

Warming seas will bring 'near-​constant natural disaster to North America' in coming decades and into the next century, according to its author — a journalist and lifetime sailor who spoke to oceanographers, meteorologists and disaster relief crews.

But the data speaks for itself: weather-related natural disasters now plague Earth at five-times the frequency that such 'freak storms' once did back in the 1970s.   

And an international team of over 60 scientists calculated last year that the burning of fossil fuels has poured the equivalent energy of 25 billion nuclear bomb blasts into the Earth's systems, heralding a dark new era of 'mega-hurricanes.' 

The new book, Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them, comes with a prophetic warning of an 'Ultra-​Intense Category 6' hurricane.

'The most powerful storm ever seen on Earth,' its author, Porter Fox, contends, 'will form from a cluster of convective supercells sometime around 2100.'

Here's the forecast for what that likely mega-hurricane will do.

Fox's prediction for this hypothetical 2100 mega-hurricane, which he calls 'Hurricane Dannielle,' derives in part from government scientists' data and modelling efforts.

But he also spoke to salvage ship crew and tugboat operators, like Joey Farrell Jr and Stu Miller, who clean up after hurricanes year-after-year with their vessels.

When Hurricane Michael, a Category 5, hit northwest Florida, Miller remembered: 'It looked like the hand of God went in there and just wiped the earth completely clean.'

'It didn't matter whether it was a steel building, a brick building, a wood building — there was nothing left standing,' Miller told Fox. 'The air pressure was so low it sucked the oil out of the giant Chevron storage tanks down by the marina.'

'Hurricane Danielle' arrives 

Fox's hypothetical 'Hurricane Danielle' would be no less devastating, as it surges through a familiar path, like 2012 mega-storm Hurricane Sandy before it, through the slim channel between Staten Island and Brooklyn's Dyker Heights. 

As this future storm enters New York Harbor, Fox argues, its punishing wind shear will rattle the Verrazzano-​Narrows Bridge, snapping its three-​foot-​thick suspension cables and 'sending both levels of the roadway into the lower bay.'

'Destruction will be on a scale never seen in the Northeast,' he writes, 'more like a cyclone on the floodplains of India or Bangladesh than wind events in the tristate.'

As this 'Ultra-​Intense Category 6' enters New York Harbor, the whole of Governors Island will be subsumed in 'a wall of whitewater.' 

'Most windows in the Freedom Tower, built to withstand gusts up to two hundred miles per hour, will blow out,' according to Fox, ironically 'reducing its windage and likely saving the building.'

Retaining walls built around Battery Park, as part of the ongoing $1.7 billion-plus Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency climate adaptation plan, will be overwhelmed.

'Ocean and river water will mix at the eastern edge of Tompkins Square Park as water flows freely through the streets of Chinatown, Little Italy, and the chic boutiques and bistros of NoHo and SoHo,' Fox writes in Category Five.

The city's vulnerability to this deluge will be a consequence not just of the storm, but rising sea levels: an example of what the author calls the 'compounding forces of climate change.'

'If Superstorm Sandy had occurred in 1912 instead of 2012,' Fox learned, 'it would have likely not flooded Lower Manhattan.'

Right now, Earth's oceans are the hottest that they have ever been, since at least the 1800s when humanity first started taking detailed measurements, according to NASA.

'Most of the added energy is stored at the surface, at a depth of zero to 700 meters [or 2,300 feet deep],' the US space agency reported late last year. 

As much as melting glaciers or the sliding of Antarctic ice sheets into the sea, the simple fact of these warming waters has put coastal cities, like New York, at risk. 

'Heat stored in the ocean causes its water to expand,' NASA determined, 'which is responsible for one-third to one-half of global sea level rise.'

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that as much as 360 zettajoules of energy has been added to the world's oceans since 1955.

'A zettajoule,' according to Dr John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas, 'is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules.'

'The amount of heat we are putting into the oceans,' he explained, 'is equivalent to about five Hiroshima atom bombs of energy every second.' 

But this early flooding of lower Manhattan — in which Canal Street 'will be reclaimed as a canal once more, channeling water, cars, driftwood, and unfortunate pedestrians southeast' — is just the beginning, Fox warns.

Manhattan, under the deluge

After landfall, Hurricane Danielle will wage a 48-​hour siege on the Big Apple, as denser, more saturated superstorms will come to slog through a hotter atmosphere.

'Hurricanes will have slowed by 15 percent by 2100 and will be saturated with 20 percent more water vapor,' Fox explains.

'Still to come from the right quadrant of the storm are gusts topping 220 mph, strong enough to blow the roof off the Metropolitan Museum of Art,' he predicts.

With 'rows of plane and oak trees in Central Park' uprooted, windows shattered across the city, and more bridges collapsed, the hurricane's force will then splinter into 'up to fifty tornadoes.' 

'This swarm of cyclones will cause unthinkable damage in tiny swaths of the city,' Fox says, 'leaving furrows carved through parks, neighborhoods, and streets.'

The explanation for this incredible intensity comes from the predictable, but nevertheless complex and chaotic forces, that come from the heat energy packed into Earth's oceans and its skies by the greenhouse gas effect.

'To laypeople,' he writes, 'storms are an atmospheric disturbance, detached from the Earth except for the damage they cause.' 

'In fact, much of a hurricane's power arises from the border between ocean and air,' according to Fox, 'what scientists refer to as the "planetary boundary layer."'

This fact is crucial to understand in order to accurately extrapolate just what carnage a future mega-storm like Danielle will one day be capable of.   

Wind friction from a tropical cyclone does not just 'float over the sea,' Fox discovered, 'they lean on it, drag it, and drive it forward.'

When water vapor pulled up into this process rises, he writes, 'it cools and condenses into rain, releasing latent heat that fuels convection and grows the storm system.'

The journalist and sailor, who has written up his travels for National Geographic Adventure and Men's Journal, alongside the occasional fictional stories, drew a probable and chilling scenario of countless New Yorkers trapped in skyscrapers.

'Those lucky enough to live in a modern, structurally sound skyscraper on high ground in Midtown or upper Manhattan will watch from upper floors as foaming brown channels of water rush through the streets,' he writes.

'Water will soon overwhelm the city's gutters and storm drains, invading the intricate substructure of Manhattan, knocking out power, internet, and cell service.'

Fallout: New York

Fox estimates that the death toll of an 'Ultra-​Intense Category 6' hitting Gotham will approach something close to 42,000 human lives. 

'Thousands of families torn apart,' he writes. 'Hundreds of neighborhoods erased.' 

'Industries gone. Transit crippled. The character and viability of America's largest city shattered [...] In the weeks and months that follow, residents and officials will grapple with the impossible question of whether or not to rebuild.'

The widespread devastation to the city's infrastructure, its ravaged communications cables and fiber optics, its roads and bridges will make rescue operations in the wake of the story 'nearly impossible.'

New York City is just one of America's most well-known coastal metropolises, Fox notes, with many others at risk of similar or worse fates. 

'One silver lining: Miami residents will no longer have to worry about superstorms, seawalls, building codes, or insurance lapses in 2100, as the city will no longer exist.'

Major cities in wealthy countries like the United States, of course, are nevertheless likely to be some of the best-protected from this apocalypse of mega-storms.

The United Nations estimates that 91 percent of the deaths already associated with today's rise in weather-based natural disasters befall those in the developing world.

But the most troubling feature of this growing crisis — to judge from what Fox's scientist sources told him — is what we don't know.

At the UN's Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26) last November and December, NOAA oceanographer Dr Adrienne Sutton blasted government policymakers over the 'black hole of data' in the world's oceans.

While global seas have acted as a climate buffer for decades, absorbing about 90 percent of the heat created by increased carbon emissions, as well as over 30 percent of that carbon dioxide itself, the full consequences of that remain unknown.

'We are currently measuring about 2 percent of the ocean,' as Sutton's colleague, carbon-modeler Dr Galen McKinley told Fox. 

'So how do we fill in the gaps?'

A variety of oceanic scientific experiments with fleets or drones, buoys and other data-collecting sensors have been proposed, but only a few have been funded — like Saildrone whose first instruments were installed by NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

But the federal funding for NOAA and other ocean research comes to only a tiny fraction, 1/250th or 0.4 percent, of what NASA receives to explore space.

And it took prior disasters from the more nascent phases of global climate change, like 2005's infamous Hurricane Katrina, for the current level of funding to arrive.

'The 2005 hurricane season in the Atlantic set everything off,' Dr Greg Foltz of NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) told Fox.

'It was such a destructive season, and it got all this attention, so more money came in and we got more funding for things like ocean observation, which really hadn't achieved any kind of scale yet.' 

There was this appreciation that hurricanes are important,' as Dr Foltz recalled it, 'and they're gonna get worse.'