It has been a tough summer across much of the Gulf Coast, where storm after storm has taken aim and two hurricanes — Laura and Sally — have decimated homes and claimed lives in a three-week span. Hurricane watches were again issued for the region Friday, as Tropical Storm Beta creeps westward, feeding off the warm waters, strengthening before possibly strafing much of the Texas coastline.

The storms that have reached the Gulf of Mexico have had some things in common: amazingly fast intensification, late shifts in path that have taken some communities off-guard, and massive storm surge and torrential rains that have inundated coastal towns with record flooding.

That hurricane season has already jumped into Greek-letter storms — having exhausted the alphabet by mid-September — is a testament to how unusual the weather has been in 2020, and there are more storms lining up across the Atlantic. In the towns that have been slammed, there is an acknowledgment from civic leaders that something has changed for the worse. They just don’t agree on what that change is. Is it an anomaly? Is it a shifting climate? Are humans responsible?

Here in Orange Beach, where Hurricane Sally made landfall this past week, Mayor Tony Kennon (R) admitted that the storm was out of the ordinary. Sally made a last-minute turn toward Kennon’s town and intensified to a Category 2 as it made landfall.

“I just think it was a freak,” Kennon said. “The Weather Service has really gotten good at what they do, but they’re not perfect. And I don’t blame anybody. The storm just didn’t do what storms normally do. . . . We just caught a storm that didn’t go the way it was supposed to go.”

Scientists are clear that human-induced climate change is a culprit, with warming waters fueling the storms, giving them more of a chance to rapidly intensify and dump epic amounts of rainfall. Human-caused climate change may also be contributing to a trend toward slower-moving storms at landfall, which worsens inland flooding.

“For 67 years, I have fooled with hurricanes,” said Al Cathey (D), mayor of Mexico Beach, Fla., which was leveled in October 2018, when Hurricane Michael turned into a monster Category 5 before slamming into the coast. Michael was the first Category 5 to make landfall in the United States since 1992, and it took many by surprise.

“Here’s what I can say: I live in a coastal town. I’ve watched it. Something is happening. To continue to ignore it is not the answer,” Cathey said. “You watch the news, they use the word ‘unprecedented’ almost routinely now. Everything is ‘unprecedented.’ Well, folks, where’s that coming from?”

“We didn’t necessarily have the number and the intensity probably 30 years ago that we have today,” he said. “So I do think there’s something to that.”