Into the Wild Black Yonder: A Butterfly Effect

Yup, this is a Wikipedia infobox. Of a hurricane. In a lake.

This almost happened in the 1996 Lake Huron cyclone, where due to exceptionally warm water temperatures, a warm-core cyclonic system developed over Lake Huron on September 11, which began to develop tropical characteristics—a deep pressure hollow, an eye and eyewall made of convective clouds, and spiral rainband clouds moving anticlockwise from the center, all shown in the above image. What's more, wind speeds reached 73 mph, just 2 mph short of that required for a Category 1 hurricane. Wind shear rapidly disrupted the system before it could intensify any further on September 15 and 16.

In Into the Wild Black Yonder, largely due to an increase in fossil fuel consumption partially motivated by the increased attractiveness of air travel (especially supersonic air travel) due to greater aerospace accomplishment, as well as the closer US ties to Ba'athist Iraq and a slightly-accelerated "green revolution" allowing a larger population size (~7.7 billion as opposed to ~7.6 billion by early 2019), global warming is slightly greater, with the average temperature being at least ~0.1 °C (~0.18 °F) hotter than in Boring Old Real Earth in both 1996 and 2019.

Now, put this—especially with the more frequent extremes global warming causes—and a liberal dose of random chance into a cup, shake it, and Lake Huron turned out to be 1 °F hotter on 1996–09–11 in Into the Wild Black Yonder than Boring Old Real Earth. Also, the winds that sheared the storm out of existence came 2 days later. So, on 1996–09–14, it was declared a Potential Tropical Storm, and sustained winds solidly exceeded 75 mph. In the wee hours of 1996–09–15, an Earth observation and meteorological payload on a Nova OLRB mission captured a perfect tropical cyclone shape, and Hurricane Hunters deployed into the area found that the storm possessed all attributes of a tropical cyclone. The National Weather Service then officially named the storm as Category 1 Hurricane Isidore, after a brief-but-heated debate on whether they even had the jurisdiction to do so. The increased wind speeds and rainfall (more than 6 inches [152.4 mm] ) lead to structural damage and damaging flooding on the coast, and 18 inexperienced Great Lakers lost their lives, mostly in Alpena and Port Huron, Michigan but also 1 each in Goderich and Sandia, Ontario. Late on 1996-09-16, the storm lost its tropical characteristics, and by 1996–09–18 it had dissipated.

So, in Into the Wild Black Yonder, Hurricane Isidore became the first lacustrine tropical cyclone and hurricane in recorded history, and for that reason the name was retired for all future seasons.

Lesson: This almost happened in real life. Don't want this to start happening? Take action against global warming and climate change! Confused on what to do at this point? The latter section of my journal Two PSAs has a course of action. 

(Edit as of 2019–08–08 at 01:59 United States Eastern Time: Image changed to a better one and text slightly altered. Original image and text archived and will be provided upon request. Also, although the Climate Strike mentioned in the journal Two PSAs has passed, it is my understanding that more are coming.)