Hermine makes landfall in Florida as hurricane, starts to lose some steam.

Hermine hit Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane at around 1:30 a.m., but nearly four hours later it was downgraded to a tropical storm.

The storm is expected to move move through the mostly rural and lightly populated corner where the Florida peninsula meets the Panhandle and then drop back down to a tropical storm and push into Georgia, the Carolinas and up the East Coast with the potential for drenching rain and deadly flooding.

Hermine is nothing to laugh at, but as the story notes, it is also “the first hurricane to directly hit the Sunshine State in more than a decade.”

I’m old enough to remember when Al Gore’s panicked warning about increased hurricane activity was recent enough that people still bothered to debunk it.