August 23, 2007
Taming the Hurricane
Filed under: Climate History, Climate Extremes, Hurricanes —
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/08/23/taming-the-hurricane/
On September 28, 1955, a Category 5 hurricane named Janet slammed into
Chetumal, on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, killing over 600 people.
Hurricane Dean, another Category 5, and the third-strongest storm ever
measured at landfall, hit in exactly the same place earlier this week
(Tuesday, August 21,2007) and killed no one. Maximum winds in both
storms were indistinguishable. The hurricane-hunter pilot who flew
through the eyewall of the storm Tuesday reported severe turbulence,
which is a temporary loss of aircraft control. Probably for the first
time in human history, a Category 5 storm hit a populated area and
everyone lived.
Because of its peculiar location, the Yucatan takes more big hurricane
hits than just about anywhere else in the western hemisphere. When
Mexico was dirt-poor, as it was in 1955, hurricanes could kill
hundreds. They were warned, then, too. Hurricane-hunter planes also
monitored Janet. Only one of these has ever been lost, and it as Janet
was making landfall.
Similar storms, huge storms, very different results. What’s happening
here?
Since then, people in the Yucatan have learned to adapt. While storms
like these used to kill hundreds, even thousands, we now have the
technology to forecast their tracks, at least for the critical last 24
hours, with reasonable confidence. Forecasting the intensity is a bit
trickier, but everyone in the hurricane business was pretty convinced
that Dean was going to bomb out sometime before it hit land. After
all, it was passing over the same region in which 1988 hurricane
Gilbert set the record for the lowest barometric pressure ever
measured in the Atlantic Basin.
Gilbert was the second-strongest storm ever recorded at landfall, and
also hit the Yucatan. While it was responsible for 202 deaths in
Mexico, almost all of these were caused by mountain floods hundreds of
miles away and days away from landfall.
Adaptation includes technology, infrastructure, and response. National
Hurricane Center forecasts and data are available to everyone. But the
infrastructure to respond to a forecast hurricane costs money, and
poor nations don’t have it. Among other things, it requires good roads
for evacuation.
Perhaps even more important, adaptation to hurricanes or other natural
disasters is political. No elected official wants to be blamed for
hundreds of preventable deaths, so the nations that can afford it
develop evacuation plans, open shelters, and deliver people from
danger.
When Janet killed hundreds, per-capita income in Mexico was less than
a tenth of what it is now, when Dean killed no one.
So why is it that people are wringing their hands about global warming
causing more severe hurricanes and deaths?
The best computer estimate for future hurricanes was published by Tom
Knutson and Robert Tuleya in the Journal of Climate in 2004. They
calculated that maximum winds should increase by about 6% over the
next 75 years. Even this may be an overestimate because the method
used assumes carbon dioxide—the main global warming emission—is
increasing in the atmosphere about twice as fast as it actually is.
Clearly, this small increase in hurricane strength is going to be
dramatically overshadowed by adaptation as the developing world
continues to develop. Mexico is a case in point.
We see other adaptations to climate change in our cities. In the
United States, cities with the most frequent heat waves have the
fewest heat-related deaths, and heat-related deaths are themselves
dropping, as our cities warm. Remember, a city doesn’t need global
warming to get hot. All it needs is a skyline, and a lot of blacktop
and concrete to impede the flow of air and retain heat. But in our
warming cities, just as with hurricanes in the Yucatan, frequency +
affluence = adaptation.
An odd example of this is that there is only one major U.S. city in
which heat related deaths are increasing, and it is the coolest one in
summer: Seattle.
Anyone concerned about climate change should take a lesson from
Hurricane Dean. Even if storms like this become more frequent in the
future, people will adapt and survive if they have the financial
resources. How silly it seems to take those resources away in futile
attempts to “stop global warming”—which no one even knows how to
do—when they could save lives by allowing people to adapt to our
ever-changing climate.
The truth is that money in the hand is a lot more useful than treaties
on paper when it comes to sparing yourself and your family from bad
weather. So people truly worried about climate change should be
cheerleading for the global trade and economic development that will
continue allowing us to adapt.
--
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not
on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away
with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone
are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices
me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net
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