Size Really Does Matter

As I sit in roiling September 100+ degree Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) temperatures in Los Angeles, watching the news footage of Hurricane Harvey damage/recovery and tracking the rising Irma in the Caribbean, I am reminded how critical weather is to human existence.

As if Harvey weren’t enough, “According to the National Hurricane Center’s latest bulletin, the storm is moving west at about 14 miles per hour with maximum wind speeds of 185 mph, with some higher gusts. Irma is already closing in on the record for strongest hurricanes ever, and the first since 2005 (Wilma) to reach the wind threshold of 185 miles per hour. The hurricane is also tearing through extremely warm waters, meaning its wind speeds could intensify still.” Mother Jones, September 6th. Florida has already asked the feds for disaster relief, before the storm even hits. But hurricanes have created political storms as well. 

The instability that has characterized the Middle East for decades was pushed into “explosively critical” by weather. Well over a million, mostly Sunni, farmers and their families in Iraq and Syria faced long-term drought that eventually rendered their once-fertile plots of land into completely and permanent unproductive desert. Their homes and farms were now worthless. Abandoned by their respective Shiite governments in Baghdad and Damascus, these locals expressed their hopeless rage by rebellion and even by embracing Sunni radicals – ISIS, al Qaeda, the al Nusrah Front, etc. – who offered ultra-violent “protection” against despised Shiite leadership. That massive immigrant push north into Europe, with all the corollary complications, is also a direct result.

We watched as Zika-carrying mosquitos migrated increasingly northward, becoming a genuine risk in U.S. states. Constant surges have made coastal street-flooding the “new normal” throughout South Florida, increasing in intensity at every surge. Miami real estate, located higher above sea level, is gentrifying fast as lower-lying coastal properties are beginning to face challenges… including the increasing reluctance of local banks to issue anything beyond a 15-year mortgage on those properties.

Heavy rains across certain parts of the United States contrast with serious drought and fire conditions in others. That increasingly warmer polar air pushes the usually colder polar air southward in to the Gulf Stream creates the freezing winter Polar Vortex effect in northern U.S. regions. There isn’t the slightest question that severe weather patterns have redefined human existence the world over, even nastier when combined with the Malthusian global population explosion everywhere. Where crops fail, people die. Where water surges, homes are destroyed, lives ruined.

So today, I am going to focus on an obvious topic, hurricanes impacting the United States. NASA’s website explains the phenomenon: “Tropical cyclones [including hurricanes] are like giant engines that use warm, moist air as fuel. That is why they form only over warm ocean waters near the equator. The warm, moist air over the ocean rises upward from near the surface. Because this air moves up and away from the surface, there is less air left near the surface. Another way to say the same thing is that the warm air rises, causing an area of lower air pressure below.

“Air from surrounding areas with higher air pressure pushes in to the low pressure area. Then that ‘new’ air becomes warm and moist and rises, too. As the warm air continues to rise, the surrounding air swirls in to take its place. As the warmed, moist air rises and cools off, the water in the air forms clouds. The whole system of clouds and wind spins and grows, fed by the ocean's heat and water evaporating from the surface…

“As the storm system rotates faster and faster, an eye forms in the center. It is very calm and clear in the eye, with very low air pressure. Higher pressure air from above flows down into the eye.” The warmer the surface water, the more intense the storm.

There are many variables that determine the frequency and intensity of such storms. Like the normal El Niño and La Niña cycles. The government’s NOAA site explains: “El Niño and La Niña are opposite phases of what is known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle. The ENSO cycle is a scientific term that describes the fluctuations in temperature between the ocean and atmosphere in the east-central Equatorial Pacific (approximately between the International Date Line and 120 degrees West).

“La Niña is sometimes referred to as the cold phase of ENSO and El Niño as the warm phase of ENSO. These deviations from normal surface temperatures can have large-scale impacts not only on ocean processes, but also on global weather and climate.

“El Niño and La Niña episodes typically last nine to 12 months, but some prolonged events may last for years. While their frequency can be quite irregular, El Niño and La Niña events occur on average every two to seven years. Typically, El Niño occurs more frequently than La Niña.” But what climatologists uniformly confirm – applying the well-established Clausius-Clapeyron Equation – is that the biggest variable in how intense a hurricane can become is surface the temperature of the ocean water where the storm is born, whatever the cause.

Seemingly small increases in that surface temperature have a seriously disproportionate impact on the intensity of the storm. And greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere – an accelerant of these climate change phenomena all over the world – have pushed up those oceanic surface temperatures, consistently year-after-year, everywhere. And we are seeing an incredible increase in hurricanes dubbed “once” in a hundred, five hundred or even a thousand years. Coincidence? No serious and knowledgeable scientist thinks so.

The September 1^st Los Angeles Times explains: “Climate change won’t mean more storms overall — but it probably will mean that that biggest storms become even bigger, scientists say… For example, rising ocean temperatures could be making storms like Harvey bigger than they would be otherwise, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. That’s because as the ocean’s surface temperature rises, the atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture goes up.

“According to the Clausius-Clapeyron Equation, every 0.5 of a degree Celsius of warming means an extra 3% or so of moisture in the air. And Harvey grew over an ocean that was 1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than just a few decades ago, which means there’s around 5% more moisture in the atmosphere… More moisture means a higher chance of heavier rainfall and bigger flooding — both of which, in Harvey’s case, have been wreaking major havoc in the greater Houston area.

“‘There is a good chance it would have happened anyway,’ Mann wrote of Harvey in an email. However, he added, ‘the impacts were likely greatly amplified by climate change.’… In this altered environment, with heavier rains, storms behave differently, said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research… ‘The storm itself grows a little bit more intense, it gets a little bit bigger, and it helps it to last longer,’ Trenberth said.

“Hurricanes usually start to dissipate soon after they make landfall, because they’re cut off from the supply of moisture from the ocean. Though Harvey weakened, its size allowed it to stay plugged into its power source in the Gulf of Mexico… ‘That’s a big factor with Harvey.… It’s big enough that it still had spiral arm bands that were reaching out into the gulf and bringing a lot of moisture into the storm,’ Trenberth said, which ‘enabled it to keep going where most storms would have petered out.’”

The post-2000 US hurricanes that have cost their communities at least $1 billion:  Katrina (2005 -$105.8B), Sandy (2012 - $75B), Ike (2008 - $27.8B), Wilma (2005 - $20.5B), Ivan (2004 - $19.8B), Charley (2004 - $15.8B), Irene (2011 - $15.8B), Rita (2005 - $11.8B), Allison (2001 - $11B), Frances (2004 - $10B), Jeanne (2004 - $8B), Isabel (2003 - $6.1B) and Gustav (2008 - $4.3B). Harvey – hitting the fourth largest city in the United States – will certainly sit atop that list when all the death and destruction is finally tallied. Preliminary estimates suggest approximately $180 billion.

While no one can determine with any precision if any of these hurricanes are caused by global climate change, what is exceptionally clear from the government’s own statistics is the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf surface temperatures are steadily rising… as is the intensity of those storms and the death and damage they cause, and the permanent land loss they inflict, rises. But since “climate change is a hoax” is now official government policy, more public lands are being opened to more fossil fuel extraction (including the globally reviled uncleanable “king coal”), and pollution restrictions relaxed, the United States (the biggest polluter since the onset of the Industrial Revolution) is most definitely part of the problem… and will reap the consequences of lost lives and losses into the trillions and trillions of hard dollars. Love those greenhouse gasses. Oh, I forgot to mention: “Tropical Storm Jose, heading for the Caribbean, strengthened to a hurricane on Wednesday [9/6] and could become a major Category 3 storm by Friday 9/8], the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.” AOL.com, September 6^th. Right behind Irma.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am repeatedly reminded that nature really does not care about mankind’s theories; she just responds to her own immutable laws with obvious and inevitable consequences.