Slower, Wetter, More Dangerous

Global climate change is destined to become, by a very wide margin, the most costly phenomenon in the history of Homo sapiens. In terms of numbers of lives lost, acreage of arable and habitable land lost, coastal land gone, misery inflicted, diseases spread, increase in the intensity and number of “natural” disasters (from fires and droughts to floods and hurricanes), political upheaval generated by desperate people seeking new viable land and hard dollar expenditures. Sure, parts of once “too cold to live here” land may become habitable and productive. Yes, a northwest passage above Canada can speed commerce along a new route. But you’d be hard-pressed to make a case for “the positive impact of global warming.”

Yet denying the mere existence of man-induced climate change, pulling regulations mandating limits on greenhouse gas emissions and activities that add such gasses to the atmosphere, encouraging the use of energy generation through the use of burning fossil fuels and withdrawing from the most important global climate accord (Syria is the only other nation not part of that Paris climate accord) are the official U.S. government policies. Words like “Global warming” and “Climate Change” have been purged from government websites, communications and reports. Government-funded research and publication of indisputable scientific statistical confirming climate change are now prohibited. Oh, and hurricane season is officially on.

Harvey and Maria are no longer popular names for children. No, not because of the Weinstein debacle… because of two of the most devastating hurricanes ever to blast through American territory literally defined the 2017 hurricane season. Harvey across the Houston, Texas area. Maria slamming Puerto Rico. Lives and homes lost. Life materially disrupted. Severe hurricanes always kill and destroy. It just seems that we are experiencing that severity with increasing frequency.

“An estimated 1,833 lives were lost in 2005 in Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history. The federal government’s lack of preparedness and inadequate response to Katrina met with widespread criticism, and the need for a more robust system to respond to natural catastrophes emerged as one of the key lessons from the 2005 storm. The impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico in 2017 indicates that these lessons have not been learned: The storm, which hit the island last September, rendered tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans homeless, left over a million people without electricity for several weeks, and caused an estimated $90 billion in damages (making it the third-costliest tropical cyclone in the United States since 1900).

“A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on May 29 estimates that the Puerto Rico death toll associated with Hurricane Maria is at least 4,654, over 70 times the original official count of 64. [Harvey was under 100.] (Last Friday [6/1], the Puerto Rico Department of Health raised its own estimate by at least 1,400, which is still far below the estimate in the study.) The mortality rate in the immediate aftermath of the storm (September 20 through December 31) was 14.3 per 1,000 persons, a 62% increase from the official rate for the same period in 2016, researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other institutions found. The ‘interruption of medical care was the primary cause of sustained high mortality rates in the months after the hurricane,’ the researchers wrote.” Harvard Business Review, June 7^th.

Back to that increase in hurricane/cyclone severity that is occurring with greater frequency. Is there a relationship between climate change and such storm intensity? Are there other factors at work in the most recent spate of intense hurricanes? The June 9^th Los Angeles Times examines contemporary research in the area and provides us with some startling facts, interestingly including research from the government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which doesn’t have to use the forbidden words noted above to make its point):

“New research by a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found that over the past seven decades, tropical cyclones have slowed down near coastlines around the world… The findings, published in the journal Nature, describe a clear link between global warming and the behavior of these severe storms — with potentially devastating consequences for the people that live near them…

“Certainly there’s one clear physical link, said Christina Patricola, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who was not involved in the study. For every 1 degree Celsius [equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit] rise in temperature, the atmosphere is able to hold 7% more moisture. That means that when it finally does rain, there’s a lot more water coming down — which could raise the risk of flooding…

“But what about speed? One of the hallmarks of Hurricane Harvey, which ravaged the Texas coastline in 2017, was how it slowly it moved across the Houston region, dumping roughly 50 inches of rain in some areas.

“‘A lot of the initial research has been focused largely on numbers of tropical cyclones and then of course on intensity because that’s the way that we feel the impacts,’ Patricola said. But when events like Hurricane Harvey hit, she added, ‘it’s a reminder that we need to consider the other characteristics of tropical cyclones.’

“[Study author James Kossin, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Madison, Wis.] wanted to see if, on average, the traveling speed of such tropical cyclones was slowing down. To find out, he used data from the U.S. National Hurricane Center and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center to study the position of such storms’ centers every six hours. From those, he was able to calculate the moving speed of these coastal storms from 1949 to 2016.

“Kossin found that, on average globally, the speed at which these tropical cyclones moved had fallen by about 10% with just 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming… ‘I was surprised at how strong a signal it was and how large a signal it was,’ he said. ‘Ten percent over 70 years is really quite a lot.’… In certain regions, that slowdown was even more extreme: about 30% over land affected by tropical cyclones from the western North Pacific and 20% over land affected by tropical cyclones from the North Atlantic…

“A storm that lingers longer over inhabited coastlines is a more dangerous storm, Kossin said, because it allows more rain to fall in a local area, raising the risk of flooding and storm surge. It may even increase the damage from hurricane winds, simply by battering the same structures over a longer period… ‘These tropical cyclones arrive carrying many, many hazards with them — none of them good — and the longer it’s in your area, the worse it’s going to be,’ he said. ‘You don’t want them to move slowly.’” Heavier storms move more slowly, it seems. Kossin must have needed to placate his politically-appointed bosses by adding a gratuitous note that past results do not necessarily predict the future. Riiiiight!

Have we passed the tipping point in unstoppable damaged from man-induced climate change? Many believe we have. But even among those scientists, there is a strong belief that we can at least mitigate a substantial portion of the expected damage by changing our policies, accepting the reality of such climate change and accelerating efforts to reverse the harm from burning and releasing carbon-based fuels and gasses into the atmosphere. That is exactly the opposite of the Trump/GOP policy on just about everything.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while we seem to love post-apocalyptic motion pictures, I have a strong suspicion that we would truly hate living in a post-apocalyptic real world.