Brace! Brace! Brace!

July’s first 10 days were particularly slammed by natural disasters. Fires raging up and down the West Coast and other western states were and continue to decimate homes and hundreds of thousands of acres. Fire-dropping aircraft and legions of firefighters on the ground are battling high winds, ultra-dry grasses and timber plus searing, record-breaking temperatures. Fire season seems to be all year now.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the opposite is true. Exceptionally heavy rains took their toll as well: “Torrents of rain and flooding battered a widespread area of southwestern Japan on Saturday [7/7], with local media casualty reports climbing quickly. Public broadcaster NHK said 38 people were dead, four were seriously injured and 47 were missing.

“Television footage showed a residential area in Okayama prefecture steeped in brown water that was spreading like a huge lake. Some people fled to rooftops and balconies and waved furiously at rescue helicopters… Okayama prefecture said a man died when he was caught in a landslide, and six others were missing. Evacuation orders had been issued to more than 360,000 people, the prefecture said in a statement.” Los Angeles Times, July 8^th.

While this was happening, a powerful tropical storm (“Chris”) was forming off the North Carolina coast, signaling the beginning of what could be yet another horrific season of devastating hurricanes. Global temperatures are rising whether evangelicals and Trump administrators want it or not. As Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf waters push ever-warmer, the impact of large tropical storms promises to be increasingly worse. Warmer surface water seeds the swirling mass above, feeding ordinary tropical storms until they make it to hurricane strength, some even pushing up to the 157 mph-plus Category Five level.

Those water soaked swirling masses are increasingly heavier than the average storms of twenty or fifty years ago. And heavy storms don’t move as fast as less water-soaked tropical depressions. Scientific studies have shown that tropical storms have steadily moved slower than they did back in 1949 (10% more slowly over that time). If the trend continues, studies suggest that by the end of the century, these storms will be dumping 24% more rain per storm!

Simply storms stay longer over the same spots and thus drop vastly more rain in the process… making bad very bad and very bad so much worse. We know that those sea waters are warmer than ever before. We know that that water temperature rise is not a good sign. But we have never lived in an era where water temperatures have reached these average temperatures before. We know it is going to be bad. What we really cannot project is how bad it will really be.

But scientists have just witnessed the very recent devastation of Hurricanes Maria and Harvey. They know what can happen, and given the fact the waters continue to get warmer, they are expecting the power of these storms to get worse. “‘There’s almost unanimous agreement that hurricanes will produce more rain in a warmer climate,’ said Adam Sobel, professor of applied physics at Columbia University and director of its Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. ‘There’s agreement there will be increased coastal flood risk, at a minimum because of sea level rise. Most people believe that hurricanes will get, on average, stronger. There’s more debate about whether we can detect that already.’

“No one knows how strong they could get, as they’re fueled by warmer ocean water. Timothy Hall, senior scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said top wind speeds of up to 230 mph could occur by the end of the century, if current global warming trends continue. This would be the strength of an F-4 tornado, which can pick up cars and throw them through the air (although tornadoes, because of their rapid changes of wind direction, are considered more destructive).

“Does that mean the five-category hurricane scale should be expanded to include a Category 6, or even Category 7?... The Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale, developed in the early 1970s, ranks hurricanes from Category 1, which means winds of 74 to 95 mph, to Category 5, which covers winds of 157 mph or more.

“Since each category covers a range of wind speeds, it would appear that once wind speed reaches 190 or 200 mph, the pattern may call for another category. Last season saw two Category 5 hurricanes, Irma and Maria, with Irma reaching 180 mph. And in 2015, off Mexico’s Pacific coast, Hurricane Patricia achieved a freakish sustained wind speed of 215 mph.

“‘If we had twice as many Category 5s — at some point, several decades down the line — if that seems to be the new norm, then yes, we’d want to have more partitioning at the upper part of the scale,’ Hall said. ‘At that point, a Category 6 would be a reasonable thing to do.’… Many scientists and forecasters aren’t particularly interested in categories anyway, since these capture only wind speed and not the other dangers posed by hurricanes.

“‘We’ve tried to steer the focus toward the individual hazards, which include storm surge, wind, rainfall, tornadoes and rip currents, instead of the particular category of the storm, which only provides information about the hazard from wind,’ said Dennis Feltgen, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center. ‘Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale already captures ‘catastrophic damage’ from wind, so it’s not clear that there would be a need for another category even if storms were to get stronger.’” LA Times.

What we do know is that federal, state and local governments remain under-prepared for the damage that is inevitably yet to come. Even as the Trump administration is patting itself on the back over its post-Maria rescue/rebuilding efforts in Puerto Rico, the deaths resulting from that hurricane have been upped from a couple of hundred to over 4,600. Large parts of the island still remain without electricity or potable water. What will be next? How will we respond? Brace! Brace! Brace!

I’m Peter Dekom, and aren’t you gratified that the Trump administration is pushing for a greater use of greenhouse-gas-emitting coal-fired electrical power plants, lower emissions standards for cars, and an overall reduction in environmental regulations?