Hurricanes and global warming 06 September 04

This season, one I’ve long expected, is indeed combining the full force of this latest multi-year cycle of hurricane-favorable conditions with the rapid pace of GW and CC, their consequences growing more and more obvious to even the casual observer. Not only are hurricanes (as well as typhoons, cyclones, tropical storms and monsoons) becoming more frequent, they are becoming both more intense and more likely to exhibit unusual behavior.

Tropical storms are certainly putting the kibosh on the idea of saying “oh, it’s JUST a tropical storm, JUST a Category 1 (or 2)hurricane.” This has been happening a LOT here in the States in the 90s and 2000s. This year was no exception. The states of North and South Carolina have been hit many times this year by “just” tropical storms, but don’t try to tell its residents that! With hurricanes, the same areas of the Caribbean and Florida (later to visit the Carolinas as “just” a TS) seem to be being hit over and over again. Charley in mid-August, Frances over Labor Day weekend, and now the Caribbean braces for the arrival of Ivan, as of this date (Sept. 6) at Category 3 status. Hispaniola and Cuba are already likely targets, followed by a strongly potential landing in-you guessed it!Florida by the weekend. This produces something of a “battering ram” effect, with both nature’s and humans’resistance quickly wearing down. A third of the old trees in my Aunt’s home town in Floridatrees that have withstood up to over a century of hurricanes and storms-fell when Charley arrived. I don’t even want to think about what Frances’ winds did to the remaining trees. Over and over, people were muttering about Frances (a very slow mover!) “coming and getting it over with,” or, getting cabin fever after days in shelters,crying, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” The environmental AND psychological effects of back to back to back weather conditions are as destructive as the storms themselves.

Meantime, the huge, slow moving Frances once bordered a Cat 5, but came ashore on Florida as “just” a Cat 2. She’s made Charley look like a piker-and she’s covered a lot of the same area that Charley did, only from east to west, not west to east. Charley, of course, was that “just” a Cat 2 storm that turned into a Cat 4 some 4-5 hours prior to hitting the Florida coast. The weatherpeople are agog-they can give some guesses, but NO SOLID explanation why these storms are behaving the way they are. And we’re only in the middle of hurricane season! (You in the UK are very aware of that, after last month’s floods, caused in part from remnants of one of our hurricanes!)

And it’s no better in the Far East, where China, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and South and S.W. Asia are being brutalized by storm after monsoon after typhoon. (India and Pakistan got THEIR worst floods in decades BETWEEN major droughts.) Japan has had back to back severe typhoons this week and last. China’s digging out from massive mudslides, and slogging through floodwaters. Things aren’t over over there, either—and an El Nino is growing in the Pacific, its impact expected to be felt by October-November.

This bodes ill for the future, as GW and CC become even more pronounced, and so called “normal” or “normal fluctuating” conditions are fed the equivalent of steroids by them—the “human fingerprint” giving the finger to themselves (not to mention all other life on Earth). And yet people go on with their lives, assuring everyone that “they’ll think of something.”

Thanks for being so fast reporting on the hurricanes, Mark. (Have you noticed that to date, they’ve ALL come within a one-month period?) Keep an eye out—with a Nino coming into the mix, the next year is going to be VERY active on the weather front!

I read in the NY Times that GW had not impacted the recent hurricanes in Florida much, if at all (I guess they meant science had not reached 95% certainity on it). Well, if this is just natural variation, wait until GW really kicks in and causes much worse damage than Charlie or Frances. That thought may actually be why some in harm’s way refuse to believe in GW – much like a person’s denial of serious heart disease.

-that’s pretty much what my overlong diatribe preceding your entry was trying to say: if stuff like this happens during “normal” peak hurricane cycles, imagine how GW/CC will fuel the “normal” into something even MORE frightening! (Like a Cat 5 hurricane the size of Frances bowling down Florida, refueling in the Gulf, then taking out New Orleans or Galveston/Houston as Cat 5, Part II.) The articles of people returning home in Florida, just to find out that if Charley, then Frances, were not enough, it looks like Ivan may be hitting the state before this coming weekend is over! Battering-ram mentality, indeed! Some are already swearing not to go through evacuation again, but to wait it out at home this time. This could be the time for Murphy’s Law to kick in, and Ivan arrive as at least a Cat 4, somewhere between Charley’s and Frances’ size! (Maybe this time, it’ll just tear up Florida’s throat, South to North-OK, bad joke, but the projections have it hitting the Keys, which are just below the Southern tip of the peninsula.) Yes, the years ahead are going to be, uh, less than boring hurricane-wise….

What some fail to realize is that even if GW’s impact on hurricanes, storms, floods, and droughts is very tiny compared to natural contributions, that small impact could have very large human-scale consequences. A house might stand high winds to a point, and then a tiny increase would destroy it. It’s not the 15 feet of floodwaters inching up that 15 foot levy that are so harmful, as the last added inches that breach it. Crops might stand a lot of heat and drought, but that extra increment would kill them (and people, as in France, 2003).

Mathematics developed “catastrophe theory” in the 1970s to deal with this type of situation. But folk wisdom has long understood it as “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

They ran a map today on the locations of offshore oil & gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Looks like ol’ Ivan the Terrible is about to do a smash-and-sink job on them as he wreaks his havoc on the U.S. Gulf Coast states! They’ve been very cocky, these fosfuel dudes, on the fact that so far this year, their lovely drilling rigs have been basically undamaged, or missed altogether, by all these tropical storms and hurricanes. Guess they missed all the stories that said that we’ve entered an active storm phase in the Atlantic (assisted with love by GW!). Fellas, hate to break it to you, but the honeymoon-from-hurricanes is OVER-and will be for years to come. (But boy, oh, boy, the power we could’ve been getting out of these tidal surges, had we developed storm-proof energy absorbers! Oops! Excuse me, I forgot-we had to spend all that money on bringing democracy to Iraq….)

After I wrote “Woo! Ivan!” I learned that he’d pretty much left the rigs untouched, and the couple of them that were “missing” were found, intact. The oil & gas honchos lucked out—again! Still, the nervousness about all these hurricanes and what it could very well mean for oil production (or lack thereof) caused a 4% jump in both crude and gasoline world prices today (Sept. 17). If the FEARS of what could happen could cause such worldwide reaction, just imagine what could happen WHEN (not “if”) these fears become reality!

Hummmm…GW-assisted superhurricane blasts the fear of God in an industry already haunted by the advent of Peak Oil…I think I have a script idea for the “Day After Tomorrow” movie sequel here….