severe weather
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What a nice idea
If Gandhi were around today, I think he would be less reasonable and tractable about the climate crisis; instead, he would challenge the moral integrity of so-called western civilization. The galvanizing march to the salt flats (the famous "Salt March") would be a tour of threatened island nations: Inuit seeking redress for loss of habitat, mountain people facing bewildering change, deluges in Bangladesh, landslides in the Philippines, and masses of people in the Indus-Ganges-Yangtze river basins facing an uncertain future over water supplies. It would be a march to bear witness to the moral wrongness that pervades the fossil-fuel civilization. It would not, my fellow environmentalists, be the image of a stranded polar bear, regardless of how signatory a phenomena.
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Stormy weather ahead
Well, we might find out, according to an exclusive from The Oil Drum and Chuck Watson of KAC/UCF, also using a weather blog, where Margie Kieper writes:
An unusual event is happening over the next 48 hours, as the first tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and major hurricane-force winds at that, is approaching the Gulf of Oman, to strike the eastern coast of Oman, curve northward, and make landfall on the coast of Iran. In the tropical cyclone best tracks and the modern era of weather satellites, there is no record of such an occurrence.
As the Oil Drum writer comments:
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And yet the media isn’t reporting it
Global warming has long been predicted to make the weather more extreme. Wouldn't it be great if there were an official government index of extreme weather -- of heat, drought, rainfall, and hurricanes -- that would let us know if the prediction had come true?
Well, such an index exists: the National Climatic Data Center's Climate Extremes Index. As the figure shows, the most extreme year by far was 1998; 2006 was the second most extreme, followed closely by 2005. The fourteen least extreme years all predate 1981. The weather is becoming more extreme, as predicted:
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On moving to New Orleans, a city defined by water
Wayne Curtis is a freelance writer who’s written for The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, American Scholar, Preservation, and American Heritage, and is the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. He recently traded Maine winters for New Orleans summers. Thursday, 24 May 2007 NEW ORLEANS, […]
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Policy-wise, that is
As Andrew mentioned, the hurricane folks are saying that hurricanes are going to be the huge controversy when the IPCC report is released. Does climate change strengthen them? Yes? No? Kindamaybe with full takebacks? Does this consensus statement say we’re 51% sure while this other one says 49%? Let me ask a simple question: what […]
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The former says nothing about the latter
“We found that there is just no way that the observed changes [in hurricane strength] [in sea-surface temperatures] could be attributed purely to internally generated natural variability.” (see correction at bottom of post) So said Tom Wigley — one of many people at NCAR with more expertise and peer-reviewed papers in the area of hurricanes […]
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Cleared up once and for all
The answer depends on the exact question you're asking. Here is my view of the scientific consensus on a range of questions:
1) Did global warming cause Katrina? Or Rita? Or any single storm?
As far as I know, there exists not a single peer-reviewed article that connects global warming with the increased ferocity of any single storm. The commonly used dice analogy provides a good explanation of why the case is so hard to make. Assume the weather is determined by rolling a six-sided die, with a six corresponding to a massive hurricane. Now assume that by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we've loaded the die to make six come up twice as frequently.
Now, we roll the die once, and it comes up six. Did it come up six because it was loaded? After all, a normal die has a 16% chance of coming up six, so it's absolutely possible that the die would have come up six even without the loading.
So the answer to this question is "maybe, maybe not, we just don't know," and I think it's likely to stay that way.
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It’s about risk
No, the lesson is not that Katrina was caused by or made worse by global warming. There is, at present, no evidence that Katrina was meteorological payback for our ongoing emissions of greenhouse gases. Rather, the lesson of Katrina is about risk.
The possibility of a large hurricane wreaking havoc on the Louisiana coast has been known for years. Everything from infrastructure damage to long-term flooding of New Orleans to the enormous refugee problem was foreseen in excruciatingly accurate detail.
We also knew the things we could do to reduce the impact of a killer hurricane. We could shore up the levees, for example, or work to recover the disappearing wetlands and barrier islands that shield New Orleans from storms. But these were deemed "too expensive" and postponed. We rolled the dice.
Now, our country is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild New Orleans and surrounding areas -- at least ten times more than the cost of mitigating the catastrophe in the first place.
What does this have to do with global warming?
