Weather Wars: Will unnatral disasters bankrupt the empire?

If nature was a novelist, the compounding ironies of the weather wars couldn’t get any sharper. A large proportion of U.S. oil-refining capacity has been built in and between New Orleans and Houston, the areas hardest hit by Katrina and Rita. This area lives by oil and—given the unfolding nature of rising seas and subsiding land—may die by it. In the meantime, the government is run by oil-related interests unable to see into a viable energy future. 

Bush and his “base” stand to gain from expensive oil, even as most other people lose. In the longer run, on the far horizon of history (in that land about which Bush does not care “because I’ll be dead then”) he—and we—will be in the same position as people who bought stock in blacksmitheries 125 years ago, at the dawn of the fossil fuel age. Oil as a source of energy has become environmentally obsolete. It is a threat to our national security in a most fundamental sense. 

In addition to national security concerns, by burning oil and other fossil fuels we are raising the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to levels not seen since the days of the dinosaurs. Year upon year, accelerating feedbacks in the atmosphere (such as gasification of carbon and methane from melting permafrost in the rapidly warming Arctic) will be more obvious than today. Additionally, the atmosphere takes about 50 years to express fossil-fuel combustion in any given period. Thus, today’s temperatures reflect consumption in, roughly, 1960. Since then, world fossil-fuel consumption has increased about 500 percent. 

Thus, if we think the weather is rough now, wait 50 years. As the atmosphere warms, storms generally become more explosive. Warmer air holds more water vapor and allows for more intense storm development. This has been true for tornadoes as well as hurricanes. About 110 miles southwest of Omaha, for example, the largest tornado on record (two miles across) wiped the town of Hallam off the map during May 2004. The same area also now owns bragging rights to the largest recorded hail, between the size of a softball and a cantaloupe. 

Hurricanes and Global Warming 

The relationship (or lack thereof) between hurricane intensity and warming atmospheric temperatures is complicated by the fact that water temperatures (like air temperatures) sometimes vary, over periods of several decades, along with the long-term trend “signal” provoked by greenhouse-gas levels. For example, water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean, which produces nearly all the hurricanes that have an impact on the United States, have been rising steadily since the 1970s, paralleling a general global rise in air temperatures. 

Frequency and intensity of hurricanes (as well as the number hitting U.S. coastlines and inflicting major damage) also have been rising during the same period. Any study that takes the record back to the 1970s indicates a very tight relationship between ocean warming, hurricane intensity, and air temperatures. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, air temperatures were generally cooler than during the 1970s, but water temperatures and hurricane intensity were higher— again, on average. By 2005 this divergence was fueling a testy debate between some hurricane experts regarding whether, and to what degree, hurricane intensity and frequency was related to the overall warming trend. This debate often spilled over into the public realm as Florida and surrounding areas were smacked by four major hurricanes in 2004 and as the 2005 hurricane season set records for the number of named storms in July. 

A study published in Nature, August 4, 2005, indicated that the “dissipation of power” of Atlantic hurricanes had more than doubled in the previous 30 years, with a dramatic spike since 1995, with global warming and other variations in ocean temperatures working together. The study, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology climate scientist Kerry Emanuel, was the first to indicate a statistical relationship between rising sea-surface temperatures and storm intensity. The trend reflects longer storm lifetimes and greater intensities, both of which Emanuel associates with increasing sea-surface temperatures. “The large upswing in the last decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effect of global warming. My results suggest that future warming may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone destructive potential and—taking into account an increasing coastal population—a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century,” Emanuel wrote.

During the summer of 2004, Florida and adjacent areas were hit by four major hurricanes (Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne) within six weeks, as speculation mounted regarding the storms’ possible relationship with global warming. Each of these hurricanes ranked in the top ten such storms to hit the United States in terms of insurance losses, until they were surpassed by Katrina and Rita. 

Another study reached similar conclusions. By the 2080s warmer seas could cause an average hurricane to intensify about an extra half step on the Saffir- Simpson scale, according to a study conducted on supercomputers at the Commerce Department’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. The same study anticipates that rainfall up to 60 miles from a hurricane’s core could be nearly 20 percent heavier. This study is significant because it used half a dozen computer simulations of global climate devised by separate groups at institutions around the world. 

Thomas R. Knutson and Robert E. Tuleya’s models indicate that, assuming sea-surface temperature increases of 0.8 to 2.4 degrees Celsius, hurricanes could become 14 percent more intense (based on central pressure), with a 6 percent increase in maximum wind speeds and an 18 percent rise in average precipitation rates within 100 kilometers of storm centers. 

During late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina tested the emergency preparation modeling for New Orleans and the rest of the Central Gulf coast with 150 mile-an-hour winds, a storm surge as high as 30 feet, and the second-lowest barometric-pressure reading in U.S. history. 

By August 30, two days after Katrina came ashore over Gulfport, Mississippi, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was calling its landfall the most significant natural disaster in the history of the United States—80 percent of New Orleans was under water and the city had no power, no drinking water, and no place to bury the uncounted dead. Along the Gulf Coast, in and near Biloxi, Gulfport, and Mobile, a 30-foot storm surge turned entire beachfront towns into piles of broken bricks and kindling. The fetid, humid heat was turning what remained into a stinking health hazard. The storm surge wiped away the town of Waveland, Mississippi, 50 miles northeast of New Orleans. Large parts of Biloxi, Gulfport, and other coastal cities and towns suffered damage on an apocalyptic scale. Five million people lost power, many of them for several weeks. The “worst-case scenarios” paled beside reality. 

It’s Becoming Apocalyptic 

Tim Wagner, Nebraska State Insurance commissioner, in an interview in the Omaha World-Herald three days after Katrina hit, said that global warming is causing weather- related disasters to be more severe and more frequent. “It’s scary,” he said. “It’s becoming apocalyptic.” 

On Saturday, September 3, the sixth day after the storm’s landfall, the Associated Press reported: “By mid-afternoon, only pockets of stragglers remained in the streets around the convention center, and New Orleans paramedics began carting away the dead. A once-vibrant city of 480,000 people, overtaken just days ago by floods, looting, rape and arson, was now an empty sodden tomb.” The New York Times reported: “Seven days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the New Orleans known as America’s vibrant capital of jazz and gala Mardi Gras celebrations was gone. In its place was a partly submerged city of abandoned homes and ruined businesses, of bodies in attics or floating in deserted streets, of misery that had driven most of its nearly 500,000 residents into a diaspora of biblical proportions…. Officials warned of an impossible future in a destroyed city without food, water, power or other necessities, only the specter of cholera, typhoid or mosquitoes carrying malaria or the West Nile virus.” 

Years before, scientists in the area had modeled the same situation in an exercise they called “Hurricane Pam.” They had known that New Orleans would flood with massive loss of life, but the gruesome nature of the reality had escaped even them. 

Two and a half weeks after Katrina struck, President George W. Bush stood in the French Quarter and told a national television audience that his government, which had been severely criticized for its tardy response to the storm, would “do what it takes” to rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the devastated Gulf Coast. Estimates of the cost at the time ranged up to $200 billion. 

The next day, in Science, another study linked rising water temperatures directly to the number, duration, and intensity of hurricanes. The researchers, led by Peter J. Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology, found that the number of storms in the two most powerful categories, 4 and 5, had risen to an average of 18 a year worldwide since 1990, up from 11 in the 1970s. There was no increase in the number of storms, the researchers said, just in their intensity. The rise in intensity coincided with an increase of nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit in the surfaces of tropical seas around the world. 

The United States has fallen behind much of the rest of the world in realizing that our energy paradigm must change during this century. Even today, most families in Denmark have a share in a wind turbine.  The European Union taxes any gasoline engine larger than two liters very heavily. Wind and solar energy are serious business in Europe. Will the United States refuse to recognize environmental realities? If we do, we will be emulating the people of Easter Island, who built a high culture on a wood-based economy and (as described by Jared Diamond in his recent book Collapse) consumed their island’s every last tree. We owe future generations better than that.