Sixteen years to the day after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Hurricane Ida made landfall, further underscoring the severe dangers of rapid climate change, as noted by some in the mainstream media. But, as Random Lengths reported in 2005, the role of climate change was perfectly obvious when Katrina hit–and a majority of the American people were ready to take dramatic action even then. To put this week’s historic storm into context, we’re re-running two stories from our 2005 coverage of Katrina (Sept. 30 edition of RLn)-one about its relationship to climate change, and one about the media’s failure to cover climate change accurately. and the threat that failure posed to our future… a future we’re now living in.
Four weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Hurricane Rita slammed into the Texas/Louisiana coast. At their peaks, both ranked among the five strongest hurricanes on record. The close proximity of these two storms in time and place has made it impossible to ignore the growing intensity of hurricanes over the past several decades, as well as the inadequacy of our response, which goes even deeper than the Bush Administration’s immediate failures, or its defunding of levee-building in New Orleans.
“There is no doubt that environmental changes related to human influences on climate have changed the odds in favor of more intense storms and heavier rainfalls,” said climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Two very recent studies underscore his point.
In the July 31 online edition of “Nature,” MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel reported dramatic increases in the amount of energy released in hurricanes in both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific oceans since the mid-1970s. Both the duration and highest wind speeds have increased by about 50 percent over the past 50 years, Emanuel found.
“My results suggest… a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century,” he said.
Then in the September 16 issue of Science, four researchers published a study showing “A large increase … in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5,” over the past 35 years. While American attention was focused on the North Atlantic, the study found that “The largest increase occurred in the North Pacific, Indian, and Southwest Pacific and the smallest percentage increase occurred in the North Atlantic Ocean.”
From 1975 to 1989, the percentage of category 4 and 5 storms ranged from 8 percent in the North Indian Ocean to 25% in the East and West Pacific. From 1990 to 2004, the percentage ranged from 25% in the North Indian and the North Atlantic to 41% in the West Pacific.
Fundamental uncertainty about global warming is something that exists almost entirely in the American political system, corporate media, and the public influenced by them. But the scientific community shares none of those doubts. Nor do the large reinsurance companies-such as Swiss Re-whose business depends on anticipating future risks. Indeed, Swiss Re published its first brochure on global warming, “Global Warming: Element of Risk,” in 1994.
“The claim that there’s ‘no consensus’ about global warming is itself a testable hypothesis,” said David Pierce, a climate scientist at the world- renowned Scripps Institute at UC San Diego. Pierce co-authored a study released last February showing clear evidence of human-produced warming in the world’s oceans, using data spanning the past 40 years. “The oceans are all warming in the top 100 yards or so,” Pierce summarized, at a rate “‘two to three times the maximum you would ·expect to see without human forcing [impact].” The data is completely independent of the land-based data first used to develop the global warming theory.
While this could be considered a ‘smoking gun’ study, Pierce says, the issue was never really in doubt, pointing to the work of UCSD colleague Naomi Oreskes, who in effect tested the hypothesis that there was ‘no consensus’ on global warming-and found it to be false.
“That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords ‘climate change’,” Oreskes explained in an article in Science magazine last December.
“Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with· the consensus position,”Oresekes reported.
“[T]here is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen,” her article concluded.
Given that these papers dated back to 1993, it is clear that the “scientific controversy” has been non-existent for quite some time.
“I started this whole project because I study the history of scientific debate, and this [global warming controversy] isn’t that,” Oreskes told Random lengths. “This is a political problem in which people are trying to exploit the notion of scientific uncertainty.”
Oreskes is an expert in understanding what counts as scientific proof, and she’s quite clear that no single weather event proves anything about climate. But that hardly makes them irrelevant.
”What Katrina shows is how serious this can be. The increase in severe weather has deadly consequences. It’ not just an inconvenience, turning up an air conditioner,” she stressed: ·
Even though Rita did dramatically less damage than Katrina, the uncertainty involved and the difficulty of responding sends an additional warning, Oreskes noted. “Everyone in Texas has tried to do the right thing. And they can’t even do it then,” she observed. “It really shows what a future with global warming is like, and it is not pretty.”
Pierce cited two other examples of consequences co-workers had identified with a particμlar impact on Southern California, though they derive from projections for the entire Western United States. The reduced snowpack over the next 50 years means a loss of water storage “that’s going to be a problem in the future. That’s going to have a real impact on all your readers,” Pierce warned. The chance of water-shortage in any given year will double what it is today. Wildfires will also increase over a similar time frame, consuming “about double the acres,” Pierce warned.
These are just some of the factors that will impact the economy in years to come. That’s why large re-insurance firms, which underwrite policies for insurance companies, have become so concerned that they now have their own climate scientists on their payrolls.
Gary Lemcke is a climatologist working for Swiss Re here in America.
“I’m not doing research and development, we are strictly applied,” Lemcke explained. He uses simplified climate -models whose output matches that of more sophisticated academic researchers, then, “We translate these into risk assessment models. They allow us to combine anticipated changes in climate pattern into event loss sets.”
As with everything in insurance, the approach is statistical. It’s not the single simulation that matters, but the aggregate of many different ones, covering many different kinds of potential losses. tropical storms, hail, anything that causes insurable losses. As a problem, global warming is “pretty clear on our radar screen,” but “its on a long-term perspective, ten to twenty-five years,” Lemcke ·explained. “We try to educate the public and our clients. But it’s still at the stage where we need more research, before it can impact our pricing models.” The education is important, because it can influence decisions now, about how and what to build in anticipation of future weather.
“How long does it take to set up power lines, or build dikes? It take 10, 15, 20 years. In that sense it has an impact [now], and you see the need to educate people,” Lemcke said, patiently.
“We are in business for well over a hundred years and want to stay in business a lot longer.”
There are several distinct types of concerns, he explained.
“‘One component is that we are trying to figure out if there is any change in severe weather events-then in the long tenn. sea-level rise. We have an example in New Orleans. You look at New York, JFK runway is only a few feet above sea level.” Another facet–the easily-overlooked effects of “minor” changes in ‘”normal weather is spelled out in more detail in Swiss Re’s publication, “Opportunities and Risks of Climate Change:’ It cites a study of the unusually warm summer of 1995, which cost a total of about 1.5 billion British pounds.
Thus, “‘even unspectacular climatic anomalies … can cause losses on a scale normally associated only with natural catastrophes.” “Don’t gamble with Mother Nature,” Lemcke warned. ··That’s exactly what we are doing. We felt pretty safe in the seventies and eighties and thought it would go on forever. And started build-in!! in areas where. we shouldn’t build.” …… He isn’t saying the”re should be no development in high-risk areas. Seaside hotels can be built at much higher standards to withstand extraordinary storms. which will become more common. But other developments will simply be uneconomical to build to standards that insurance companies will insure.
The potential costs of global warming–both to entire economies and to the insurance industry itself–are subject to wide ranges of uncertainty.
More fundamentally, climate change undermines a basic assumption of the insurance industry, Lemcke explained: the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future. Which is why his work is so important for the industry.
Not only is global warming a financial threat, it’s a national security threat as well. This point was underscored in a 2003 report commissioned by Andrew Marshall, known as “the Yoda of the Pentagon,” which looked at the consequences of rapid climate change–changes of several degrees in the space of a decade.
While still regarded as relatively unlikely, such changes have occurred in the past, and are thought.to be triggered by shifts in global ocean currents, which could in turn result from continued melting of the polar ice caps. The report caused quite a stir when it was released, but like almost all news that doesn’t fit the Bush Agenda, it seemed to disappear without a trace within a matter of weeks. Katrina may bring fresh attention to this perspective.