Putting natural disasters into perspective
Bookworm on Sep 05 2008 at 8:39 am | Filed under: Climate change
Part of the environmentalists’ apocalyptic frenzy about climate change is the fact that natural disasters seem to have worse consequences than ever before, with more property destroyed and more people killed. Time Magazine, of all journalistic places, puts that into perspective, reminding the hysterics of something they might have forgotten: we have more people than ever before.
Before I quote from the article, let me remind you of something. In statistical terms, the Black Death was probably the greatest kill off in mankind’s known history, resulting in the death of up to one-third of the European population (and that’s not even touching deaths in Asia, where the plague originated). Were that to happen now, deaths would be in the billions. Back then, European deaths were about 25-50 million. It’s a staggering number, but would be only a fairly biggish drop in the demographic bucket today. It certainly wouldn’t equal a third of the West’s population.
Having laid the stage, let me go back to Time’s bracing take on death and destruction from today’s natural disasters:
If it seems like disasters are getting more common, it’s because they are. But some disasters seem to be affecting us in worse ways — and not for the reasons you may think. Floods and storms have led to most of the excess damage. The number of flood and storm disasters has gone up 7.4% every year in recent decades, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. (Between 2000 and 2007, the growth was even faster, with an average annual rate of increase of 8.4%.) Of the total 197 million people affected by disasters in 2007, 164 million were affected by floods.
It is tempting to look at the lineup of storms in the Atlantic Ocean (Hanna, Ike, Josephine) and, in the name of everything green, blame climate change for this state of affairs. But there is another inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more vulnerable to weather mostly because of where we live, not just how we live.
In recent decades, people around the world have moved en masse to big cities near water. The population of Miami-Dade County in Florida was about 150,000 in the 1930s, a decade fraught with severe hurricanes. Since then, the population of Miami-Dade County has rocketed 1,600%, to 2,400,000.
So the same-intensity hurricane today wreaks all sorts of havoc that wouldn’t have occurred had human beings not migrated. (To see how your own coastal county has changed in population, check out this cool graphing tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)
If climate change is having an effect on the intensities of storms, it’s not obvious in the historical weather data. And whatever effect it is having is much, much smaller than the effect of development along coastlines. In fact, if you look at all storms from 1900 to 2005 and imagine today’s populations on the coasts, as Roger Pielke Jr., and his colleagues did in a 2008 Natural Hazards Review paper, you would see that the worst hurricane would have actually happened in 1926.
You can read the rest of this intelligent, calming article here.
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Bookworm, nice post highlighting how the media does not do stats or numbers very well. I believe reporters are still worse than lawyers and legislators in this regard. But you might be relying too much on this particular mistake while ignoring a very important story that just came out one or two days ago: http://voanews.com/english/Science/2008-09-03-voa31.cfm. The scientific study shows that while the number of storms has not risen due to climate change–an erroneous assumption maintained by some environmentalists and even some scientists–the intensity and destructive force of the worst storms is greater. The results will be published later this week in Nature magazine, one of the very best science publications around. Your judgmental adjectives (“apocalyptic frenzy,” “hysterics”) notwithstanding, there is very good science to support the notion that the 0.5+ degree temperature increase in the oceans will, by the laws of physics, translate into harsher storms and more damage, even adjusting for the higher populations, costlier real estate, etc. that now lie on or near the coast. The trick in evaluating the issue, I believe, is to keep the emotional stuff to a minimum and instead focus on the numbers, data, etc. And try to come up with policy solutions that strike a balance between the need to maintain economic growth and the need to avoid very serious problems related to climate change.
Putting natural disasters into perspective…
Part of the environmentalists’ apocalyptic frenzy about climate change is the fact that natural disasters seem to have worse consequences than ever before, with more property destroyed and more people killed. ……
The solution to humanity’s ills, Book, is to destroy humanity. That way, evil will no longer exist, Book. That is the Leftist creed for a better world.
Bookworm, this is a fascinating subject to me. That is, the relationship between concerns of scientists and how it can drive public policy and shake world events.
A classic example is the letter Leo Szilard wrote, transmitted via Einstein, which led to the atomic bomb. Often times it starts with just one individual and radiates outward with tremendous intensity.
I especially appreciate the highlight of the fact that it is the flooding that causes most of the misery and the devastation.
It surely is true that more and more people are living in coastal areas that are vulnerable to storm surge, and it is the flooding associated with the storm surges that wreaks the most havoc.
But it is also true that flooding along rivers causes extreme havoc as well. We must remember that since the 40′s we have instituted more and more “river control” along most of our major rivers. Dams and concrete barriers and flow control. When the inevitable happens, and these measures of control are (rather easily) overcome, all the people living in the lowlands and the cities experience extreme flood trauma.
What is true is that without the vast network of controls, fewer people would be harmed! It’s the inadequate nature of the controls that causes much of the river flooding misery.
I’ve heard stories from native Texans of droughts (in the 50′s) that created cracks in their yards so wide they could fall into them and break their legs. Stories of floods caused by rainfall amounts much higher than we have recently seen. We need to take into account that the weather events we see aren’t actually so unique… it’s our very fragile systems of control that are inadequate. Fragile systems of control that are new, and that actually cause much of the misery.
(And this includes Katrina’s effect on New Orleans. If the levees had been properly maintained, it would have been a mild rain event, that’s all. Now, the effect on the nor-east side of the hurricane, in extreme northeast LA, and in Mississippi and Alabama… the effects of the tidal surge were far worse.)
Here is something you might have missed.
http://www.smm.org/buzz/blog/sunspot-activity-reaches-record-low
http://tinyurl.com/562srq
While no one can accurately predict long range weather, even the old standby, The Farmers Almanac, is predicting a colder than normal winter.
http://www.farmersalmanac.com/
Allen, I wonder, then, by extension, whether you have grown concerned that the Bush administration has prevented such influence during its tenure, and, if so, whether a McCain presidency might be more open to the type of advice that has been historically provided?
Mike, I heard the other day on a television program that the marshlands around New Orleans, having been destroyed by human development, also exacerbated the flooding occuring after Katrina. Since you seem to know a lot about the subject, is this another proximate human cause of increasingly devastating storm damage?
Something I just got to share:
http://thecrescat.blogspot.com/2008/09/this-is-your-brain-on-liberalism.html
Zhombre, nice…. But those are not brains on liberalism. I think that a few people did a little too much acid in the 60s or 70s. I believe you are watching what drug users call an acid flash.
dg,
I’m not all that knowledgable, but it is certainly true that the marshlands of the southern bayou have been devastated, and that therefore a storm surge into New Orleans would be far worse than it would have been forty years ago.
The flow control of the Mississippi River within Louisiana is directly to blame for this. Perhaps also the regulation of the Mississippi above Louisiana also prevents the necessary accumulation of silt that formerly kept the marshlands intact. I’m not sure.
Regardless, storm surge was not highly significant to New Orleans during Katrina, as New Orleans was on the southwest side of the eye. There was some, and it was a contributing factor to the collapse of the levees. But if you look at the accounts of the water flow into New Orleans it is clear that it was clearly expected to be handled – perhaps on the level of a Category One hit on New Orleans itself, or even less. The levees became wet, then muddy, then internally collapsed in places due to exceptionally poor construction.
My usual diatribes strike at corruption, and we ARE talking about Louisiana, after all. The management of the New Orleans levee system, and the money that was supposed to be guided to it, is an object lesson in the horrors that corruption can bring.
dg, Szilard was wrong. Consider it.
Allen, you’ll have to fill me in on the Szilard-Einstein story. I only know that Einstein proposed the possibility of tapping nuclear power for bombs and thought the US should acquire them before Germany did. You’ll have to fill in the rest of the story…