Say Anything Blog

A very interesting read on Yahoo’s web site here:

A few tidbits:

It is tempting to look at the line-up of storms in the Atlantic (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.

Could mankind possibly be warming the atmosphere and be partially to blame for seemingly worse storms? Possibly. But nothing can compare to the fact that humans are purposely moving into the paths of these disasters.

What’s changed is what we’ve put in the storm’s way. Crowding together in coastal cities puts us at risk on a few levels. First, it is harder for us to evacuate before a storm because of gridlock. And in much of the developing world, people don’t get the kinds of early warnings that Americans get. So large migrant populations - usually living in flimsy housing - get flooded out year after year. That helps explain why Asia has repeatedly been the hardest hit by disasters in recent years.

Secondly, even if we get all the humans to safety, we still have more stuff in harm’s way. So each big hurricane costs more than the big one before it, even controlling for inflation.

And finally my point, and one that many people caught up in the “climate change” emotional swing don’t seem to realize.

But even if greenhouse gas emissions plummeted miraculously next year, we would not expect to see a big change in disaster losses. So it’s important to stay focused on the real cause of the problem, says Pielke. “Talking about land-use policies in coastal Mississippi may not be the sexiest topic, but that’s what’s going to make the most difference on this issue.”

Another inconvenient truth for climate change nuts. The problem is not that storms are getting worse. It’s that more and more people are purposely putting themselves in the way of storms that are no more powerful than they have ever been. You can cut our carbon emissions to pre-industrial levels, but if you keep building houses on the coast and below sea level, it shouldn’t be a shock when a hurricane blows them over and floods them.