To all - WSJ piece on weird weather / fears of global warming connection.
September 17, 1999
Land of the Free,
Home of Bad Weather
By David Laskin, author of "Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of
American Weather" (Anchor, 1997) and the forthcoming "Partisans:
Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals" (Simon &
Schuster).
The hoopla over Hurricane Floyd is but the latest outbreak of millennial
hyperbole in our weather reports. How many storms of the century have we
weathered in the past few years? Amid the drumroll of recent meteorological
disasters--punishing heat and drought in the East this summer, an F-5 tornado
(the highest category on the Fujita wind damage scale) hitting Oklahoma City
last May, record rains last winter in the Pacific Northwest, the floods and fires
attending the severe El Ni¤o of 1997-98--there invariably sounds the bugle call
of global warming. It is now received wisdom, cited by Vice President Albert
Gore among others, that as greenhouse gases warm the planet, we will suffer
more weather disasters on the order of Floyd--more "superstorms," more
intense and more frequent hurricanes, more nor'easters, more floods and
droughts.
But it this true? The notion that
global warming is making our
weather worse is a myth that got
going in the media a few years back
and has taken on a life of its own.
This is not to say that global
warming isn't happening (it clearly is,
for whatever reason) or that it won't
intensify as concentrations of
greenhouse gases increase (the verdict is still out). But putting aside the
global-warming debate, the simple truth is that America has always experienced
weather disasters of one kind or another and that global warming is not making
them worse (or better). Catastrophe is the norm.
Take hurricanes. In a recent study, Christopher Landsea, a research
meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's
Hurricane Research Division, and Roger Pielke Jr., a scientist with the National
Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found that the
much-touted tropical storms of the last few years actually look rather tepid
once you adjust for inflation, population and wealth. For example, an unnamed
hurricane that caused $105 million in damage when it struck Miami in 1926
would cost an unimaginable $77.5 billion if it followed the same track today,
primarily because of the huge increase in the population of Dade County.
Messrs. Landsea and Pielke's assessment of the major hurricanes of the
century revealed that nine of the 10 most damaging storms struck before 1970.
Hurricane Andrew, which cost $26.5 billion in 1992, accounts for the majority
of the hurricane damage of the past 50 years; damage assessments for Floyd
have not yet been calculated.
This is not to dismiss the severity or increasing frequency of hurricanes in the
1990s. But, according to William Gray, a professor of atmospheric sciences at
Colorado State University, the reason for the recent upswing in tropical activity
is not global warming but rather a strengthening in a naturally occurring
long-term cycle known as the "Atlantic Ocean thermohaline," a sort of
conveyor belt. When the conveyor accelerates, as it seems to have done
starting in 1994, hurricanes increase in number and become more likely to
make landfall. The resulting hurricanes are likely to be more damaging because
of the vast increase--much of it directly or indirectly subsidied by the
government--in the number of people living along the shoreline. Thus
imprudent property development--not global warming--is to blame for the
resulting catastrophes.
And it's not just coastlines that are in danger. Thanks to a confluence of
geography, ocean currents and global atmospheric circulation patterns, the
U.S. is blessed and cursed with the greatest variety of extreme weather in the
world. Practically every region of the country has its meteorological disaster
specialty. Three-quarters of the world's twisters touch down on our soil, most
of them in the vast flatlands of Tornado Alley. There is a higher concentration
of lightning strikes along the Front Range of the Rockies than anyplace else on
the planet. Blizzards plague the Plains states, droughts and floods alternate on
the West Coast, nor'easters regularly whack New England in the winter.
Our recorded history, brief as it is, abounds in epic weather disasters, and
archeologists and climatologists have discovered ancient evidence of even more
cataclysmic climatic upheavals in Indian ruins, fossilized pollen, tree rings and
ice cores. So why are we so aghast at every major "weather event," so
convinced that something especially weird is happening to the weather now,
and so quick to blame ourselves for causing it by spewing carbon dioxide into
the air?
Part of the reason, I believe, is that our history is so short: we're relative
newcomers to the weather of this continent and we're still getting acclimated.
The Western European and West African peoples who displaced North
America's natives brought with them memories of tamer or at least less varied
climates and were unprepared for the spectacular violence of North American
weather. Words like "blizzard" and "hurricane" had to be invented or imported
into the language to account for atmospheric phenomena outside the experience
of most colonists.
As we trekked westward into stranger, drier and more erratic climatic zones,
we zealously altered the face of the continent, only to speculate anxiously about
the atmospheric consequences. Both Cotton Mather and Thomas Jefferson
were convinced that the colonists had changed North America's climate by
clearing off the virgin forests: global warming theories circa 1690 and 1770.
Notions that the weather is behaving bizarrely because of something we have
done to it crop up again and again in our weather history.
We don't need global warming to account for what goes on overhead. Our
weather is plenty crazy without it. Hurricane Floyd is neither a freak
superstorm fueled by idling combustion engines nor an ominous symbol of the
impending millennium. It's a natural signal that another summer is coming to an
end.
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