Doom is a growth industry. There are credentialed scientists who talk of Atlantic hurricanes becoming as powerful as Pacific typhoons. They tell of Antarctic ice shelves disintegrating, glaciers melting everywhere and open water at the North Pole. Global warming could shut down the Gulf Stream, throwing Europe into its own private Ice Age.
Dig into the literature and you'll read about 100-year droughts on the Great Plains, dry spells so extreme they make the Dust Bowl look like a brief break in the humidity. There are tales of islands sliding into the sea and spawning tsunamis 150 feet high, racing across the sea at the speed of a jetliner.
A tornado touches down in Virginia last month, one of several local twisters spawned by the remnants of Hurricane Ivan.
(Tony Warren)
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Even today, in the background, you hear a sound: Mount St. Helens is rumbling. Volcanoes are the calamities that we tend to forget until suddenly something blows, like Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which exploded in 1815 and led to the fabled year without a summer.
An earthquake last month on the San Andreas Fault registered 6.0, just strong enough to remind California that the Big One is somewhere out there, that the North American and Pacific tectonic plates are groaning and straining and aching to slide past one another, and will do so someday with a tremendous jolt. And that might not even be the worst U.S. quake: that could come on the New Madrid fault, near St. Louis and Memphis, where the earth moved so dramatically in 1811 and 1812 that the Mississippi River changed course.
And then there are Florida hurricanes. Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne represented a run of bad luck with a whiff of weirdness -- like, it wasn't supposed to be possible. Like the rules had changed. There are those who say we're getting punished for our fossil fuel addiction. William Calvin, a scientist who warns of sudden, cataclysmic climate change, says, "It's a good example of what global warming will look like, which is to say, violent storms."
Nature commands humans to adapt or die. The natural world keeps erupting, shifting, storming, collapsing, whirling. It refuses, despite our entreaties, to become something dependable and constrained and rational.
Calmly, coolly, we must ask the hard question: Is this planet getting a little too dangerous?
The Secular NOAA
Conrad Lautenbacher, the man the U.S. government has put in charge of the weather, doesn't seem worried a bit. He's got the cool nerves of a technocrat, the heart of a sailor. He's the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has commanded ships as a vice admiral in the Navy, has a doctorate in applied mathematics from Harvard, and he isn't about to be intimidated by a little wind and rain and the occasional growling volcano.
He is an adaptationist.
"In the winter we heat our houses, in the summer we run around in T-shirts. . . . It's why we're the most invasive species on the planet," he says.
Adaptation is the can-do response to the perils of climate change and other global upheavals (disease, invasive species, resource crises, etc.). Lautenbacher assumes we'll find a way to survive and thrive, though it will take hard work, and ingenuity, and perhaps a passel of new satellites and sensors that can help us understand the Earth.
"I want to wire the world. We want to be able to give the world an MRI. We want to take the pulse of the planet," he says.
This is a dramatic shift from the historic strategy in regards to natural disasters, which was to pray a lot. Catastrophes were seen as acts of God. Today they are more likely to be seen as cyclical and somewhat predictable events whose effects can be minimized. Death tolls from such things as earthquakes and hurricanes have dropped dramatically in the developed world. Homes are sturdier, flood control is more advanced and we are less likely to see the kind of disaster that befell South Florida in 1928, when a hurricane drowned more than 2,000 people in the towns along Lake Okeechobee, with some victims frantically climbing trees only to be bitten by the water moccasins who also took refuge there.
The highest risk factor in disasters is being poor. The four storms that hit Florida may have destroyed thousands of mobile homes, but they killed fewer than 100 people. Hurricane Jeanne by itself killed about 2,000 people in Haiti, and left an additional 300,000 homeless. The Haitian countryside, denuded of forest, proved no match for the inundating rains, and the residents in their hovels watched helplessly as their surroundings turned into a torrent of water and mud and debris.
