"Tell me, what's more important here, climate change or poverty?" asks Patrick Michaels, a University of Virginia professor of environmental sciences and a leading climate change skeptic.
The dislocations and agricultural crises projected by many climate scientists would not necessarily cripple a nation with deep pockets. But poor countries could face famine.
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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Consider the plight of Bangladesh, where tens of millions of impoverished people already live at sea level, and where a quarter of the land could be submerged in little more than a generation.
"They're simply not prepared, as we are," says Bill McGuire, a professor of geophysical hazards at University College, London. "They're living in shantytowns. Climate change, within a few decades, will be devastating."
There are those who argue that there's really no such thing anymore as a natural disaster. There is only a failure to prepare. Adaptationist errors. One of which might be the refusal to admit that there's any danger at all.
The High Cost of Calamity
Climate scientists are the kind of people who would be reluctant to declare that a drought has officially ended even if they are up to their necks in floodwater. They're not about to make a bold declaration about the fate of the world based on some TV weather stud being blown all over a parking lot on some 24-hour cable network.
Glaciers may be melting at an alarming rate in Alaska, but the sea surface temperature in equatorial regions has risen only slightly in recent decades, about half a degree Celsius, according to Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at MIT and a specialist on tropical hurricanes. That's not enough, he says, to make a significant difference in storms at this point in time. "There's no indication that hurricanes today are more intense than they were 50 years ago," Emanuel says.
But then there's Wallace Broecker, a famed scientist at Columbia University, who warns that climate change may happen abruptly, rather than gradually. Ice cores from Greenland show that it's happened many times in the past. Broecker thinks it could be related to a sudden shutdown in the North Atlantic conveyor, the system of ocean currents that carries heat northward and keeps Europe relatively balmy. "We have to have respect for this system we're shoving around," Broecker says.
Regardless of what happens with climate change, no one can dispute that disasters cost more than ever. In America we have the hubris to build luxury homes on barrier islands and coastal floodplains and then claim, when storms blow in, that we're victims of a natural calamity.
The biggest insurance losses have come in the past decade and a half. The second most expensive natural disaster was the Northridge earthquake near Los Angeles in 1994, with about $12 billion in insured losses. The most expensive disaster was Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, with about $15 billion in losses. The four Florida storms this year may collectively top that number.
In the case of Andrew, the damage was a case lesson in adaptability and the lack of it. Evacuations, a highly adaptive move made possible by technology warning of a storm's approach, helped keep the death toll in the low dozens. The storm obliterated mobile home parks but otherwise tended to destroy only the homes that hadn't been built according to code. Nail your rafters together properly and your wood-frame house can survive even a Category 4 monster.
Buildings in California have undergone extensive improvements to make them safer in a quake, but that's not the case along the New Madrid fault in the Mississippi Valley. New Orleans, largely below sea level, remains a prime candidate for a flooding catastrophe. The insurance industry tries to calculate the risks of these events by using "cat models," or catastrophe models. Karen Clark, considered the inventor of the cat model, says a New Madrid quake would probably be the worst U.S. disaster in terms of insured losses, but only because private industry doesn't provide flood insurance and wouldn't be hit by claims in a New Orleans flood.
As the U.S. economy expands and becomes more interconnected with other economies, we become vulnerable to disasters everywhere. An earthquake flattening much of Tokyo would cause an enormous ripple in the world's economy.
"It's a zero-margin society," says William Hooke, a former NOAA scientist who is now with the American Meteorological Society. "Margin is inefficiency, so we're always trying to operate at the edge."
