MORE DESTRUCTIVE STORMS
Chapter 2. Signs of Stress: Climate and Water
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth
(W.W. Norton & Co., NY: 2001).
Rising temperatures and the power of storms
are directly related. As sea surface temperatures rise, particularly
in the tropics and subtropics, the additional heat radiating into
the atmosphere causes more destructive storms. Higher temperatures
mean more evaporation. Water that goes up must come down. What is
not clear is exactly where the additional water will fall.32
More extreme weather events are of particular concern to countries
in the hurricane or typhoon belt. Among those most directly affected
by increased storm intensity are China, Japan, and the Philippines
in the western Pacific, India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal,
and the United States and the Central American and Caribbean countries
in the western Atlantic.
Munich Re, which insures insurance companies, has maintained detailed,
worldwide data on natural catastrophesprincipally
storms, floods, and earthquakesover
the last half-century. The company defines a great natural catastrophe
as one that overwhelms the capacity of a region to help itself,
forcing it to depend on international assistance. During the 1960s,
economic losses from these large-scale catastrophes totaled $69
billion; during the 1990s, they totaled $536 billion, nearly an
eightfold increase.33
Recent years have seen some extraordinarily destructive tropical
storms. Among them was Hurricane Andrew, which cut a large swath
across the state of Florida in 1992. Storm alerts held the loss
of human life to 65, but Andrew destroyed 60,000 homes and other
buildings, inflicting some $30 billion in damage. In addition to
the buildings it destroyed, it also took down seven insurance companies,
as mounting claims left them insolvent.34
Six years later, Hurricane Georgesa
powerful storm with winds of close to 200 miles per hourwas
stalled off the coast of Central America by a high-pressure system
that blocked its normal path to the north. It claimed 4,000 lives
and inflicted a staggering $10 billion worth of damage on El Salvador
and Nicaragua. Damage on this scale, which approached the combined
gross domestic products of the two countries, set economic development
back by a generation. A storm that hit Venezuela in mid-December
1999 caused enormous flooding and landslides, claimed 20,000 lives,
and registered economic losses of $15 billionsecond
only to Hurricane Andrew.35
In late September 1999, Typhoon Bart hit Japan's densely populated
island of Kyushu. Its toll in human life was held to only 26, but
it did $5 billion worth of damage. Countries such as Japan, China,
and the Philippines are in a particularly vulnerable location, fully
exposed to all the power that storms generated over the tropical
Pacific can muster.36
Winter storms are also becoming more destructive in the northern
hemisphere. S.J. Lambert, writing in the Journal of Geophysical
Research, has analyzed the frequency of intense winter storms
in this hemisphere over the last century. From 1920 until 1970,
there were roughly 40 storms a year. But then as temperatures started
to climb, so did the frequency of storms. Since 1985, the northern
hemisphere has experienced close to 80 storms a yeara
doubling in less than a generation. Over the past decade or so,
Western Europe has been hit by numerous storms of record destructiveness.
In 1987, the United Kingdom and France bore the brunt of a winter
storm that claimed 17 lives and caused $3.7 billion worth of damage.
In 1999, Western Europe was hit by three unusually powerful winter
storms: Anatole, Martin, and Lothar. They claimed 150 lives and
did $10.3 billion worth of damage. Lothar, which hit the continent
during the holiday season on December 26, left $7.5 billion of damage
in France, Germany, and Switzerland.37
Damage from storms is mounting both because of greater population
density and because the investment per person in housing or other
structures that are vulnerable to storm damage is greater than ever.
There is also a disproportionately large gain in construction in
coastal regions, which are much more vulnerable to storms and storm
surges.
The bottom line is that storms are increasing both in number and
in destructiveness. More powerful storms mean more damage. A doubling
of the number of winter storms in the northern hemisphere within
less than a generation, coupled with increasing severity, yields
a dramatic rise in storm-related damage.
At this point, no one knows quite how this trend will unfold in
the twenty-first century, but it seems likely that if we continue
with business as usual and CO2 levels continue to rise, the destructiveness
in the future will dwarf that in the presentjust
as the destructiveness in the present is far greater than that of
the recent past. The risk is that the cost of coping with these
ever more destructive, human-induced catastrophes could overwhelm
some societies, leading to their economic decline.
ENDNOTES:
32. A correlation is made between increased sea surface temperatures
and increased storm activity in Steven J. Lambert, "Intense Extratropical
Northern Hemisphere Winter Cyclone Events: 1899-1991," Journal of
Geophysical Research, 27 September 1996, pp. 21, 319-21, 325.
33. Munich Re, Topics 2000: Natural Catastrophes-The Current Position
(Munich: M�nchener Ruckversicherungs-Gesellschaft, December 1999),
p. 43, and MRNatCatSERVICE, Significant Natural Disasters in 1999
(Munich: REF/Geo, January 2000).
34. Ed Rappaport, "Preliminary Report: Hurricane Andrew 16-28 August,
1992" (Miami, FL: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
National Hurricane Center, 10 December 1993); damage report estimates
range from $25 billion in ibid. to $33 billion in William K. Stevens,
"Storm Warning: Bigger Hurricanes and More of Them," New York Times,
3 June 1997.
35. Hurricane Georges in Munich Re, "Munich Re's Review of Natural
Catastrophes in 1998," press release (Munich: 29 December 1998);
December 1999 storm in Munich Re, op. cit. note 33.
36. Munich Re, op. cit. note 33, p. 15.
37. Lambert, op. cit. note 32; European storm information from Munich
Re, op. cit. note 33, p. 48.
Copyright
© 2001 Earth Policy Institute
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