Life is difficult enough these days due to covid-19. Now those who live in the Atlantic basin are facing a double whammy: a hurricane season that not only started early--for the sixth straight year--but one that is likely to be worse than normal.
The combination could be called cruel and unusual punishment for the tens of millions of Americans who live near the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico.
The New York Times’ Henry Fountain summarized a recent study by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Wisconsin. “Hurricanes have become stronger worldwide during the past four decades, an analysis of observational data shows, supporting what theory and computer models have long suggested: climate change is making these storms more intense and destructive.
“The analysis... shows that warming has increased the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a major one of Category 3 or higher, with sustained winds greater than 110 miles an hour, by about 8 percent a decade, Fountain wrote.” The study was published May 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Physics suggests that as the world warms, hurricanes and other tropical cyclones should get stronger, because warmer water provides more of the energy that fuels these storms. Scientists point out, though, that there are other factors at play, as well.
“We’ve just increased our confidence of our understanding of the link between hurricane intensity and climate change,” said James Kossin, the lead author of the new study. “We have a significantly building body of evidence that these storms have already changed in very substantial ways, and all of them are dangerous,” he said.
Gabriel Vecchi, a hurricane expert at Princeton University who was not involved in the new research, told The Washington Post that the study shows an uptick from 30 percent of storms being major to about 40 percent of storms being major. He termed that “a pretty large increase.”
NOAA researchers are putting the odds of an above-normal hurricane season at 60 percent. They forecast that the Atlantic basin could see 13 to19 named storms, six to 10 hurricanes and three to six major hurricanes. The average hurricane season includes 12 named tropical storms, six hurricanes and three major hurricanes.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially begins June 1 and runs through November. This year the first named tropical storm, Hurricane Arthur, arrived in mid-May. It hit North Carolina’s Outer Banks before veering out to sea, having done relatively little damage.
After two months of a pandemic, Fox News reported, some emergency officials worry that people living in hurricane-prone areas could face “disaster fatigue.”
“We have disaster fatigue, they’re tired of seeing the numbers, they’re tired of seeing the news. … They’re tired,” Bill Wheeler, Houston’s deputy emergency management coordinator, told Accuweather.
This year’s hurricane season is all the more dangerous because of the pandemic, which makes some of the core practices of emergency management, like group shelters, far more difficult,” noted Carlos J. Castillo, acting deputy administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in a call to journalists May 21.
Meantime, some Americans who live hundreds of miles from the Atlantic have their own problems. Floodwaters from heavy rains caused the collapse of a dam upstream from Midland, Michigan, May 20, forcing the evacuation of about 40,000 people. The floodwaters mixed with containment ponds at a Dow Chemical Company plant and could displace sediment from a downstream Superfund site, though the company said there was no risk to people or the environment.
The changing climate has put more of the nation’s 91,500 dams at risk of failing, engineers and dam safety experts told The New York Times. “We should expect more of these down the road,” said Amir AghaKouchak, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s unfortunate but this is what the trend is going to be.” The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its latest report card on infrastructure in 2017, gave the nation’s dams a “D” grade.
In the West, there’s another problem worsened by climate change. “Expanding and intensifying drought in Northern California portends an early start to the wildfire season,” Paul Duginski wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “and the National Interagency Fire Center is predicting above-normal potential for large wildfires by midsummer.”
All these challenges across our nation drive home, yet again, the need for national action to counter climate change. Congress should reduce the number-one cause of climate change--carbon dioxide emissions--by putting an honest price on carbon.