Nature's wrath has a human origin

Though the hurricane season officially extends from July 1st to November 30th, the year 2005 has already surpassed the astounding twenty-one tropical system record set in1933, and has completely blown past the 21 alphabetical letters allotted to storms annually (the Hurricane Center, which has assigned names to tropical storms since 1953, excludes the letters Q,U,X,Y and Z, which are normally not used to name people). In fact, the Center is now resorting to Greek letters to name the storms, the latest of which has been Hurricane Beta, which had formed into a hurricane even before it hit landfall in Nicaragua on October 30th, burdening the country with feet of rain. Hurricane Beta has in fact tied another record set by 1969, having been the twelfth hurricane to occur in one year. And the season has officially not ended.

While America desperately seeks to pick up the pieces after Katrina and the additional assaults upon the southeastern coast, many also try to make sense of a year which seems to have been greeted and subsequently inundated by natural disaster on a global scale.

In fact, science in itself does not suffice to explain the recent scourge of natural disasters including the tsunami which uprooted the coasts of Southeast Asia and the recent earthquake that ravaged India. Some of a more spiritual leaning may ponder this rash of events on a more divine platform. The ultimate question resounds, “Why so many? Why this year?”

Nevertheless, many investigators are at the very least certain that the surge in tropical storms and hurricanes experienced this year can be attributed to now irreversible trends of global warming. Kerry Emanuel, professor of meteorology at MIT and a leading expert on the correlation of global warming to tropical storms, reports in the journal Nature that, “future warming may lead to an upward trend in hurricanes’ destructive potential and taking into account an increasing coastal population, a substantial increase in hurricane related losses in the 21st century.”

Emanuel’s claims are based in part by theories and computer simulations which indicate that hurricanes should “hit harder, produce higher winds, and last longer.”

According to Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, increased greenhouse gases in the air, including carbon dioxide will increase the temperature of tropical sea surfaces, thereby providing more fuel for hurricanes to be even more intense. Another feature of the study claims that an 80-year build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can increase hurricane strength by one-half of a category. So far, wind strength in tropical storms and cyclones has doubled since1950 and has dramatically increased in the last 30 years. This strength increase is positively correlated to the increase in tropical-sea surface temperatures during that time.

What makes matters even worse is that, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), increased sea temperatures cause glaciers to melt, resulting in higher sea levels, which create dangerous surges even for what used to be considered minor storms.

Sea surface temperatures must exceed 80 degrees Fahrenheir in order for hurricanes to occur. Sea temperatures around the southern United States peaked at 86 degrees Fahrenheit in mid-August, providing not only ideal conditions for Hurricane Katrina, but also providing a cradle for Hurricanes Rita and Wilma.

Environmental regulation may help curb greenhouse emissions in the short-run, but the momentous downhill trend to global-warming is not so forgiving. According to UCS, the levels of carbon dioxide in the environment can remain for as long as 100 years, during which we should only expect to see more and stronger hurricanes.

There is however, an area in which policy makers should concentrate their efforts, and that is in doing everything possible to keep people safe amidst these natural disasters. According to the UCS, reversing the depletion of nature-given marshes along vulnerable coasts may greatly help us to achieve this goal. “It is essential that we combine aggressive emission reduction efforts with improved measures to protect coastal communities. These measures— including building codes, storm drainage plans, and preservation and restoration of wetlands, dunes, and barrier islands— must be designed to cope with increasing sea level rise and storm intensity due to global warming,” argues the UCS

In fact, the artificial dissipation of most of the wetlands in New Orleans may have played a great role in the city’s flooding during Katrina,, as Lake Pontchartrain simply had no where else to retreat. The natural marshes, which existed near Lake Pontchartrain had been for the most part, filled in and built upon. These violations of natural barriers continue to propagate in many coastal areas for the sake of economic expansion.

It is convenient however, to neglect this issue and place all the blame on the inadequacy of levies, an opportunity hastened to by the media en lieu of upsetting those who would rather see a more “useful” Kmart erected in place of a smelly swamp.

While meteorology may do a lot to explain the cause of this year’s grand sweep of tropical systems, the field offers little that is useful in the way of immediate solutions. However, simply analyzing the origin of the storms of 2005 among the rest of the vast destruction which has and continues to be characteristic of the year, it becomes quite obvious that our negligence has caught up with us, and that as a people, religious or not, we are simply answering for our sins.