Climate Change, Environment, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America

ENVIRONMENT-US: Flying Blind Into Monster Storm Season

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Aug 24 2007 (IPS) - Category Five Hurricane Dean is just the first of several monster storms coming this hurricane season, meteorologists predict.

The United States and other countries remain highly vulnerable, even as budget cuts to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) imperil hurricane prediction and research.

“The U.S. will experience landfalls of between two and four major hurricanes this year,” said Gerry Bell, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Centre in Maryland.

“In addition to Dean, the Caribbean region can expect two or three more major storms,” Bell told IPS.

Major hurricanes are defined as Category Three or higher, meaning winds of at least 178 kilometres per hour with storm surges ranging from three metres to as much as 10 metres. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from Jun. 1 to Nov. 30.

NOAA also predicts 10 to 12 lesser but still destructive Category One and Two hurricanes and tropical storms. Tropical Storm Erin brought extensive flooding throughout much of the U.S. midwest this week.


“We are in a very active hurricane era and we should prepare for one active hurricane season after another,” Bell said.

Last year’s 10 named Atlantic storms, which included five hurricanes, only two of them considered major, was a “lucky aberration”, according to Bell.

A change in tropical weather patterns called the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation during the mid-1990s has created the conditions for a more active hurricane cycle that may last for 30 years. Climate change is likely also playing a role, but more research needs to be done.

However, such research is in serious jeopardy as NASA has cancelled or delayed the launch of satellites that look back at the Earth and provide invaluable information about hurricanes, track the melting of glaciers and droughts, deforestation and much more.

“The [George W.] Bush administration has decided going to Mars and the International Space Station is more important,” said Judith Curry, chair of climate and remote sensing at Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

“They literally removed ‘to protect Planet Earth’ from NASA’s mission statement,” Curry said in an interview.

NASA has long had a series of Earth-observing satellites, whose data is used by scientists around the world to monitor the planet. However by 2010, 40 percent of the current satellites will be out of service, with few if any replacements on the way, as the earth sciences budget was slashed by 30 percent between 2000 and 2006. Billions of dollars will go into manned space efforts instead.

“Earth sciences has taken a huge hit at NASA. That’s not a good thing for those of us living on Planet Earth,” Curry said. “This is a very serious issue.”

One of the many not-good things is the loss of data for improving the tracking and forecasting of hurricanes during an era of increased storm activity.

Equally serious is the lack of effort and investment to keep coastal regions safe despite the toll Hurricane Katrina exacted in 2005. Practically no coastal region in the U.S. is prepared for the landfall of a major hurricane, Curry added.

“New Orleans is still a mess. A Category Three hurricane strike this year would be catastrophic,” she said.

More than a billion dollars has been invested to repair and upgrade New Orleans system of dikes, canals and levees. The Army Corps of Engineers said this week that at least 14 billion dollars and many years of construction will be needed to properly protect the city from Category Three storms.

Whether or not that enormous effort will include restoring the region’s vast wetlands and cypress forests is unclear. What is certain is that Hurricane Katrina was a human disaster, according to William Freudenburg, professor of environment and society at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Louisiana had already lost an estimated 4,000 square kilometres of wetlands by 2000. Freudenburg highlights one particular project, the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO), to illustrate how human efforts can have substantial unintended consequences.

MR-GO is a massive channel project constructed in the 1960s that required more digging than the Panama Canal. It opened up a large area of wetland and cypress to salt water that quickly killed most of the vegetation. And that left the southeast region of New Orleans unprotected when the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina struck.

“It was pork-barrel politics to benefit a few well-connected people,” said Freudenburg.

Despite much-promised economic benefits, few ships ever used or needed the MR-GO channel and now the Army Corps of Engineers says it should be closed – but will take 35 years to fill in.

“The MR-GO channel contributed as much to the Louisiana economy as a series of major bank robberies,” Freudenburg charged.

He says the real lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that we ignore warnings about environmental risks at our economic and personal peril.

That lesson has apparently not been learned along the Gulf Coast, including the U.S. state of Mississippi where Katrina did much of its damage.

“The Mississippi coast was flattened in 2005 but real estate prices are up 20 percent,” noted Stephen Leatherman, director of the International Hurricane Research Centre at Florida International University.

The price of coastal real estate is also climbing in Florida even though the state endured eight hurricanes in 2004-05 and a doubling of windstorm insurance rates, Leatherman told IPS.

“Hurricanes aren’t seen as a deterrent to living on the coast, only an inconvenience,” he said.

It’s an inconvenience in part because state and federal governments subsidise the costs of coastal living. Flood insurance is subsidised, for example, and government agencies spend hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding sea walls and replenishing beaches with sand after storms. And then there are various forms of emergency hurricane assistance and services provided to a greater or less extent by the much-maligned Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I’m not sure how much better prepared we are in general but New Orleans is at the same risk as it was before Katrina,” Leatherman said. “The levees in New Orleans have broken over 10 times in the past and it will happen again.”

 
Republish | | Print |

Related Tags



qbq book summary