Hurricane Katrina’s heavy punch has passed over the Gulf Coast, but the political and scientific storm surrounding hurricane prediction still rages with increasing intensity.
There’s general agreement that the Atlantic Ocean is spawning hurricanes of greater intensity than was true just a few years ago. The dispute is over why.
Atmospheric scientists long have predicted that global warming will cause more destructive weather than has been experienced in the past. Some of the biggest effects of global warming will be in the oceans, which, like the atmosphere, are growing warmer – about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last 50 years, a significant change given the huge size of the world’s oceans. The oceans took longer than the atmosphere to heat up, but now that they have, they’ll stay that way a long time. And warm water is a key ingredient in cooking up big hurricanes.
This summer, two studies warned that warming of the oceans may spawn hurricanes of greater intensity than was true in the past. The first report involved kinetic energy in storms and was done by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. The second, more controversial study was led by a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The report predicted future hurricanes will have higher wind speeds than past storms. The report said that while there might not be more hurricanes in future years than there are today, the ones that do occur will be more powerful and destructive. The study didn’t use computer models but real-life storm data, providing a glimpse of how global warming may be affecting us.
Critics say that conclusion, like New Orleans yesterday, was all wet. Research at Colorado State University indicates that hurricane intensity follows a 40- to 60-year cycle and that we’re at the beginning of a prolonged but normal period of severe tropical storm formation.
Regardless of whether the MIT or CSU studies are right, U.S. coasts are in for a rough time as intense hurricanes emerge.
Coastal areas compose only one-fifth of the U.S. landmass but are home to more than half the population – and some of the country’s fastest-growing communities are in Florida and other coastal areas. So, even as the oceans cook up more intense storms, more people are moving into harm’s way. The combination means future storm damage could be more costly. It’s predicted that Katrina may leave $25 billion in property losses in its wake.
So, the perception that hurricanes are a bigger problem now than they were several years ago doesn’t stem just from the media’s need to fill the 24/7 news cycle. (Although there now seems to be a limitless supply of soggy correspondents standing out in the rain and wind where no sane person would go.) There really are more intense storms today, and they really do affect more people than was true a few years ago. There’s an obvious, urgent need to better understand such dangerous weather events.
Thanks to improved forecasting, coastal areas usually get plenty of warning when a hurricane is coming – Katrina’s path, for example, was forecast by scientists with sophisticated computers at NCAR in Boulder. What’s hard to predict, because the science is still inexact, is how severe a storm will be.
Katrina was a vicious Category 5 as it churned in the Gulf but an angry Category 3 as it clobbered Louisiana. Yet knowing the intensity is crucial: A Category 1 hurricane may make New Orleans residents board up their homes, but a Category 5 will compel them to flee. Officials estimate 80 percent of New Orleans’ residents heeded the call to evacuate before Katrina roared ashore.
To do the necessary research, scientists need high-tech tools such as satellites and ocean buoys. Unfortunately, the money for them may never materialize. NASA has told scientists who monitor the Earth that funds for their kind of work will be cut. The rollback could handicap climate science because the studies depend on satellites. So many previously planned science missions have been canceled, reduced in scope or delayed that the whole Earth science monitoring network is at risk, warned a National Academy of Science report.
NASA plans to shift money away from climate and severe weather studies into the push to send astronauts to the moon and Mars. “This is precisely backwards,” fumed U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a moderate New York Republican who chairs the House Science Committee. “The planet that has to matter the most to us is the one we live on.”
Boehlert and other members of Congress are struggling to restore funds for climate and weather studies, but they seem to be running against Category 5 political winds in Washington.
Cutting funding for climate science is short-sighted and could leave residents of at-risk cities like New Orleans, Mobile and many more without the tools they need to respond to killer storms.
