Right now, Hurricane Dean is spinning into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. It is, according to the National Hurricane Center, a category five storm with sustained maximum winds at 160 miles per hour. It will cause at least several billion dollars worth of damage to Mexico's economy. The U.S. will also be hurt: Mexican oil refineries are closing down as the storm approaches.
Dean is the first major storm what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expects to be an above-average hurricane season. More specifically, NOAA predicts an 85 percent chance that the season will be above-average, a 10 percent chance that it will be average, and a 5 percent chance that it will be below average. In terms of storm numbers, the agency expects between 13 and 16 named storms - i.e., tropical storms and hurricanes - seven to nine actual hurricanes, and of those hurricanes, NOAA anticipates between three and five storms in category three or higher.
Major hurricanes are one of the most powerful forces of nature; a category five generates about 600 billion kilowatts of power, according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. During five days, it will release more than one hundred times the energy of the earthquake that caused the 2004 Christmas tsunami. While the earthquake was more powerful, large hurricanes ultimately release hundreds, even thousands of times more energy.
The upshot of this is hurricane season presents a unique danger to the Caribbean, southern United States and eastern Mexico. In an above-average season, the Atlantic generates between one and two dozen bullets that each carry the destructive energy of thousands of Hiroshima bombs, and as many as five that can wreak many thousands of times more damage. We can dodge some, but not all, and our southern seaboard is extremely vulnerable: Katrina showed us this almost exactly two years ago. Even now, a category three storm hitting New Orleans would break the levees; a category five storm would flood the entire city under almost twenty feet of water.
As if the annual hurricane season wasn't bad enough, in the future hurricane seasons are going to become even fiercer. This won't be an annual trend - some seasons will be weaker than the preceding ones - but the average number and strength of hurricanes will increase in the years to come. This is a consequence of anthrogenic global warming. Hurricanes are powered by warm water in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico; the warmer the water, the stronger and more frequent the storms can, and will, become.
I do not subscribe to the school of thought that global warming is bad because we are harming nature or other such nonsense. Nature as a whole is valuable only because we value it; it possesses no intrinsic worth. By analogy, a starving man will value a diamond necklace less than a bowl of gruel; diamonds have no value of themselves, but only value in the eyes of the man. Global warming, then, is bad not because we are harming nature, but because we are indirectly harming ourselves. In essence, we are giving the gunner in the Atlantic more bullets to aim at the southern U.S. - and that is just the beginning of a long list of problems climate change will cause for the human race.
We need to start drastically reducing carbon emissions. This, of course, will slow the human effect on climate change. We also need to begin anticipating the effects of stronger storms, changing rainfall patterns and rising sea levels: we will only be able to combat the symptoms of climate change once we've identified them, and combating them will require a centuries-long effort by the whole of society.
Can we stand up to nature? Undoubtedly. The Dutch, for example, have been doing it for centuries. But if we wait until the last minute we will suffer mightily in the process. It would be better if all of humanity, or at least the United States, began to institute climate change mitigation policies now rather than when the effects become painfully evident.
Write to Neal at necoleman@bsu.edu
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