Ten climate experts who are sharply divided over whether global warming
is intensifying hurricanes say that this question, a focus of
Congressional hearings, news reports and the recent Al Gore documentary,
is a distraction from “the main hurricane problem facing the United States.”
That problem, the experts said yesterday in a statement, is an ongoing
“lemming-like march to the sea” in the form of unabated coastal
development in vulnerable places, and in the lack of changes in
government policies and corporate and individual behavior that are
driving the trend.
Whatever the relationship between hurricanes and climate, experts say,
hurricanes are hitting the coasts, and houses should not be built in
their path.
But coasts are attractive places to live, and political pressures on
states and Congress tend to result in discounted insurance costs for
property in harm’s way, the statement said.
The scientists added that reimbursement for losses can spur more
building in the wrong places. “Federal disaster policies,” they said,
“while providing obvious humanitarian benefits, also serve to promote
risky behavior in the long run.”
“These demographic trends are setting us up for rapidly increasing human
and economic losses from hurricane disasters, especially in this era of
heightened activity,” they concluded, stressing that a storm like
Hurricane Katrina or worse “was (and is) inevitable even in a stable
climate.”
The statement was posted yesterday at wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/home.html.
The scientists, several of whom had publicly debated the
hurricane-climate connection in recent months, said they were concerned
that the lack of consensus on the climate link could stall actions that
could cut vulnerability — no matter what is influencing hurricane trends.
Philip J. Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University
who disputes the idea that global warming is linked to stronger storms,
said the social and economic trends were completely clear.
“There is likely to be an increase in destructiveness from tropical
cyclones regardless of whether they are getting more intense or not,” he
said yesterday. “This is largely due to the increase in coastal
population and wealth per capita in hurricane-prone areas.”
Kerry A. Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, drafted the statement and conducted one of several recent
studies asserting that the building energy of hurricanes in recent
decades was probably related to human-driven warming of the seas.
“We as a community have said for a long time that this is a big social
problem right now,” Dr. Emanuel said in an interview. “A lot of us are
tired of the climate question being set up as a bigger conflict than it
is.”
(Por Andrew C. Revkin,
The N.Y. Times, 25/07/2006)