Besides being darned good forecasters, the good people at the
National Hurricane Center are also paragons of social sensitivity.
They give storms names reflective of the cultures through which
they are likely to pass. Hurricanes in the Atlantic basin are given
anglicized names or ones that are roughly similar in both English
and Spanish: Alberto, Bob, Gloria. In the Eastern Pacific, where
storms frequently hit western Mexico, almost all the names are pure
Spanish.
In this vein, I’d like to vote that this year’s “H” storm in the
Atlantic be given the name Hysteria. As in,
caused-by-global-warming-hysteria. As in, the perception that
there’s been a tremendous increase in the damage done by these
storms caused by global warming.
The name should be “Hysteria,” because that’s simply, flatly,
untrue.
Last month, Roger Pielke, Jr., director of the Center for
Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of
Colorado, released the most comprehensive paper ever published on
the subject of damage trends in Atlantic hurricanes. The article
will appear soon in the peer-reviewed journal Natural Hazards
Review.
Is the planet warmer than it was? Yes. Is there any trend in
hurricane-related damages in the United States, where good records
of damages exist? After accounting simultaneously for inflation,
population, and property values, no.
The problem with these storms is that Americans have a peculiar
proclivity to take money and bury it in a sand dune on a
hurricane-prone beach, i.e. a beach house. As a result, the number
of beach homes is going up and up, and because the supply is
limited (there’s only so much beach), prices have risen
astronomically. And the costs and sizes of the homes have also
risen, given that increases in real wealth have outpaced
inflation.
Pielke’s very clever (and elegant) methodology, employing a
simple algebraic equation, gives hurricane damages in 2005-dollar
equivalents. That year’s Katrina, a monster by any standard, caused
$81 billion worth of damage. Applied Insurance Research, using a
totally different method, estimated $82 billion.
But Katrina pales in comparison to the Great Miami hurricane of
1926. Pielke gives two estimates, averaging around $148 billion.
AIR pegs it at $160 billion. Given the trajectory of property
values and population in Florida, Pielke notes that a $500 billion
hurricane (in today’s dollars) should be quite likely by the
2020s.
A little history. After the Great Miami and Katrina, the
remaining top ten storms (in descending order) occurred in 1900
(Galveston 1), 1915 (Galveston 2), 1992 (Andrew), 1983 (New
England), 1944 (unnamed), 1928 (Lake Okeechobee 4), 1960
(Donna/Florida), and 1969 (Camille/Mississippi). There is no
obvious bias toward recent years. In fact, the combination of the
1926 and 1928 hurricanes places the damages in 1926-35 nearly 15%
higher than 1996-2005, the last decade Pielke studied.
What’s more interesting are the trends. After allowing only for
inflation, hurricane damages are indeed increasing. Rather, it’s
the other factors — the huge coastal population increases and the
rapidly appreciating property values — that negate any trends.
The silence associated with this important finding is deafening,
and the results are consistent with other science that is being
ignored in the current climate. One of Pielke’s co-authors, Chris
Landsea, from the National Hurricane Center, has also found no
trends in hurricane frequency or intensity when they strike the
U.S. Sure, as is known to anyone who has studied hurricane data,
there has been an increase in the number of strong storms in the
past decade, but there were also a similar number of major
hurricanes in the 1940s and 1950s, long before such activity could
be attributed to global warming.
As Pielke writes, “The lack of trend in twentieth century
normalized [inflation and wealth-adjusted] hurricane losses is
consistent with what one would expect to find given the lack of
trends in hurricane frequency or intensity at landfall.”
Hysteria begets cost, especially when politics gets involved.
For years now, Europe’s big reinsurance companies — the people who
insure the insurers — has been raising rates, claiming that global
warming is making hurricane damages worse. Interestingly, the
American companies, using the AIR data, are not as strident.
This works out to an interesting market competition. People will
obviously tend towards the lower cost insurance, after adjusting
for coverage differences. Someone is going to go out of business.
Who will win here: Hurricane Hysteria, or the real world?
Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental
studies at the Cato
Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable
Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the
Media.
