On September 28, 1955, a Category 5 hurricane named Janet
slammed into Chetumal, on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, killing over
600 people.
Hurricane Dean, another Category 5, and the third-strongest
storm ever measured at landfall, hit in exactly the same place last
Friday and killed no one. Maximum winds in both storms were
indistinguishable. Not surprisingly, the hurricane-hunter pilot who
flew through the eyewall of the storm Tuesday reported severe
turbulence, a temporary loss of aircraft control. Probably for the
first time in human history, a Category 5 storm hit a populated
area and everyone lived.
Because of its peculiar location, the Yucatan takes more big
hurricane hits than just about anywhere else in the Western
hemisphere. When Mexico was dirt-poor, as it was in 1955,
hurricanes could kill hundreds. They were warned, then, too.
Hurricane-hunter planes also monitored Janet. Only one of these has
ever been lost, and it was as Janet was making landfall.
Similar storms, huge storms, very different results. What’s
happening here?
Since then, people in the Yucatan have learned to adapt. While
storms like these used to kill hundreds, even thousands, we now
have the technology to forecast their tracks, at least for the
critical last 24 hours, with reasonable confidence. Forecasting the
intensity is a bit trickier, but everyone in the hurricane business
was pretty convinced that Dean was going to bomb out sometime
before it hit land. After all, it was passing over the same region
in which the 1988 hurricane Gilbert set the record for the lowest
barometric pressure ever measured in the Atlantic Basin.
Gilbert was the second-strongest storm ever recorded at
landfall, and it also hit the Yucatan. While it was responsible for
202 deaths in Mexico, almost all of these were caused by mountain
floods hundreds of miles away and days away from landfall.
Adaptation includes technology, infrastructure, and response.
National Hurricane Center forecasts and data are available to
everyone. But the infrastructure to respond to a forecast hurricane
costs money, and poor nations don’t have it. Among other things, it
requires good roads for evacuation.
Perhaps even more important, adaptation to hurricanes or other
natural disasters is political. No elected official wants to be
blamed for hundreds of preventable deaths, so the nations that can
afford it develop evacuation plans, open shelters, and deliver
people from danger.
When Janet killed hundreds, per-capita income in Mexico was less
than a tenth of what it is now, when Dean killed no one.
SO WHY IS IT THAT PEOPLE are wringing their hands about global
warming causing more severe hurricanes and deaths?
The best computer estimate for future hurricanes was published
by Tom Knutson and Robert Tuleya in the Journal of Climate
in 2004. They calculated that maximum winds should increase by
about 6% over the next 75 years. Even this may be an overestimate
because the method used assumes carbon dioxide — the main global
warming emission — is increasing in the atmosphere about twice as
fast as it actually is.
Clearly, this small increase in hurricane strength is going to
be dramatically overshadowed by adaptation as the developing world
continues to develop. Mexico is a case in point.
We see other adaptations to climate change in our cities. In the
United States, cities with the most frequent heat waves have the
fewest heat-related deaths, and heat-related deaths are themselves
dropping, as our cities warm. Remember, a city doesn’t need global
warming to get hot. All it needs is a skyline, and a lot of
blacktop and concrete to impede the flow of air and retain heat.
But in our warming cities, just as with hurricanes in the Yucatan,
frequency + affluence = adaptation.
An odd example of this is that there is only one major U.S. city
in which heat related deaths are increasing, and it is the coolest
one in summer: Seattle.
Anyone concerned about climate change should take a lesson from
Hurricane Dean. Even if storms like this become more frequent in
the future, people will adapt and survive if they have the
financial resources. How silly it seems to take those resources
away in futile attempts to “stop global warming” — which no one
even knows how to do — when they could save lives by allowing
people to adapt to our ever-changing climate.
The truth is that money in the hand is a lot more useful than
treaties on paper when it comes to sparing yourself and your family
from bad weather. So people truly worried about climate change
should be cheerleading for the global trade and economic
development that will continue allowing us to adapt.
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.
