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1 the 2005 Hurricane Season – a Sign of Climate Change? by Nancy Chen

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1 the 2005 Hurricane Season – a Sign of Climate Change? by Nancy Chen The 2005 hurricane season – a sign of climate change? By Nancy Chen, intern at the RC/RC Climate Centre I. Background: Katrina and the trend in Atlantic hurricanes On Aug. 24, 2005, tropical Depression 12 strengthened into Tropical Storm Katrina over the Central Bahamas, and a hurricane warning was issued for the Southeastern Florida coast. Katrina passed Miami as a weak hurricane, rating as only a category 1 hurricane on a scale from 1 to 5. But within days, warnings from forecasters warmed that the worst might be yet to come. The storm sucked energy from warm Gulf of Mexico waters as it moved west, swelling into a category 5 monster and then weakening only slightly before it slammed into the Mississippi shore as a category 4 hurricane. Abundant rain and a surge of ocean water overwhelmed flood-control measures and broke levees at nearby Lake Pontchartrain, deluging New Orleans with up to 20 feet of water and plunging the city into mayhem. Katrina pushed the death toll in New Orleans alone as much as "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands1" and caused the economic loss with subsequent flooding in New Orleans expected to exceed $100 billion2, breaking the records of Hurricane Andrew in 1992. In the remainder of the season, the US was also hit by hurricanes Rita, and Wilma, the most intense hurricane ever recorded. In the meantime, further south, hurricane Stan created havoc in Central America. After Wilma, there were no names left for the next tropical storm, which became alpha, shortly followed by hurricane beta, which made landfall on the coast of Nicaragua. With another month remaining, the 2005 hurricane season had already set new records for the most named storms and hurricanes in a single year. The year before, 2004, had been very intense as well, with the second largest annual damages (after 2005). And these two subsequent harsh seasons seem to fit a trend: the frequency and particularly intensity of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic has been on the rise since 1995. II. Scientific debate: a link to climate change? Triggered by the devastation caused by Katrina, but also in the light of the harsh 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, many people have been asking whether these hurricanes arose by mere chance or whether something more long lasting might be at play—global warming/ climate change. The scientific debate on these linkages is currently ongoing. All scientists agree that the main cause of the upswing in hurricanes is a natural, cyclic phenomenon that affects ocean currents and atmospheric temperature, which yields decade-to-decade swings in total hurricane numbers that have nothing to do with global warming. 1 According to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin 2 Risk Management Solutions, a US firm. 1 In a recent study in Nature3, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found an increase in the duration and power of hurricanes in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Another scientific study in the September 16 issue of Science4 notes that the number of large hurricanes appears to have increased since 1970, while smaller hurricanes have become less common. Co-author Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research comments: "What we've done is show that there's actually an increase in the number of intense storms”. To count the hurricanes world-wide in each category of storm intensity, Holland and his colleagues used satellite data collected by scientists since about 1970. They found that the number of storms in categories 4 and 5 doubled during the past 35 years, while storms in categories 1 to 3 dropped off. Overall, he says, the larger storms now occur 20 to 35 percent more often than smaller storms do. Peter Webster, a coauthor of the report, says, "The intensity of Katrina is consistent with the type of storms we've been finding, [which are] increasing in intensity globally." Some of these climate scientists are also pointing to global warming as a culprit for at least part of the increasingly ferocious hurricanes worldwide. Both scientific theory and computer modeling predict that as human activities heat the atmosphere, warmer sea- surface temperatures will fuel hurricanes, increasing wind speeds and rainfall. In a paper in Science on 17th June5 2005, Kevin Trenberth, Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research6 explains that the observational hurricane record reveals large natural variability from El Niño and on multi-decadal time scales, and that any additional trends due to climate change would be relatively small. However, he also points out that we do know that sea surface temperatures are rising and atmospheric water vapour is increasing. These factors are potentially enhancing tropical convection, including thunderstorms, and the development of tropical storms. Over the coming decades, these changes are expected to increase hurricane intensity and rainfall. At the same time however, the effect on hurricane numbers and tracks remains unclear: "there is no sound theoretical basis for drawing any conclusions about how anthropogenic change affects hurricane numbers or tracks, and thus how many hit land." III. The response Regardless of the scientific debate on the involvement of global warming in the current hurricane season and hurricane Katrina, there is a very important underlying issue: our vulnerability is rising dramatically. "[Katrina] should be a wake-up call for us to carefully look at our vulnerabilities," says Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado at Boulder, "Global warming is an important topic—I definitely think we should be responding to it— but we shouldn't confuse our responses to global warming with disaster mitigation." In fact, this is a key message for all extreme events (including floods, droughts, and heat waves, which are already becoming more frequent due to global climate change): we need to address the rising risks not only by mitigating climate change, but also by better 3 Emanuel, K (2005), Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years, Nature, 436, 686- 688. 4 Webster, P.J., G. J. Holland, J.A. Curry, and H.-R. Chang (2005), Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration and Intensity in a Warming Environment, Science, 309, 1844-1846. 5 Trenberth K. (2005), Uncertainty in Hurricanes and Global Warming, Science, 308, 1753-1754. 2 disaster risk reduction. Increasing disaster preparedness and integrating disaster risk reduction into development planning are crucial to mitigate the impacts of hurricanes like Katrina, and reduce the massive losses and human suffering we’ve seen in the 2005 hurricane season. 3.
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