ARTICLE - MORE HURRICANES = WARM EARTH?

HURRICANES WORSEN; IS A WARMER EARTH TO BLAMES?
(Philadelphia Inquirer) - By Anthony R. Wood

The simmering issue of whether a warmer world brews more-destructive hurricanes is a powerful one, not just for coastal interests but for every U.S. taxpayer from Philadelphia to Honolulu.

Look for the debate to heat up this year, as the latest outlooks are calling for another busy and potentially destructive hurricane season, which will begin June 1.

Without question, hurricanes have become more devastating as the world has become warmer during the last 30 years.

But are the trends related?

Human activity indisputably is a factor - for evidence, see all that nature-taunting coastal building. The greenhouse case, however, remains arguable.

A word on the warming: It's been real. Global temperatures have been above long-term averages every month since February 1985, according to National Climate Data Center records dating to 1880. They are just under a degree Fahrenheit higher now than they were when the trend started.

As for the hurricanes, a warming trend also has taken hold in the storm-inciting waters of the tropics, and a 2008 study found rather convincingly that peak winds of the strongest hurricanes have intensified since 1981.

So have the costs.

In 1989, Hugo slammed into South Carolina and arced all the way to Lake Erie, causing $7 billion in damage, three times more than any U.S. hurricane before it. The cataclysmic Katrina, 16 years later, would become the country's first $80 billion storm.

So shouldn't that seal the greenhouse case? Not quite.

The 2008 paper documenting stronger peak winds in the most-potent storms relied on global satellite data available only as far back as 1981.

The changes did track neatly with increases in sea-surface temperatures - SSTs - and the paper might have been the first to establish the SST-wind connection. But it did not address the question of whether those increases were cyclical or something permanent.

"We did not examine what might be causing the uptick in SST," said James Elsner, a hurricane specialist at Florida State University, who led the study.

As for those staggering hurricane costs, they clearly speak to the amazing building boom along the coasts since 1970. Much of it occurred before 1995, a general lull for hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Active and lull periods have alternated in cycles of 25 years or more, and an active era got cooking in 1995. Since then, it has been hurricane rush hour in the Atlantic.

The hurricanes have encountered barricades of buildings along the Southeast coast and Gulf Coast.

To look at the consequences of development, consider Katrina. Tweaking for 2010 dollars, Katrina resulted in an estimated $91.4 billion in insured and property losses.

But if Katrina had hit the same areas in 1970, the damage would have been closer to $40 billion in today's dollars, according to an analysis by Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado.

Adjusting for inflation and current levels of building, Pielke has estimated what storms would cost if they arrived today, and his tables are oft-cited. On the Pielke list, Katrina is a distant third behind the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 and the Galveston disaster of 1900.

The horrors of Katrina extracted staggering costs, leaving U.S. taxpayers with a $40 billion disaster-aid bill, plus $18 billion in federal flood-insurance losses. The total comes to better than $500 per household.

Disaster aid wells from the best impulses of mankind, said Pielke's colleague William Travis, director of the university's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, but "we're digging ourselves a hole. How are we going to get out?"

Hurricanes remain the biggest-ticket item for disaster expenses - far bigger than tornadoes, earthquakes, and other mayhem.

At the end of the 2010 hurricane season, Federal Emergency Management Agency figures showed that more than 80 percent of the $65 billion in disaster costs since 2005 had been due to hurricanes.

The major hurricanes that make landfall in the United States are the ones that roll up the disaster costs, as they drag waves landward and cause widespread flooding.

That is why the outlooks issued this month by Accu-Weather Inc. and Colorado State University researchers William Gray and Philip Klotzbach are particularly worrisome.

The team forecast 16 named storms, with winds 39 m.p.h. or more, including eight hurricanes, with winds at least 74 m.p.h. Accu-Weather predicted 15 named storms, including eight hurricanes. The long-term averages are 10 named storms and six hurricanes.