Politicizing Storms
November 12, 2013
WHAT is the normal person’s reaction to a devastating storm in a distant country, a storm that has swept thousands of helpless people out to sea and flattened hundreds of thousands of homes? The normal person prays for the comfort of the afflicted. The normal person sends a check to a relief organization. The normal person reflects on the fragility of life and the vanity of all things.
But, when a major storm devastates a region, as Typhoon Haiyan has done in the Philippines, the liberal views the catastrophe in light of his political agenda. The storm must be the result of evil Westerners who drive cars. Never mind that this past hurricane season in the Atlantic was uneventful. The liberal never proclaims when storms aren’t happening that catastrophic scenarios related to global warming have been disproved. For the liberal, mankind and life itself are perfectible. Thus even storms are someone’s fault. Curiously, he does not ever seem to entertain the possibility that some storms may be more devastating than they need be because of corrupt or inept officials who allow overbuilding in fragile zones.
Here is a risks assessment map put out by the UN in 2011 which stated that Tacloban, the city hit especially hard by Haiyan, had a 10 percent chance of just such a storm in the next ten years.
According to Science Insider:
Haiyan is the fifth Category 5 storm (the top category) on Earth so far in 2013, Masters says. The global average since 2000 has been 4.4 Category 5s per year, and the record was set in 1997 with 12 of them. September’s massive assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found only “low confidence” that intense tropical cyclone activity had increased measurably since 1950.
Also:
The IPCC found that, “more likely than not,” global warming will drive an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the western North Pacific and North Atlantic by late in this century.
The possibility of somewhat stronger storms is a serious concern and the moral necessity of reducing man-made emissions is indisputable, but one must bear in mind the size and complexity of the atmosphere and the limits of human power.