Tag Archives: Yolanda

A word of caution about Hurricane Patricia

October 23, 2015UncategorizedHaiyan, Hurricane, Hurricane Patricia, Katrina, Severe weather, Size comparison, YolandaGreg Laden

CNN is calling Hurricane Patricia “The Most Dangerous Hurricane in History.” Another news outlet showed a picture of the hurricane and pointed out “The Enormous Size of Hurricane Patricia.”

Both of these are wrong. Size matters with hurricanes. A category 5 hurricane that is twice as large as another category 5 hurricane is “more dangerous” all else being equal, and by “all else” I mean things like exactly where it hits, how fast it is moving, exactly how strong it is (category 5 includes a very wide range of wind speeds because it is the highest category). Hurricane Patricia is not huge.

Patricia is very dangerous, has a very low pressure center and very strong winds, both being at or near record breaking levels. But the hurricane is small. Here’s a VERY rough size comparison between two of the well known and very large hurricanes that I just slapped together:

The larger hurricanes will cover more area with their dangerous winds, may have a more extensive storm tide, and will very likely bring a lot more rain inland. Patricia will do very bad things where it makes landfall, which is actually happening as I write this, but that area will be smaller than a Katrina like hurricane. And it will bring a fair amount of water inland, but not nearly as much as a monster like Haiyan would have.

So yes, take Patricia seriously. But I expect to see a lot of yammering after the fact, from certain factions, about how everyone was being very alarmist about Patricia when in the end it was not a Katrina.

So let it be understood. Patricia is no Katrina. But it is impressive in its own way.

Haiyan is an example of climate change making things worse

November 19, 2013UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Haiyan, Hurricane, Sea Level Rise, Severe weather, YolandaGreg Laden

Update on Haiyan/Yolanda Death Toll

The final figures are not likely in but the numbers have stabilized and we can now probably put a number to the human toll of this storm that will not change dramatically in the future, at least in terms of orders of magnitude. The current “official” death toll in the Philippines from Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan is 6,009 with 1,779 missing and 27,022 injured, with the largest concentration of casualties in Eastern Visayas. This comes from a December 13th report of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, which you can (probably) download here. If you do download it expect to see slightly different numbers as the report seems to be updated dynamically. Wikipedia, which references the same report, gives slightly different numbers (higher for dead and injured, same for missing). Regardless of these smaller changes, we can say that the total casualty number for this typhoon is well over 30,000 with over 6,000 dead. With so many people missing we may guess that the number dead is somewhat over 7,000.

A few days ago a major typhoon struck the Philippines and then Vietnam, with another smaller storm heading in roughly the same direction. At about the same time, a tropical cyclone hit Somalia and killed at least 100 people there. The United States is not unaffected by the impacts of large tropical storms. There is reason to believe that tragedies like these may become more common or more severe with climate change. We must first address the urgent needs of the people in the affected areas, but it is also true that events like these and the voices of the victims must drive our continued commitment to address climate change preemptively.

Yeb Saño, the Philippines’ negotiator at the UN Climate Talks, found himself in the position of addressing an international body about the damaging effects of climate change while his own family was living in the affected area. We should take our lead from him. When he gave his address to the gathered representatives from around the world, he announced a hunger strike on behalf of his people which he would continue until the UN group completed the job they had convened to do. Saño’s brother, along with his fellow citizens, was occupied with recovering the dead and helping the survivors while Saño himself sought international recognition of the climate crisis; he was moved to say, “The climate crisis is madness.”

The exact nature of future storms is uncertain, but there are four lines of scientific evidence that hurricanes will be more of a problem in the future than they were in the past.

First, sea levels continue to rise, so the same storm ten years from now vs. ten years ago will have significantly greater impact. Sea level rise was a significant factor with Superstorm Sandy and Katrina, and was likely a factor in the high death toll and extensive damage caused by Haiyan.

Second, large storms are likely to produce more rain over a broader area because a warmer atmosphere contains more moisture; large storms will bring increased inland flooding, a major cause of damage, injury, and death in tropical storms and cyclones.

Third, increased sea temperatures may generate more intense storms. This seems to have happened with Katrina and Haiyan; the sea surface temperature drives the storm’s formation, but in these two storms the sea was unusually warm at a greater depth, several meters, causing those storms to become much stronger than they otherwise might have been. Recent studies have shown a strong association between sea surface temperatures in the Pacific and the cumulative strength of the storms that happen in a given year.

Fourth, and less certain, is the possibility that there will be more hurricanes and typhoons. One of the best models for predicting past hurricane frequency predicts that this will happen in the future, and by the way, that model predicted the current relatively anemic Atlantic storm season with good accuracy. Major tropical storms occur with highly varying frequency from year to year, so it is difficult to identify any trend over just a few decades for which there are good records, but the climate models are increasingly accurate and they suggest that globally we can expect an uptick in frequency.

It is often said that it is impossible to link a given weather event with climate change. This is no longer true, if it ever was. The typical climate for a region or a season tells us what weather is “normal.” Climate change is pushing us into a new normal; the climate has warmed, there is more energy in the atmosphere, the jet streams have changed their configuration and are thus more likely to stall weather patterns as happened this year in Calgary and Colorado. This is the new climate, and thus, there is a new normal for the weather in any given region or season. It appears that the new normal is now, and will increasingly be in the future, one with a significantly greater threat of damage, injury, and death from major tropical storms and other severe weather events.

There are many approaches to addressing this problem, but most of them start with one initial step: stop denying the importance and reality of the accepted science of climate change. This is something individuals must do, the media must do, and politicians and policy makers must do. This is something that must start now, and really, should have started years ago.

Bad storms have always happened. But, to ignore the fact that humans are making them worse is certainly, as Saño put it, “climate madness.”

WUWT Science Denialist Blog Hits New, Historic Low

November 9, 2013UncategorizedAnthony Watts, Climate and weather, Climate Change, Climate Change, Denialism, Global Warming, Haiyan, Hurricane, Lies and Denial, Severe weather, Typhoons, YolandaGreg Laden

At this moment, there is a guest post over at WUWT blog downplaying the size, strength, wind speeds, overall effects, and even the death toll of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Even as the monster storm steams across the sea to it’s next landfall (probably as a huge wet tropical storm, in northern Vietnam and southern China), Anthony Watts and his crew are trying to pretend this monster storm didn’t happen, and instead, that it was a run of the mill typhoon.

At the moment, nobody is really saying that Haiyan’s strength, size, power, or even existence is specifically the direct result of global warming, although it is of course impossible to remove the effects of global warming from ANY weather event because global warming is part of climate change and guess what … weather arises from the climate. The climate has changed, so ALL of our weather is affected by climate change.

This offensive post is preemptive denial, but it is denial that throws the lives and suffering of millions of people … of which thousands have lost relatives … under the bus. So that Anthony Watts and his guest poster Paul Homewood can … can do what? Feel smart? Take a shot at the reality of climate change? Pretend severe weather does not matter? What? Maybe they don’t like people who live in the Philippines.

Haiyan will be measured and remeasured over coming days, but it really is looking like it will be one for the record books. But Watts and Homewood don’t care about a big storm this year, or the fact that there have been several big storms in the Pacific, because there were a lot of Pacific typhoons in 1964, before fossil fuels were discovered by humans and thus unlinked to climate change. … ;( … Haiyan will be measured in terms of the death toll and destruction to property and forests, and it will be one of the worst typhoons ever, probably. But Watts and Homewood don’t want storms to be important for the simple reason that the best models strongly suggest that there will be more storms … especially in the Pacific, where Haiyan struck, over coming decades because of the changes to climate that humans are carrying out and that Anthony Watts and Paul Homewood deny to be real.

Update on Haiyan/Yolanda Death Toll

Watts needs to take this offensive and absurd post off of his site. Homewood needs to apologize, and to do so sincerely. But before they do that, go have a look. It will probably make you throw up a little in your mouth.

There is one funny thing. Homewood takes the Daily Mail to task for getting numbers wrong and exaggerating the severity of the storm. I don’t know if the Daily Mail got it right or wrong because I don’t read the drivel they publish in that rag, and I don’t normally read the drek Watts publishes on his horrid site, and the two together is just too much, so I skipped that part. But the Daily Mail is one of those rags that often publishes climate science denialism and the nefarious and mean spirited denialists like Anthony Watts often use such sources to make their point. But here apparently the sensationalism of the Daily Mail contradicts the made up crap Watts puts on his blog. Somehow the expression “You gotta dance with the one that brung ya” comes to mind.