Ruminations

Weather Conditions

"Florida knows hurricanes, it just hasn’t met many lately. The state has withstood more direct hurricane strikes than any other state, and it is often grazed by storms that end up making landfall elsewhere."

"However, until Hermine made landfall in September, Florida had gone more than a decade without a direct hit from a major storm. This lengthy lull came after two hyperactive hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005, which together produced more than 40 named storms and 13 major hurricanes. The 2005 season produced 28 named storms, the most since 1851 and eight more than the second busiest season of 1933."

"This hurricane season has proved a rude awakening from that decade-long lull. Hurricane Matthew, the 13th named storm of the season, has pummeled Florida’s east coast and is projected to batter the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Forecasts even showed it hooking a U-turn and heading to every storm's landmass of choice: Florida."
The Washington Post, 100 years of hurricanes hitting and missing Florida, visualized By Lazaro Gamio October 7, 2016

In 1950 the population of the United States was 152 million people. By 2015 the population had ballooned to 320 million people living in the United States. That represents an average growth rate in the population of 1.2 percent annually. Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, all known for their mild climate unlike the raging cold that winter brings in the north saw an average increase far outdistancing the growth rate in say, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska.

The tropical winds turn dangerous. (Reuters/Carlos Barria)
Tropical Depression 16 formed this morning (Oct. 4) in the southwestern Caribbean Sea. The National Hurricane Center forecasts it could hit Florida as a hurricane on Sunday

In the first group the average growth rate of the population was two percent yearly, double the average on a national scale and representing in their totality 21 percent of the American population. The northern state group, on the other hand, saw a growth rate of 0.7 percent annually, and its total percentage fell from the original 12.3 percent of the American population to 9.3 percent. A net gain for the south, a net loss for the north. Representing where the population of the United States preferred to locate to.

In 1950, both the southern group and the northern group of states each collectively represented roughly 12.3 percent of the entire American population. What led to and distinguished their changing population fortunes was the choice of people to live in warmer, albeit wetter climates, rather than commit to living in distinctly four-season climates which may be drier, but also colder. The benefit of living in the north, however, is the lack of hurricanes, whereas in the south hurricane season is guaranteed.

The vast geography of the United States of America offers to its residents the opportunities to live in the frigid north of Alaska, to its extreme opposite, Florida, and everything in between; where there are forests, mountains, great plains, deserts and rainforests. The popularity of warm atmospheres and comfortable, minimally-changing in degrees of comfort temperatures influence peoples' choices enormously, enabling them to discount the threat of major disruptions when untoward weather systems erupt, as they always have historically.

Before the advent of recognized human-activity loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions, hurricanes were guaranteed on schedule during their typical seasonal activities. According to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the U.S. underwent between fifteen and twenty-four landfall hurricanes every decade between 1851 to 1960. Atlantic cyclones represent an expected climate event, having nothing to do with climate change.

Of those historical weather events between one and ten were considered major. When human GHGs began to sharply rise, from 1960 to 2010, landfalling hurricanes presented at the rate of 12 to 19 every decade, and four to seven of those were considered major, yet still within the historical range. It had been noted that since 2010 there were fewer occurrences of landfall hurricanes, and of those, two of a total of three were considered to be major events.

The hurricanes that came along in 2017 some of which have been considered once-in-a-century events for the damage they caused resulting from their category-force status, owes in large part to the fact that human habitation has altered the geology of sensitive areas from their natural capacity to absorb great volumes of sea water and withstand gale-force winds. But because of the growth in population and in particular the growth of people opting to settle in those weather-sensitive areas such as flood plains, the hurricane effects have been magnified.

In choosing to locate to vulnerable areas of the United States reflecting a preference for warmer, wetter potentially more hazardous climate events, the situation where such events impact so deleteriously on human habitation is vastly magnified. These are deliberate choices on the part of the population, to live where they will be exposed to inimical weather events, and in so doing, altering the lay of the land, adjacent the oceans.

Government responds by coming to the rescue through economic and disaster relief. Leading people to waive their responsibility to insure their properties, and to think less about where they are building when building codes are lax, despite enabling people to over-build in areas prone to weather hazards. Under these conditions, when severe weather systems do arrive as they have historically, great shifts in population temporarily relieve people from direct exposure to danger, but their homes become threatened.

Resulting in those vulnerable populations calling on government to both act on climate change, and rescue their possessions when they become threatened and damaged leading to tremendous personal and infrastructure loss. The risk has always been known, but that hasn't stopped real estate entrepreneurs and town councils from encouraging people to come along and make their homes where instability and climate threats can be guaranteed.

And to pay for these costly rescues and efforts to correct the damage done to natural geological defences drains both local, state and federal coffers. So would the Americans who make conscious decisions to place themselves and their families in annual danger including the prospect of losing all their possessions agree to funding needed reactions to meet the demands of such climate events by agreeing to pay increased taxes?

Those words and such a prospect represent anathema.