Avian Weather Perceptions

"We don't know how [birds are able to detect when a cold front is approaching]. There are a number of hypotheses but we don't know for sure yet."
"We know that birds and other animals can detect subtle changes in air temperature. Many birds somehow sense that very minute drop in air pressure that typically signals low pressure coming [accompanying a storm]. [Birds have several options] That depends on the bird. They either want to get out of there, or they want to hunker down."
"We've done a lot of work on various sparrow species that forage on the ground. If you're a sparrow in winter and a storm is coming, that probably means there is going to be snow. Sparrows need to eat while they can. When we expose these sparrows to a drop in air pressure they start eating more [to store energy]."
"A large number of animals are probably detecting these subtle changes in barometric pressure. How sharks are sensing that under water is a total mystery. I'm interested in understanding in what situations they can cope, and in what situations they will not be able to cope."
"If these extreme events [in weather] become more common, I think it's useful to understand how animals predict and cope with them. Birds are important, not only for the ecosystem but they are culturally important to us. Really, I'm just motivated in trying to understand how they are coping with the changing environment."
Scott MacDougall-Shackleton, Advanced Facility for Avian Research, University of Western Ontario

Sparrows are      known to eat more when they sense a drop in air pressure signalling he arrival of a winter storm. Photo:  Judith Gustafsson

It remains a speculative mystery to scientists how it is that birds have foreknowledge of a winter storm's arrival. With that knowledge they make decisions that are vital to their survival; whether to fly away to safety or to choose to hide until the storm passes. Whichever decision they make is invariably integrated with their feeding requirements. Sensing changes in air pressure, however slight, they are also able to detect when temperature drops, linked to a cold front incoming.

At the University of Western Ontario where Dr. MacDougall-Shackleton, a behavioral psychologist, has his laboratory, the facility is home to the world's first hypobaric climate wind tunnel for bird flight. Research into the physiology and aerodynamics of bird flight at different altitudes is enabled when researchers turn air pressure up and down to study their effect on birds. When high pressure is simulated in the lab along with cold weather linked to winds out of the north in spring, birds decrease their northbound migratory flight behaviour.

Birds in southeastern states in the U.S. managed to develop through an evolutionary track, a measure to dodge storms approaching from the west. They enact a formula whereby they fly south to avoid the path of the storm, then turn west and finally return flying back up behind the storm. Infrasound --  sound at a frequency too low for human hearing -- may cause birds to react. One current theory is that because low-frequency sound travels a long way, birds can hear the sounds of distant rumbles from thunder "probably many hours in advance" of its actual appearance.

"We have now clearly demonstrated that birds, both when wintering and migrating, have their own internal barometer, which helps them make decisions about everything from flight to feeding,"
"This has been hypothesized for a long time and there is a large body of evidence that animals in the wild behave differently when weather changes but we now have an experimental demonstration where we held everything else constant except for barometric pressure proving definitively this long-held belief."

According to climate theory, a warming world will result in more frequent and more violent storms. Dr. MacDougall-Shackleton would like to find out how this, should it occur, will affect bids and other wildlife. There is the issue to be studied whether too frequent and too violent storms may overwhelm the capacity of birds to persevere.

One of Dr. MacDougall-Shackleton's doctoral students is conducting research on whether a bird may become too physically stressed to survive a frequent succession of such storms. If a laboratory bird is exposed to a simulated storm approaching once weekly, the birds appear capable of handling the situation. Should the lab simulate two storms weekly "they would start losing some weight.So they weren't able to keep up with their energy balance."

"Birds have evolved to cope with bad weather. They have experienced it all through evolution. But it's possible that some species may be in trouble", should increasingly violent weather eventuate in the future over what is being experienced at the present time.

Global Warming? Mebbe   Climate Change? Absolutely

"Weather, and especially extreme weather, is how most people will experience climate change."
"You don't experience the slow change in average temperature. What you experience are the changes in extreme weather that are brought about."
"So how we talk about that is really important."
Susan Joy Hassol, director, science outreach organization Climate Communication

"To the nine or ten percent of the population that are going to be dismissive of climate science no matter what, there's not much you can say to them."
"But a lot of people out there are legitimately curious [about how global warming can be real if it's cold out today]."
Marshall Shepherd, professor of atmospheric science, University of Georgia

"For a long time, Americans saw climate change as a distant threat. But as of our most recent survey, I don't feel I can say that any more."
"We're seeing a lot of movement on people understanding that climate change is already happening."
Edward Maibach, professor, George Mason University

According to a 2017 study people who experience extreme weather are likelier to support climate adaptation measures than they were before their introduction to extreme weather. The study also concluded, however, that the effect was not deep and failed to last; as time went on people's attitudes returned to where they were to begin with, the memory of exposure to extreme weather events fading with time.

Author of that 2017 study, David Konisky, associate professor at Indiana University was left wondering whether a more effective type of messaging could shift opinions. "It might be that climate has become so wrapped up in one's identity and worldview that it is not the sort of thing that's susceptible to better messaging", he mused.

In recent years some climate scientists have made a concerted effort to transform instances of severe weather events into useful teaching tools. "This is what global warming looks like", became a mantra in the summer of 2012 when widespread droughts, wildfires and extreme heat advisories distinguished the season.


On the other hand, climate change deniers as well used weather events to shape public perceptions, as they expressed their disbelief that these events were anything but normal cyclical weather systems repetitively seen evolving in other, earlier eras. Both environmentalists and scientists made often cited notes that record-breaking hot days have become more frequent occurrences than their counterpart cold days.

A new survey by Yale and George Mason universities identified 69 percent of Americans being "worried" about the issue of global warming -- representing an eight-point increase from the spring before. To explain the situation, extreme weather disasters were cited that took place in 2018; wildfires and hurricanes as well as concerted efforts of both scientists and local TV weathercasters to place the events in a climate context.

A consistent string of shifting weather begins a process of undermining doubt about global warming, according to Wanyun Shao, an assistant professor of geography at University of Alabama. Such instances help to guide people to begin to imagine a world of the future where weather conditions have altered what we have long taken for granted, according to psychologists.

"For some people, it takes more time [to be convinced of the reality of Global Warming]. But eventually people start trusting their own experiences", pointed out Professor Shao.

Tornado Watch

"There have been studies that have shown the well-known Tornado Alley [in the United States] that stretches from Texas to the Dakotas has been moving east, which means we might see more and more tornadoes in Canada."
"It [Ottawa's Dunrobin twister] gives us a better chance to relate the wind to the damage to the houses."
"We're trying to mitigate the tornado [damage] risk, so we are trying to better estimate losses from experimental simulations."
"In terms of the loads on the buildings, there isn't much in the building codes. We're trying to work toward that."
Jubayer Chowdhury, research scientist, adjunct research professor, Western University engineering school, London, Ontario

"[The estimated loss was $300 million] and that is probably just insured losses."
"We hope to contribute to mitigating loss that will, for sure, happen [in the future]."
Djordje Rominic, researcher, Western twister team

At Western University in London, Ontario a team of researchers is making use of the world's largest tornado simulator in an effort to more fully understand damage done by a devastating cluster of tornadoes that hit last fall in Canada's National Capital Region. As part of the Northern Tornadoes Project at the university, a team of researchers led by Jubayer Chowdhury is examining the effects of tornadoes on multiple buildings located within a neighbourhood block.

In September of 2018 six tornadoes struck the Ottawa-Gatineau (Ontario-Quebec respectively) area, destroying houses and in the process hundreds of people in communities along both sides of the boundary between the two provinces were displaced. The south-west of Ontario has experienced tornadoes in the past, in a wide zone stretching from Windsor to Eastern Ontario, prone to volcanic windstorms.

The town square in Goderich Ontario was ripped apart by a tornado in 2011. At the nearby world's largest salt mine, a worker was killed during that even. Researchers at Western's Wind EEE Dome have turned to the Ottawa tornado cluster that presents a unique opportunity to examine the consequences of those dangerous winds, in an area where few large, mature trees were growing, thus eliminating the possibility of falling or uprooted trees having contributed to the damage.

While the research details remain in the planning stages, the researchers are focusing on the strongest of the tornadoes that struck Dunrobin in the Ottawa area. That violent twister was the strongest tornado to visit Eastern Ontario since 1902. The Dunrobin twister has been identified as intense, striking a residential area. Its strength can be gauged for its standing on the six-level Enhance Fujita scale, rating tornado intensity by damage left behind.

The scale, from EFO to EF5 gave the Dunrobin tornado an EF3 value, with wind speeds of 218 to 266 kilometers an hour, in a scale range that measures as high as winds up to 320 km/h. A not-for-profit research organization, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction has funded the research through a $110,000 grant. At Western, the research team plans to simulate the tornado in their wind dome to enable the team to study its effects on homes in a scale-model block of 22 houses in Dunrobin.

The research is viewed as potentially life-saving, with findings and conclusions that might conceivably benefit insurance companies, builders and homeowners. Its conclusions and recommendations could also be used to strengthen building codes or construction standards in the interests of building structures able to withstand tornado-class winds in a highly-improved construction mode.

According to research conducted nationwide, there are about a hundred tornadoes ripping through parts of Canada annually. Moreover, this kind of research is all too timely, given that scientists have reported a notable rise in tornado activity in recent years, in particular events with multiple twisters in clusters of high-wind damage.

Northern Tornadoes Project // Special to Western News

Damage from an EF3 tornado in Dunrobin, near Ottawa, in September 2018. It was the strongest of a cluster of six tornadoes that day.

Cooling in a Warming World

"When we look in fact at the hot countries in the world, in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, where about 2.8 billion people live, only about eight percent of the population owns an air-conditioner."
"Air-conditioners are only second to the entire industrial sector. Twenty-one percent of the total world electricity growth is coming from the need to meet the growth of air-conditioner electricity demand."
Fatih Birol, head, International Energy Agency

"If you look at cooling degree days for Chennai or Mumbai [India], these are places that have twice as many cooling degree days as the hottest city in the U.S., Miami."
"It's unbelievably hot -- there's nothing in the U.S. that compares in terms of heat to these cities in India."
Lucas Davis, director, Energy Institute, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

Cityscape in Dubai as the temperature soars to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit).

Anwar Mirza/REUTERS

In fact, without the advent of air conditioning available in the southern United States to cool down the enervating effects of continual heat, the corporate superiority, production of manufacturing and advance of business in the United States might never have taken place to make it the world's largest economy, a giant of technology, enterprise, production and innovation. Air conditioning is responsible for bringing modern industry to a level it might never have attained without its presence, a way around heat producing worker fatigue and inefficiency.

Fully 90 percent of American households can boast air-conditioning. It makes life tolerable in areas of extreme heat and humidity, it enables people to be productive. More than that, in many instances during catastrophic heat waves, access to air conditioning can play a critical role in keeping people with compromised immune systems, the elderly and the very young from collapse and death. Premature deaths on hot days was reduced by 75 percent since 1960 in the U.S. according to one study, by the introduction of home air-conditioning.

Air conditioning units line a street in Singapore. Photograph: Ed Wray/AP

Now the availability of air-cooling systems for domestic use is growing, and with that growth electrical systems are being increasingly overburdened. And not only do electrical grids become taxed often beyond their capacity, but a concomitant increase occurs in emissions leading to planet warming. According to the International Energy Agency, the worldwide proliferation of air-conditioners is predicted to rise to 5.6 billion units from its current 1.5 billion units, by mid-century.

Should this occur without any change in the method of cooling delivery, air-conditioners are set to use fully as much electricity as comparable to what giant China uses for all its activities at the present time. The generation of electricity powering air-conditioners leads to greenhouse gas emissions released by coal and natural gas plants. The collective air-conditioners of the future would double the generation of electricity by 2050, producing emissions contributing to global warming, thereby heightening the demand for air-conditioning; a predicable and cruel cycle.

Air conditioning is growing rapidly in places like Wuhan, Hubei, China.

yezi9713/Flickr

The countries making most use of air-conditioning are the United States and Japan, with China's use creeping up behind. Incomes in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are rising and as they do, enabling greater numbers of people to install air-conditioners. Much of the growth now predicted to rise in air-conditioning use will come from India, China and Indonesia, a huge population-swath of the globe.

In lock-step with increased household wealth comes the popular use of appliances that makes life easier, more convenient and entertaining, like refrigerator and television acquisition. Neighbourhoods become warmer the more electrical appliances are used, their energy vented from home interiors to the outside. Air-conditioning works through venting hot air to the exterior. In some cities with full use of air-conditioning there are estimates that overnight temperatures can rise about one degree Celsius.

Air conditioners in Hong Kong

Over 700 people died, attributable to the heat wave that struck Chicago in 1995. The European heat wave of 2004 and the 2010 Russian heat wave were each responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Climate change, according to researchers, produced a deadlier effect with both the European and Russian heat waves. Cooling temperatures to enable people to withstand heat waves is seen as an imperative to improving the human condition exposed to the deadly effects of extremes of weather.

But some of the risks can be mitigated with better technology. Air conditioners in India today use twice the electricity as more efficient units to produce the same amount of cooling. Air-conditioners available in Japan and the European Union are 25 percent more efficient than units sold in the United States and China, so the obvious response should be for governments to officially set efficiency standards for the manufacture of air-conditioners. Some manufacturers have already proven adept at passing energy-efficiency standards, so why not all?

Is Moderate Climate the Matter Over Mind?

Is Moderate Climate the Matter Over Mind?

"Growing up in temperatures that are close to the psycho-physiological comfort optimum encourages individuals to explore the outside environment, thereby influencing their personalities."
Study, Nature

"Overall, it is interesting that although people instinctively believe that better weather results in better moods, the evidence for this assumption is weak. In general, the effects of "better weather" on people's feelings are modest, inconsistent, and at times counter to commonly-held expectations. Moreover, warm weather seems associated with breakups and more antisocial behavior. Yet there can be benefits, not only directly for people who suffer from SAD, but via indirect effects when people get out in nature and exercise more. As with many assumptions in life, presumed cause-effect relations can be wrong. Often, the key to experiencing benefits depends on what people do with their opportunities rather than whether they simply have them in the first place."

Allen R McConnell Ph.D., Psychology Today

Does climate determine personality? I am not sure."
"But from my own research, I do know that weather and climate affect mood, and this may be reflected in some of the [study] authors' assessments."
Alan Stewart, professor of psychology, University of Georgia

So, does geographical climate have an effect on forming peoples' personalities? As in making them happier, more satisfied people, easier to get along with? If, that is, they happen to live where the climate is moderate, not given to extreme swings of warm and cold. We commonly think of people from the Nordic countries as being slightly morose in temperament, and people living say, in Hawaii, light-hearted and stable. These are impressions, they don't reflect actual scientific measurements of human nature being formed by prevailing weather patterns.

People living in northern climes, it is true, tend to fixate on the weather because they live with extremes of temperature and those extremes impose on their style of living, from travelling and communicating to recreational opportunities. In Canada, as an example, there is an outdoor winter culture that impresses people to get out in the snow and the cold because not only is it beautiful in appearance, but these conditions lend themselves to enjoying and taking part in winter recreational habits available to anyone -- and staying fit in the process.

Human beings tend to become bored with any kind of environment that seems static, unchanging. The change in seasons is a natural, unending ritual that brings a changing landscape introducing another chapter to the year's seasons, resulting in anticipation and appreciation of season-appropriate activities. If the transitions are to relatively moderate, albeit vastly different seasons they're more than tolerable. If the transitions herald extremes of alternate weather landscapes they can seem intrusive and unwanted.

If we take a geography like Hawaii as ideal, however, why is it that according to the U.S. Census Bureau there are more people leaving the state daily than there are those moving into it. While the weather may be great, the geological beauty impressive, the unemployment rate low with a robust labour market, and few concerns about cyclones hitting states like Florida, it is an enormously expensive place to live in. So while people living there may be happily satisfied with the climate, they are dissatisfied with the opportunities to forge ahead financially.

And quite the same can be said for Canada's Pacific coast province of British Columbia, a spectacular geography, never too hot and sun-baked in the summer, and with mild winters where snow falls for the most part in the interior and coastal mountains and cities like Vancouver enjoy moderate climatic features. The fly in that particular urban ointment is spectacularly high real estate costs, so much so that even with well-remunerated employment few residents can dream of owning their own homes in the urban core.

Tokyo's situation is much the same, with weather very similar to that of Georgia, for example, where a snowfall is rare, and when it does come down, it is languid and scarce and quickly dissipates as the unusual cold that brought it in leaves. On the other hand, summer heat and humidity in Tokyo can make life uncomfortable for those who prefer dryer, less humid and hot atmospheres. And again, like Hawaii and Vancouver, home ownership and rental costs are phenomenally expensive.

So what does make people happy and content? The researchers in the most recent study cited above conclude that in places where the comfort of warmth prevails for most of the year with an average high temperature about 21C people tend to be agreeable, open and emotionally stable growing up and maturing in a warm climate, as compared, for example to being raised and coming to maturity in Marquette, Michigan with its average high temperature of 10C.

Research has previously linked personality to geography; as in "Midwest nice", and "New York abrasive". But while it can be true that regions appear to have group personalities with social cultures that are recognizably linked to geographies, there is little proof of cause and effect. Yet according to the researchers linked to this new study  the significant factors in personalities are linked to the average temperatures prevailing in the places that nurture us. We are shaped personally by the climate we live with.

That should make Canadians pretty surly people, and they are, in fact, noted for their tendency to be rather moderate in their emotional presence to the point of being boringly predictable in their easy-going attitudes. Still, it is the researchers' contention that people who are raised in regions with average temperatures around 22C tend to be agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, extroverted and open; personality traits psychologists identify as "the big five".

Take it with a grain of salt.

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. 

NHC Atlantic Ops ✔ @NHC_Atlantic

A Tropical Storm Warning has been issued for portions of the coast of Nicaragua & Honduras for TD 16. Full advisory: http://hurricanes.gov 

10:53 AM - Oct 4, 2017

Business As Usual

"There could have been ways to have more green space and more green infrastructure over the years, and it just didn't work that way, because it was fast and furious."
"It's been known for years how to do it. It just costs the developers more money to do it that way."
"And so the building just went rampant, and there weren't many controls. It was like the Wild West, and you just built housing subdivision after housing subdivision up close to the bayous, up close to the channels."
Dr. Phil Bedient, professor of Engineering in Civil and Environmental Engineering , Rice University, Houston

"If you put the kind of super-strict planning shackles on Houston, that would be the way to kill it."
"Why would you live in a hot, humid, flat space if it was expensive?"
Joel Kotkin, urban theorist

"Houston will accept anybody who's got hustle -- it respects energy more than any place."
"Houston is a very resilient city, and it will overcome."
Larry McMurtry, Texas writer

Bright Cove, Houston, Foxnews.com

In other words, it will be business as usual for Houston now that the inconvenience of a massive flooding event thanks to a one-in-a-500-years hurricane has come and passed. Of course, equally inconvenient is the fact that environmentalists warn that these unique and deadly hurricanes are on track to become more common, more numerous, and places like Houston that faced up to nature's wrath, with most of its natural surroundings devised by nature to protect the geography from flooding have been severely compromised by gung-ho building.

The city itself was the brainchild of speculators in real estate from New York. And since Houston was chosen as a site for a city that would evolve to an energy powerhouse in the 1830s, homes and businesses have routinely flooded. Attempts to drain the swampy land failed to protect its residents, the floods just kept coming in, one after another. In Houston's first one hundred years of existence it has coped with no fewer than 16 major floods. But none of that kept Houston from becoming a flourishing metropolis, the centre of the petroleum industry in the United States.

It was from Houston that the U.S. Space Agency first sent humankind to visit the moon. It is where the world's largest medical center has been established. No fewer than 145 languages are spoken in the city, as a teeming melting pot model of humanity on display, live and energetic and bursting with pride. Of course on the way to achieving all of this, as the city's population grew so did its need to push nature around, to claim for human habitation and corporate business areas intended by nature to absorb extravagant amounts of water from storms to protect the mainland.

Without the municipal authority agreeing that there was no need to regulate the environment, much less to place restraints through onerous building code regulations that would slow down industry, development and the growing population base requiring places to live, the result has been that it isn't dreadfully expensive to afford a  house in Houston. Because homes were developed on the cheap, on the very wetlands and prairies that were meant to remain as the natural sponges nature had intended them to be.

The irony cannot be escaped that it is the industry that made Houston the power house it is, that has been identified as the major contributor to the pollution that threatens to incite those overwhelmingly dangerous storms. Houston itself is the unlikeliest of natural environments to host a growing mega-city of aggressive enterprise. Throughout its inner geography it is burdened with the presence of slow-moving bayous where clay soils fail to absorb excess water. During Hurricane Harvey close to 1,400 millimeters of rain fell; while the average annual rainfall in Houston registers about 1,200 millimeters.

Rosenberg Police Department -- Twitter

The city had decided it would control stormwater by directing the runoff to the Gulf of Mexico, and to that end two key bayous were channeled by conversion to concrete culverts, and a third one widened. Houston must have felt it had accomplished its due diligence in a massive engineering network of 1,400 channels totalling 4,000 kilometers, built for storm runoff to be directed out of the city and funnelled down to the sea. Thus assured, city planners felt free to allow building to run rampant.

Then came the realization that such large rainfalls couldn't, after all, be  handled by the system devised, since green space that might have absorbed all that extra water falling during a big storm had been paved with parking lots, houses, churches and malls. An initiative undertaken in 2010 to improve roads and renew the drainage system represented a major financing effort necessitating new taxes. Raising taxes is singularly unpopular anywhere, particularly when it is paired with a recommendation that homeowners living in flood plains return the land to green space through government buy-outs.

The result of which, concerns many planners; that with stricter regulations on building codes the momentum that has always inspired Houston to grow as it wished, and unregulated, will result in houses no longer being as affordable, and thus attractive to lure people to live and work in Houston, in its signature industry.

Indifferent Nature, Terrorized Humans

"The heaviest rainfall events have become heavier and more frequent, and the amount of rain falling on the heaviest rain days has also increased."
"The mechanism driving these changes [is hotter air stemming from] human-caused warming." 
National Climate Assessment, U.S.

"I've lost everything. My home has been torn apart. Everything is gone. This is not my first hurricane but it's the worst I've ever experienced."
"The kitchen came apart, then the roof came off, and we had to spend the night outside in the wilderness. We called out but no one heard us. We need to get off this island. Everyone is homeless, we don't have anything to ride out the next storm."
Gloria Cethaf, mother of six, Barbuda

"It was devastating. I was at my parents' house and the back door blew in, so we ran to the community centre, which was a shelter, and it was packed."
"Then the community centre was destroyed so I went to my friend's house but it was completely gone. My business, my bakery, gone. It's too much to handle."
Jacqueline Beazer, Barbuda

"It was like a horror movie. People were running from house to house, and we had cars flying over our heads."
"We had 40-foot containers flying left and right, people were tying themselves to their roofs with ropes to keep them down."
Barbudan woman

A photo taken on September 7, 2017 shows damage in Orient Bay on the French Caribbean island of Saint Martin, after the passage of Hurricane Irma.  LIONEL CHAMOISEAU/AFP/Getty Images

And now it is Florida's turn. Evacuation orders have gone out to residents to leave, after many had barricaded their homes with everything they could get to safeguard their property against the coming hurricane with its impossible-to-imagine wind force, the most powerful ever recorded. Imagine an anthill, well established, large and rounded, its inhabitants busy with their life-work and suddenly something plows into it, and the ants in instant reaction hysterically scurry here and there, attempting to escape life-threatening danger; an escape too late for many of them.

All of Savannah, Georgia has been evacuated, awaiting the hurricane's full force, possibly at the 4 level when it hits full-blown, down by one-degree of deadly force from what those in Barbuda experienced. Texas is still attempting to find itself after its relatively more feeble wind force and pounding rain with Hurricane Harvey. The state had no laws in force to control where and how buildings were placed, no municipal building codes. The highways of cement do not absorb excessive water; nor does paved-over arable land converted to homes and businesses.

Nations like the Netherlands, Britain, France and the U.S. with national interests in the Caribbean have sent ships and planes with emergency workers, food, water, troops and medicine. Paltry, but life-affirming. Paltry in the sense that what is being offered barely covers the depth and breadth of need in vulnerable areas destroyed by the prodigious force of nature that assailed them. The Florida Keys and South Florida are exiting the area, along with parts of metropolitan Miami; a lot of people on the move, desperately so.


In the Gulf of Mexico the surface temperature of the water last winter was surprisingly warm. Warm seas result in increased moisture evaporating into the atmosphere and this in turn incites the presence of more ferocious storms, carrying an increased load of moisture; what goes up must come down. Climate change is presenting the world with droughts, famines and deadly heat waves, and enabling the spread of disease carried by vectors with an increasing range.

The threats to international safety and security caused by terrorist groups disables society to a degree where destabilization is balanced by increased vigilance and time-consuming steps to counteract the potential of attacks. Nature's assumptive agency with her various elements which in unleashed fury swiftly destroys far more than human agency can even imagine save for the use of atomic weaponry, is a cause of human terror for in these extreme events there is little-to-nothing that humans can do to protect themselves.

Heavier rain interacts with higher sea levels increasing flooding -- and Houston's lack of foresight in enacting zoning laws permitting building to ensue in vulnerable areas complicates matters enormously. We see Houston's perilous decision-making reflected in areas throughout the world through inattention to vitiating nature's unpredictability in visiting chaos and cataclysmic events on an unprepared public. And we never seem to learn from such experiences.

Traffic rolls at a crawl on the northbound lanes of the Florida's Turnpike near I-75 in Wildwood   CNN

The Deadly Summer of 2015

As temperatures reached up to 49C in Karachi, Pakistan in June, reports circulated that local morgues were running out of space to accommodate the bodies of the dead. "They are piling bodies one on top of the other", Dr. Seemin Jamali a senior official at the city's largest government hospital said at the time. More than two thousand people died that month in Pakistan, most in Karachi. An even deadlier heat wave -- the fifth-deadliest ever -- swept through India in May, claiming more than 2,500 lives and melting asphalt roads. More than one hundred people died from the heat in August in Egypt, while at least 90 deaths were reported in Japan.
Nick Faris/Catherine McIntyre, National Post

This has been a hot summer. Summers do tend to be hot. Particularly around the equator. But this summer was deemed by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration to be one for the history books as the warmest year in recorded history. May, June and July among the five months qualifying as extraordinarily hot, were the warmest ever experienced, while July is considered to have been the hottest month ever across the land and ocean surfaces of the Globe.

• Ashgabat, Turkmenistan: 47.7C June 30, previous record set in 1891.
• Walla Walla, Lacrosse and Chief Joseph Dam, Washington: Three towns reached 45C in June, breaking the all-time high of 43.9C in Washington set in July 2006.
• Urumita Colombia: 42.2C the hottest day ever in Colombia on July 1, besting the 42C record set on June 27.
• Kitzingen, Germany: 40.3C July 5, hottest day ever in July for Germany, breaking previous record of 40.2C set in 2003 and 1983.
• Madrid, Spain: 39.9C on July 6, as opposed to 39.5C reached July 1995.

People, desperate to find relief from the stifling heat and humidity have tried remedies both new and old. Wherever water was to be found, people doused themselves. Young and old stayed in the shade and hurried to pools, lakes and rivers. When water shortages loomed in villages across India in May volunteers handed out pouches of buttermilk and raw onions representing an Ayurvedic Hindu medicine practise to hydrate the body.

Pakistani men rest under a bridge during a heat wave in Karachi, on June 29, 2015, Rizwan Tabbasum, AFP/
Getty Images

In Turkey at least a hundred people were reported drowned, attempting to find some relief from the oppressive heat, during a late-July, early-August heat wave. In India, the deadly heat wave destroyed over 17-million chickens leading to a steep rise in poultry prices. In Thailand, severe drought hit the world's biggest rice exporter damaging 80 percent of the country's rice farms, resulting in a 20 percent drop in yield.

Brazil is anticipating its smallest coffee crop since 2009; ten percent lower than the year before, related to two months of record-low rainfalls in the southeast where over 90 percent of Brazilian coffee beans are grown. Tanzanian farmers are uprooting their coffee trees to replace them with hardier vegetables like cabbage and onions. California's agricultural stability was hard hit by persistent hot, dry weather causing it to write off over 500,000 acres of crops.

Climate change is believed to be playing a role in the kind of extreme weather patterns seen around the world, but environmental scientists are also pointing to a brutal El Nino this year, held by many to be the real cause of the 2015 summer year of extreme heat conditions. When dwindling trade winds disrupt the flow of warm water from close to the equator to cooler parts of the ocean, the El Nino climate phenomenon kicks in

A pool of heated water is created in the Pacific, some hundred metres deep and with a wide circumference. That heated water rises into the atmosphere, in the process creating greater extremes of chaotic weather in counties closest to the equator.