The recovery efforts from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria are barely underway, and it will be years before the full extent of the damage caused by four major hurricanes to make landfall in one season is known. However, we can already begin to see how severe the effects can be when two category 4 and two category 5 Hurricanes make landfall in quick succession:
The last time the northern Leeward Islands experienced two major hurricanes in the same season was 1899, and now it is looking at three in the same month.
Residents of some islands barely had time to assess the wreckage of a Category 5 hurricane before another bore down on them. Others fled their homes to escape Irma, only to find themselves in the cross hairs of Maria.
A full reckoning of 2017’s place in hurricane history will not be possible until the season ends on Nov. 30, but there are a few things we can say with reasonable confidence:
It will almost certainly be the most expensive season on record in the United States. That distinction, like most others, currently belongs to 2005, when Katrina and three other major hurricanes caused more than $143.5 billion of damage in the country. But this year, AccuWeather estimated that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma might cost a combined $290 billion: two storms producing double the economic damage of four in 2005.
The devastation caused by these storms, and the suffering that continues, especially in Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, as well as several Caribbean islands, including Dominica and Barbuda, is overwhelming. Some communities may take decades to recover, some might never recover.
It is difficult to imagine how, in the face of such a widespread humanitarian catastrophe, things can get worse.
But they will get worse, very soon, and for a long time.
Writing for Carbon Brief, Daisy Dunne summarizes the work of Dr. Andra Garner of Rutgers University, whose work focuses on the effect of rising temperatures and sea levels on catastrophic flooding, like that caused by Hurricane Sandy, and shows how such events will become a regular occurrence over the next hundred years:
… sea level rise is likely to affect the size of future storm surges… Gardner says:
“The bad news is that when sea level rise is added into the picture, it becomes clear that overall flood heights will become drastically worse in New York City in coming years.”…
The results suggest that, under the high emissions scenario, sea levels close to New York are likely to rise by 0.55-1.4m between 2010 and 2100. If the possible effects of Antarctic ice melt are considered, sea levels could rise by 0.88-2.5m by 2100.
The researchers combined their measurements of projected sea level rise and projected storm surge heights in order to estimate the total height of floods in New York in the coming decades.
The results show that flood heights in New York from 2080 to 2100 could be 1.4m above the average flood heights witnessed from 1970 to 2005, when an average is taken from all the scenarios of future sea level rise.
Imagine storms hitting the east coast every five years (or more frequently), which cause greater damage than Hurricane Sandy:
Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey on October 29, 2012. It did $71.5 billion in economic damage, according to the National Hurricane Center. It had been a Category 3 storm, but downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it made landfall. (Source: "The Thirty Costliest U.S. Tropical Cyclones," Not adjusted for inflation. NOAA Technical Memorandum, August 2013.)
The storm damaged or destroyed at least 650,000 homes, and 8 million customers lost power.
The time frame for such events is right now— between 2010 and 2100. And Dr. Garner’s models may underestimate the severity of storm effects:
The study is “very useful” says Prof Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who was not involved in the study, but it doesn’t include “some things of importance” such as the added impact of high tides and the risk of mid-latitude storms…
… he tells Carbon Brief:
“The paper assesses coastal flood risk over the next three centuries, but these risks depend hugely on scenarios as to how factors such as emissions and population size change. This makes me quite uncomfortable: the assumptions are huge and understated.”
It’s also worth noting that other nearby cities, such as Hoboken in New Jersey, are “every bit or more vulnerable” than New York City, Trenberth adds. (emphasis added)
We know the culprits in all of this: carbon combustion, and the GOP, which perpetuates outright falsehoods in the service of the carbon profiteers they serve:
While the scientific consensus has remained unchanged, the industry-funded fake news of climate denial has not. In the 1990s, Republicans told us the earth wasn’t warming at all. In the 2000s, after a decade of record-high temperatures, they said that the warming was just a regular fluctuation, nothing to do with us. In the 2010s, faced with irrefutable graphs correlating unprecedented CO2 output and unprecedented global warming, they’ve said that, well, maybe some of the warming is due to us, but not all of it, and we’ll be okay, and, look over here, covfefe, ha ha ha.
Notice that I’ve said “Republicans”—not Trump. While the Trump administration has indeed been unprecedented in its attack on scientists, journalists, criminologists, and anyone else who tells inconvenient truths that the president doesn’t want to hear, it has behaved more like a traditional Republican administration when it comes to climate change.
Since the causes are known, every life lost is attributable to efforts— spanning decades-- to delay action on carbon combustion; accordingly, there is another term to apply to the GOP: murderers.