Tag Archives: impact on humans

Severe

Counting Storm Shelters Along the Highway

Not long ago, during spring break, I went to Huntsville, Alabama with family on a quick getaway.  We’d had a harsh three weeks of winter conditions in an area that is unaccustomed to them, and which is certainly unaccustomed to four winter storms in about twenty days.  We were also under assorted conditions of stress from work, school, and preparation for the future.  We needed the trip, short though it would have to be.

No one in the car really wanted to drive on I-20/I-59.  That stretch of interstate between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham is incredibly nerve-wracking and dangerous, and is not something I’d recommend to any driver unless one particularly savors the thrill of bumper-to-bumper 75 mph across three to four lanes and people passing with only feet to spare.  We took the state highways instead.  Some of the drive took place on Highway 43, a winding but generally pleasant stretch of road that passes through such Alabama towns as Hamilton and Hackleburg.

It was as we approached Hackleburg that we saw the first unusual scene:  a swath of trees snapped, long denuded of leaves, bent down flush with the ground at assorted angles.  The realization hit all of us at once.

The track of the EF-5 “Hackleburg tornado” (really an extremely long-tracked tornado that began in far western Alabama and continued a little into Tennessee) paralleled Highway 43 early in its lifespan, and EF-5 damage was observed along this part of the path.  The destruction we saw was not the organized logging of a timber company.  They weren’t even the type of trees likely to be felled for commercial purposes.

It has been almost four years, and yet these downed trees still remain, a stark reminder of the violence of April 27, 2011.

We continued our drive.  As we moved into Hackleburg, we saw the first one along the road.  A heavy, inset, but otherwise unassuming rectangular door that opened into what appeared to be a small room built into a slope on the property.

“Storm cellar,” somebody remarked matter-of-factly, with no alteration of tone or pitch.  It might have been me.  I don’t recall who noticed the first one.  We were all pointing them out before the end of it.

The “Hackleburg tornado” took 72 lives in rural and small-town Alabama, scouring 132 miles with its fury.  The official survey claims that the winds were at least 210 mph.  I am convinced that they were much higher than that in places.

We talked about things we remembered about this tornado.  I was pretty sure that it had created a “situation” at the nuclear power plant in northern Alabama.  It had.

“Storm cellar.  Looks like the same kind as before.”  And indeed the second one we noticed did look like the same design as the first one.

Although they are generally acceptable for shelter in most tornadoes, I am firmly of the opinion that basements and above-ground safe rooms (even reinforced) are insufficient to guarantee safety in EF-5 tornadoes.  There have been basement fatalities before.  I particularly recall that they happened in the 2008 Parkersburg, IA EF-5 tornado.  Think about it:  If a basement is even partially above surface level, or the flooring above it is not specially reinforced, then just what exactly is to prevent an EF-5 tornado (capable of leveling a house down to a bare slab foundation) from exposing a basement and then descending into it?  If a safe room is above-ground, what is to prevent an EF-5 tornado (capable of hurling heavy metal tanks up to a mile, as happened in the 2013 Moore, OK tornado) from tossing a massive object right at it and crushing it?

“There’s another storm cellar.”  Again the same type.  Most likely the same contractor installed them.

I have some misgivings about the notion of building earthen walls around prefabricated storm shelters, particularly those plastic rooms that Southeasterners frequently saw advertised after the 2011 tornadoes.  The tornado that I drove away from that day, the EF-5 Kemper/Neshoba tornado, dug trenches into the ground 2 feet deep.  The storm shelters that we saw along Highway 43, however, appeared to have been built into natural embankments.  I hope they are sufficiently deep into the ground that they could not likely be exposed by another monster of that sort.

“Another storm cellar.”

We were all pleased to see the residents of Hackleburg being prepared.  It must have been an unimaginably traumatic event.  I didn’t even lose anything, but merely the fear/expectation that I was going to lose everything left me with a mild case of PTSD-like symptoms every time the anniversary approached.  In order to be sure of this, I would have to make the drive again with someone marking placing markers on a GPS-enabled map whenever we passed a house with a shelter, but it is even possible that these were all people who lost their homes in the 2011 tornado.  They were certainly close to the EF-5 damage path, if not directly in it.

These appeared to be homes of middle-class residents.  It should be easier for everyone to install a—

“Storm cellar.”

By then we were simply saying the words.  It was almost like another road game, such as counting cars of a particular color.  As we passed through Hackleburg proper, we couldn’t help but observe how much construction appeared to be quite new.  Even the road had a new stretch of pavement, identifiable because of its smoother surface and different, darker color from the surrounding road.  The tornado did tear up the asphalt as well.  Intense tornadoes often do that.

“Storm cellar.”

If this stretch of road is representative of the community, that says something very positive about the residents of this area.  I don’t support unfunded mandates to require private homeowners to have basements or storm shelters, because I think people should have the right to face private, personal risk as they see fit (after all, I did precisely that by choosing to hit the road to evade an EF-5 tornado, against the recommendation of the National Weather Service), but I am very glad when people do take the initiative to protect themselves and their families in this manner.  I am in favor of the “carrot” of permanent tax credits for any expenditure of this nature.

There were six homes with the same kind of earthen, in-ground storm cellar just along Highway 43 between Hamilton and Hackleburg.  I’ve never seen that many in such a small area before.  It might not even be noticed by most people, especially people who did not know that an exceptionally violent tornado had occurred in this place four years earlier.  But those of us who did have that bit of knowledge, and who still look at things outside the vehicle instead of some sort of onboard entertainment, noticed this series of doors opening to rooms in the ground.  It was a subtle indicator of something different about this area.

Trauma changes people.  What we saw that day, March 11, 2015, was proof positive that it changes communities too.

Severe

Was the Joplin Tornado the Deadliest We Can Expect?

Meteorologists and weather-watchers are bidding the year 2011 a less-than-fond farewell.  While it was certainly a banner year from the point of view of storm chasing—6 EF-5 tornadoes, 17 EF-4s, and many of them highly photogenic, as the dozens of home videos on Youtube illustrate—it was a catastrophe in terms of the human impact.  With 552 fatalities, this year is tied for the second-deadliest tornado year in the U.S.  The death toll is an order of magnitude greater than even most of the “bad years” of the 1975-2010 period.  Two events are primarily responsible for this:  the April 27 Dixie Super Outbreak, which killed over 300 people (breaking the 1974 Ohio Valley Super Outbreak’s grim record by a hair), and the Joplin, MO EF-5 tornado, with approximately 160 fatalities.

With the 2011 Super Outbreak, meteorologists are starting to work out an approximate historical return period for these large-magnitude events.  Before the 1974 event, the last comparable event occurred in 1936, with an outbreak popularly known as the Tupelo-Gainesville outbreak for the violent tornadoes that occurred in Mississippi and Georgia.  It seems that these huge events occur approximately every 35-40 years.  Obviously, a comparable event could occur next spring, but statistically, it seems that they are a 35- to 40-year event.  And, given that the 1974 Super Outbreak and 2011 Super Outbreak saw comparable death tolls, I think we can also estimate what the human toll for such an event will unfortunately be as long as the affected communities have unsuitable safety options for EF-4 and EF-5 tornadoes.

The Joplin tornado is a different beast.  We do not have a comparable modern event.  Individual tornadoes in 1953 killed over 100 people in Waco, TX and Flint, MI, but that year was something of a catalyst of public outrage, for a third tornado in Worcester, MA killed 94 people.  Public sentiment that year was essentially, “DO something so that this never happens again!”  And for 57 years, no single tornado in the U.S. did kill over 100 people.  Then… it happened again.

Was the Joplin event a worst-case scenario?  Is this the deadliest (give or take) that a single tornado can actually be now?

I think the answer to the first question is a guarded “yes,” at least for the specific case of a tornado striking a city.  The tornado was about as strong as they come; its winds were estimated to be up to 250 mph.  They can get more intense than that, but it doesn’t make a lot of difference in terms of structural damage.  The tornado rapidly intensified precisely as it entered the heavily populated regions of Joplin, and it passed right through residential and commercial shopping areas—the worst areas it could strike.  Examination of the track shows that there was also a pretty large corridor of EF-4 and EF-5 tornado damage, which would be expected for a wedge tornado.  Sometimes the area of violent damage is comparatively small, but this was not the case with this tornado.  Storm cellars were rare in this area, making survival above ground mostly a matter of good luck.  The tornado was also rain-wrapped for much of its existence.  In terms of the storm’s power and the location of impact, you can’t get much worse than this.  However, I should note that it occurred on a Sunday.  Some have argued that if it had happened at the same time of day on a work day, it could have been worse.  We don’t know for sure, and let’s hope we don’t find out.  I tend to think it probably would not have been much worse, given that residential areas (not a likely area for commuters to be stranded) and the shopping district (which probably would get more foot traffic on weekends than work-week afternoons) were such a large part of the damage zone.  In my opinion, the Joplin tornado was essentially a worst-case scenario for a tornado striking an urban area.  A comparable tornado striking an urban area probably would have a comparable human toll.

Unfortunately, the second question—is the death toll of ~160 the highest we could see for a single tornado in the modern era—has a different answer.  There are two ways that a single tornado could kill a lot more people than that.

One is the possibility of a weak, poorly-built or dilapidated high rise building taking a direct hit from a violent tornado and collapsing with a lot of people inside it.  Generally, these buildings are not supposed to collapse even in EF-5 events.  Images of collapsed high rises on hurricane landfall sites are misleading; these buildings mostly had shallow foundations and were undermined by the storm surge.  They were not blown over by wind alone, and storm surge is obviously not a factor for tornadoes.  The St. John’s Hospital building in Joplin took a direct hit from the tornado when it was at EF-4 intensity and it did not collapse.  However, a poorly-constructed or dilapidated one could.  (As an aside, one does have to wonder about the possibility of a tornado tearing up ground several feet deep, as happened in the EF-5 tornado on April 27 in central Mississippi. This could definitely undermine a slab foundation on a house, resulting in the foundation being ripped from the ground—the supposed hypothetical “F6 intensity” signature that one heard bandied about prior to the adoption of the Enhanced Fujita Scale.  However, high-rise buildings have much deeper foundations than residential homes.)

The other possibility is that of a violent tornado striking a crowded spectator event, such as a sports game, a fairground, a speedway, etc.  This possibility has been discussed at length by meteorologists such as Dr. Roger Edwards of the Storm Prediction Center.  It’s almost happened before, in fact; in 2008 an EF-2 tornado in Atlanta, GA struck the Georgia Dome while a basketball game (involving my college team) was going on.  It had gone into overtime, so people were not milling around outside.  Still, there are videos from that event of pieces of the roof collapsing and falling to the floor while the spectators were left to fend for themselves in the stands.  A stronger tornado could very easily have taken that roof off.

So yes, although the Joplin tornado was very likely a worst-case event for a tornado strike on a city, thereby representing an approximate limit on fatalities for that type of disaster, the potential exists for individual tornadoes to kill far more people than that in a different sort of disaster.  Let us hope that we can deal with the infrastructure and the safety considerations of large venues so that these greater disasters do not occur, either in 2012 or years to come.

Severe

NWA 2011: Thoughts About Tornado Warnings and the Casualty Count

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I attended the National Weather Association’s conference in Birmingham, Alabama, for two days.  Toward the end of the second day, the main focus of the talks was the terrible death count from tornadoes for 2011, and most of the speakers were coming at the problem from the perspective of social science such as psychology.  It is understandable that people would want to better understand what happened in an anomalous, outlier year such as 2011.  It is understandable that people would want to find out if the catastrophe was a result of factors that can be easily changed, and that they would even be biased toward that hypothesis.  (One presentation even mentioned the “optimism bias”—a concept that seems a bit strange to me as a natural pessimist, but I can readily see that it would exist in most people, and I would say that this is a perfect example of it.)  My intention here is not to call anyone out.  However, I think that a lot of the research is, frankly, barking up the wrong tree.  There are also some very serious flaws with some of the studies themselves.

The bulk of the research involved surveys of people from the areas that were impacted by tornadoes in 2011.  The surveys contained questions about NOAA watches and warnings (whether people received them, how they received them, whether they were understood) and people’s responses to these messages.

Here are some points I took away from the social science presentations:

  • An overwhelming majority of people in impacted areas did receive warnings.
  • A very small minority of them immediately went to shelter after receiving a warning from the first source.
  • A rather large plurality sought out additional information from TV, the Internet, or personal confirmation to determine if the tornado actually existed and would potentially affect them.  This was more likely in people with higher levels of education and in people who knew more about the weather.  (I would like to note here that this is exactly what I did when the east-central MS EF-5 tornado of April 27 was heading my way.  I did not immediately barricade myself under the stairs when I heard the warning.  I looked at radar to identify a probable debris ball signature and plotted its projected path to go right over my house.  I then grabbed my cat and got out of town.  The tornado lifted, but if it had stayed on the ground, I could have been killed as a result of following the canned advice rather than reasoning out the best course of action for myself!)
  • A minority of people chose to completely ignore a warning.
  • When asked how likely they, personally, thought it was that their area (of what radius?  I don’t recall if it was stated) would be significantly impacted as a result of bad weather mentioned in a warning, the most common answer was less than a 25% chance.  The social scientists said that they wanted people to guess a nearly 100% chance, but in fact, the scientifically and statistically correct answer was less than 5%.  Interestingly, this arguably refutes the “optimism bias” argument in that people did give a more pessimistic judgment of their risk level than was really the case, just not pessimistic enough to suit the social scientists.

The social scientists seemed to be dismayed by the fact that people were less likely to immediately dive for cover the more educated and weather-savvy that they were.  Needless to say, this is an odd message to deliver to a room full of meteorologists (many of whom actively seek out bad weather in their vehicles).  What is the point here?  “Ignorance is strength,” to quote from Orwell? Let alone that people can’t exactly become less weather-savvy, less educated, or more paranoid about the personal impact from a storm if they already know better.  This is an example of trying to close the barn door after the animals have escaped.  These things are what people do, and with the proliferation of web phones with more and more features that allow people to have access to information virtually anywhere, these behaviors are only going to become more common.  This means that they are the behaviors that must be worked with and planned for.  Trying to force people into a state of unnecessary and statistically unwarranted fear is not going to work.  Nor is it a good idea to try to bully people into not seeking out information and using cognitive reasoning.  I’m no social scientist, but I can tell you that if this is attempted, the most likely reaction is a rebellious contempt for “the government” for “trying to make us not question, not think for ourselves, and do as we’re told.”  I would be just about willing to guarantee it.  It could backfire badly.  People ultimately have to be responsible for their own decisions.

Furthermore, there was absolutely no evidence given that people who sought out more information first were more likely to be injured or die in an event, and obviously the survey methodology required interviewing people who did not die.  Knowledge about what the people who died did must come from people who were with them and survived.  However, I never even saw that there was a distinction made between the group of people who were in the path of the tornado and were uninjured or had only minor injuries, and those who were severely hurt or killed.  It would have been useful to find out if the people who were severely harmed did anything differently from those who were more or less okay.  Given that at least one of the surveys was conducted via e-mail shortly after the event in question (the Tuscaloosa tornado), I would expect that there would be very few people who were severely injured who even participated in it, because they would have been in the hospital.  In effect, the social scientists gathered statistics about a control group and presented it as though it represented the experimental group.  In this situation, the statistics about behavior patterns following a warning mean nothing in themselves.  There is nothing (survival/non-survival, minor/major injury) to correlate them to.  Implying that these behaviors caused the death toll to explode is unsupported speculation.  The one survey I saw that definitely interviewed people who had lost loved ones or who were severely injured was conducted in Smithville, MS, and these authors did not make any wild inferences about how seeking out additional information had led to the deaths.  There is simply no data support for it.  The only situation where it might make a difference is when the lead time is basically zero and every second counts, which was not the case in the April 27 tornadoes or the Joplin tornado.  (I had a lead time of about 25 minutes, which was enough for me to get my cat and laptop and go 18 miles away.)

There was one data omission that is, in my perspective, more important than any behavioral survey.  One table that I did not see in any of the social science presentation was this one:

F Scale Killer Tor Fatalities
F0 1 1
F1 3 4
F2 15 24
F3 23 76
F4 13 160
F5 6 282
F? 0 0
TOTAL 61 547

(Credit to the Storm Prediction Center: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/torn/fataltorn.html)

That is, 95% of all tornadic deaths this year occurred in EF-3 or higher tornadoes, which will destroy most or all walls in a house.  EF-5 tornadoes can even expose the basement and descend into it (it is a myth that the funnel would magically stop at the ground level if an open hole existed for it to twist into), sucking people to their deaths.  And it gets even more significant when you dig deeper into the data.  A look at the list at the top of that page shows that only 4 of the deaths from EF-2 or weaker tornadoes occurred in permanent houses.  I don’t know exactly what happened there, but it could have been extremely bad luck such as a tree falling on the house, a piece of heavy furniture, or a piece of timber causing injury.  It could have been a weak structure.  The point is, this is very rare.  The rest of the deaths in EF-2 and weaker tornadoes were in trailers, vehicles, outdoors (all highly dangerous places to be in a tornado) or were unknown.

I respect the research into this year’s terrible tornado casualty count.  It is important to determine exactly why this occurred, and one question that did need to be answered was whether it happened because of bad decisions.  This is the question that the social scientists have attempted to answer.  I simply disagree very strongly with their apparent conclusions, as I think they are unwarranted by the questionable research methodologies, and are little more than speculation.  My contention is that the catastrophic death toll is directly attributable to major, violent tornadoes, the kind that obliterate entire homes, happening to occur in a lot of populated areas this year.  In short, it was a statistical outlier year.  This classification does not address the underlying structural problem of the Southeast, which is that effective storm shelter is not commonly available for the most violent events, but that’s not an easy problem to resolve.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, it is this hard problem, rather than comparatively easy ones regarding bad decisions, that must be answered if this type of death toll is to be prevented from ever happening again.

Climate change

+6°C

Forget the brouhaha about the ideologically motivated hackers who combed through megabytes of e-mails in order to find some indicating that, horrors, scientists are humans too and some of them will jazz up their data to make a point. It means nothing in terms of the credibility of anthropogenic climate change. All that the climate deniers have proven is that their “position” is utterly bankrupt. In the language of the Internet, the hacking stunt was a fail. Hoping to find proof of a grand conspiracy to falsify data in favor of global climate change, their hackers simply uncovered a few e-mails in which a few scientists spoke about manipulating the presentation of the data that they had found. No secret coverups, no collective lying about what is contained in the data, no forged results, just a mere matter of data presentation. The data themselves are what’s really the issue. Considering how lackadaisical that the politicians of the world have been on this subject, and considering what their stalling seems to have done, I can’t say I’m against jazzing up the data to scare people.

A scientific study group led by British scientists has run the climate models again, and the group has found that we are on target for a global rise in temperature of 6°C by the year 2100. This is the worst-case scenario of the 2007 United Nations report on climate change, which even then was widely seen as being far too conservative. The odds are very strong that I wouldn’t live to see it, since I’d be 117 if I did, but the children and definitely grandchildren of my generation would see it.

This is not quite a repeat of the carbon- and methane-caused temperature spike that caused the massive Permian extinction and resulted in the loss of 95% of all species on Earth. It’s not quite the catastrophic mass extinction scenario of the Pixar movie WALL-E. (Yes, the real environmental damage portrayed in that film was caused by global warming, not just garbage.) But it’s close, and it isn’t an isolated result. For several years now, scientific studies of climate have been finding that the observed conditions are on the upper end of the range of predicted results for that period of time, or even exceed all estimates outright. Those people who have paid attention to global warming news probably saw this British result coming.

Life on Earth at +6°C would not be a pleasant affair, even if the description of it in The Independent is a bit sensationalized. The Gulf Stream Current of the Atlantic would have shut down, plunging Europe into coldness (and probably also much of the Atlantic coast) and cutting off the outward flow of hot water from the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Without a source of outflow for this tropical heat, hurricanes like Katrina could be brewed up in the Gulf every month in every hurricane season, theoretically. Tropical diseases and invasive species would have an easier time of spreading past their appropriate ranges. The Arctic ice would long ago have melted—indeed, the summer ice is very close to disappearing now, and mainstream scientific consensus is that it is too late to prevent this particular loss—and the resulting changes in air masses would have a profound impact on Northern Hemisphere climates. At 6°C, the Antarctic Ice Shelf likely would have melted as well, along with Greenland, resulting in the submerging of areas like the Florida peninsula and the marshes of Louisiana.

But even so, what the West will face in this brave new nightmare world is mild in comparison with what is coming Africa and Asia’s way. Africa, already suffering from critical food and disease problems, would see both exacerbated. The melting of glaciers and the sea-level-driven flooding would be climatic bombs dropped on east Asia. Imagine a scenario in which the ice of the Himalaya mountains—a source of fresh water for India, China, and Pakistan—melted away. Then add to that the seawater flooding of the Ganges, Yangtze, and other river basins in Asia that have port cities housing millions of people. Those people have to go somewhere, but resources would already be strained because of the decrease in usable fresh water. China, India, and Pakistan are all nuclear powers. (It suddenly makes “Global Zero,” a full nuclear disarmament movement, sound not at all hippie-idealistic, but critical.) Even the Bush-era Pentagon produced a report about the geopolitical effects of catastrophic global climate change, and its conclusions were chilling. It predicted a global resource war.

What scientist in his or her right mind would want to fabricate data to support such a horrific situation? The only people who enjoy dreaming of things like this are people like the scriptwriters for 2012. People who actually do deal in fantasy. Of course the stupid hackers did not find anything real. It is indicative of the level of media discourse in America that, to the extent that either news story is being discussed at all, their failed stunt garnered more attention than the scientific study of the Global Carbon Project. But the Global Carbon Project’s results are far more important.

I’ve said it before and I will reiterate it in the face of this ugly report. I do not believe that energy efficiency and conservation will be enough to forestall this. I am absolutely in favor of moving in that direction, if for no other reason than because it is cheaper in the long run and it is not advisable to power a world economy on fuels that will someday run out. However, I am utterly convinced that we will need to develop geoengineering techniques that can remove the greenhouse gases that we have already put into the atmosphere. Technology created this problem, yes, but it is a fallacy to extrapolate from this that technology must be avoided in finding a solution. In fact, I think that the judicious use of technology to clean up the atmosphere is the real solution.

Severe

Thoughts on Mobile Homes: A Problem with No Solution?

Yesterday and today an early-season severe weather outbreak occurred in the Central and Eastern U.S. The outbreak produced comparatively few tornadoes, but under the right conditions, it takes only one to do catastrophic damage—and that is exactly what happened when an EF4 struck the community of Lone Grove, Oklahoma.

EF4 and EF5 tornadoes are classified as “violent,” and they are known for flattening “fixed” buildings. The main difference is that EF4s blow houses down and EF5s blow them away. Obviously, in these tornadoes, survival above ground in ordinary buildings is not something that can be counted on. (Sometimes, in fact, survival in basements is not guaranteed, such as in the Parkersburg, IA EF5 tornado that struck in May of 2008. It ripped houses from their foundations and filled the exposed basements with debris.) But a mobile home is absolutely the worst place that one could be. It’s not any better than being in the open outdoors in EF3 and higher events. And, indeed, most of the fatalities associated with yesterday’s tornado occurred in a trailer park.

This is really no surprise. These structures are death traps in severe weather. Last year, 56 of 123 tornado-related deaths occurred in mobile homes. Continue reading Thoughts on Mobile Homes: A Problem with No Solution? →

Climate change

Global Warming Would Drown the Coastal Hurricane Defenses

The barrier islands of the Gulf Coast are an important defense against hurricanes. Mostly uninhabited, they are the first landforms that a Gulf Coast hurricane strikes. While they do not weaken the hurricanes (they aren’t large enough), the islands take the brunt of the hurricane’s storm surge, diffusing it somewhat before the eye makes landfall on the mainland. They are also an important defense against tsunami, a real (if little-known) threat. Significant seismic activity has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico fairly recently.

Global warming is predicted to melt part of Greenland and/or West Antarctica, raising sea levels worldwide up to 20 feet (more if all of Greenland and some of West Antarctica melted). This would have horrific consequences on coastal cities around the globe, of course. This blog, however, will focus on one specific area — the United States Gulf Coast. (Ha, doesn’t it always?)

If global warming raised sea levels as predicted, most of low-lying Louisiana — as well as the critical barrier islands — would be underwater. The low-lying swampland of Louisiana, which has been receding for years now, is another natural barrier for the coast, as well as an environmental treasure. It too would be covered in water.

The coastline would lose its natural defenses against hurricanes.

And, as research is indicating, global warming would also intensify the hurricanes themselves.
The EPA produced a series of pictures showing the coastal areas that are most at risk from global warming-induced inundation. Red indicates areas that are less than 1.5 meters above sea level. The images can be clicked on to show a larger view.

Here is an image of Louisiana and Texas:

And here’s one of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida:

It’s hard to see on these maps, but the barrier islands are the thin trail of red south of the main coastline. They would be underwater.

More disturbingly, from the National Environmental Trust, here is a QuickTime movie of how Biloxi, MS (and its barrier island) would be affected by a rise in sea level. (WARNING for dial-up users: 3 MB file!) I’ve linked to the movie from this graphic I’ve made showing how the coastline would be inundated.

The barrier island protecting the city would no longer exist. Sure, the projection of the land would still exist underwater, and would serve to slightly lessen the impact of a storm surge, but it isn’t at all the same as having a true island above the sea. A dry, projecting landmass stops the flow of water, at least temporarily, and breaks the waves. A former island that has gone underwater obviously doesn’t keep the water from flowing.

Also, as you can clearly see, the city itself would be partially underwater. This includes the glitzy new development that is taking place on this part of the coast in response to Hurricane Katrina — very shortsightedly, I ought to add. Whether this is because of the government of Haley Barbour, who is very likely a global warming skeptic, or because the businesses are aware of the risk but decided to hedge their bets, I do not know.

The Katrina recovery and rebuilding process is not taking global warming into account at all. When the next really bad hurricane strikes, its impact could be compounded by the effects of global warming. The coast will be farther inland due to rising waters, there will be fewer natural barriers, and the hurricane itself is likely to be stronger and wetter than it would be without global warming. And, as unfortunate as it is for me to say this, at this point it’s not enough to simply drive less, replace incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent, cross our fingers, and hope that we’ve stopped the problem.

I absolutely support cutting carbon emissions. If we don’t, the consequences will be even more horrendous than the scientists are daring to predict right now. But we’ve reached a point where it would be nothing short of grossly irresponsible to fail to look into preparation for the potentially disastrous changes that we have brought upon ourselves.