http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-sarewitz23sep23,0,50959.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
Managing the next disaster
By Roger A. Pielke Jr. and Daniel Sarewitz
September 23, 2005
LIKE A BAD horror movie in
which the villain keeps coming back, Hurricane Rita, the 18th storm of
the season, is spinning toward an inevitable rendezvous with the Gulf
Coast. We've already seen more death and destruction than the last 35
hurricane seasons combined. And many people, including some European
and U.S. politicians, are hoping that the carnage — represented most
poignantly by the destruction in New Orleans — will help bring this
country to its senses on dealing with global warming.
But understanding what this hurricane season is really telling us about
why we're so vulnerable to climate-related catastrophes means facing up
to an unavoidable fact: Efforts to slow global warming will have no
discernible effect on hurricanes for the foreseeable future. Reducing
greenhouse gas emissions and adequately preparing for future disasters
are essentially separate problems.
Reducing emissions is a
crucial environmental, economic and geopolitical goal. But if we are
concerned about hurricanes, then we need to manage what is within our
control on the ground, not what is proving to be beyond our control in
the atmosphere.
The truth is, the number and scale of disasters
worldwide has been rising rapidly in recent decades because of changes
in society, not global warming. In the case of hurricanes, the
continuing development and urbanization of coastal regions around the
world accounts for all of the increases in economic and human losses
that we have experienced.
Even if tomorrow we could somehow
magically put an end to global warming, the frequency and magnitude of
climate-related disasters would continue to rise unabated into the
indefinite future as more people inhabit vulnerable locations around
the world. Our research suggests that for every $1 of future hurricane
damage that scientists expect in 2050 related to climate change, we
should expect an additional $22 to $60 in damage resulting from putting
more people and property in harm's way.
None of this means that
we should not pursue reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or that
mitigating climate change is a bad idea. But we simply cannot expect to
control the climate's behavior through energy policies aimed at
lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
The current international
policy framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — the Kyoto
Protocol — is far too modest to have any meaningful effect on the
behavior of the climate system. And even the modest agreements reached
under Kyoto are failing.
For example, the European
Environment Agency reported in 2004 that 11 of the 15 European Union
signatories to Kyoto "are heading toward overshooting their emission
targets, some by a substantial margin." And the other four are meeting
their targets only because of non-repeatable circumstances, such as
Britain's long-term move away from coal-based energy generation. To
make matters much worse, most of the growth in emissions in coming
decades will occur in rapidly industrializing nations such as China and
India, which are exempt from Kyoto targets.
To make matters
still worse, because of the way that greenhouse gases behave in the
atmosphere, even emissions reductions far more rapid and radical than
those mandated under Kyoto would have little or no effect on the
behavior of the climate for decades. As James Hurrell, a scientist at
the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, testified before the
U.S. Senate in July, "It should be recognized that [emissions
reductions actions] taken now mainly have benefits 50 years and beyond
now."
The implications are clear: More
storms like Katrina are inevitable. And the effects of future Katrinas
and Ritas will be determined not by our efforts to manage changes in
the climate but by the decisions we make now about where and how to
build and rebuild in vulnerable locations.
Do we have the will
to pay the upfront economic and political costs of strict building-code
enforcement and prudent land-use restrictions? Will we have the
imagination to build resilience into the local economy, rewarding
companies that find ways to preserve jobs after a disaster and
contribute to a faster recovery? Do we have the decency to counter the
market forces that cause poor people to live in the most vulnerable
areas?
As we learn the lessons of this terrible hurricane
season, the answers we give to these kinds of questions will create the
conditions that determine the effects of future hurricanes. We are,
that is, about to begin the process of managing the next disaster. What
kind of disaster do we want it to be?
ROGER
A. PIELKE JR. is director of the Center for Science and Technology
Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. DANIEL SAREWITZ
is director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at
Arizona State University.
