- Sep 13, 2002
- 94,289
- 191,202
- 113
The science is in, and we are effed.
In the past seventy years, the United States has averaged three land-falling storms a year; Ida is the seventeenth in the past two years.
Amid the torrent of news reports and Webcam photos and anguished GoFundMe appeals, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this calamity is the predictable result of simple physics. Hurricanes, as Emanuel pointed out, draw their power from heat in the ocean.
If there’s more heat, the hurricane can get stronger. Physics. Warm air can hold more water than cold air can. So in warm, arid areas you get more evaporation, and hence more drought, and hence more fire. Physics.
The water that’s been evaporated into the atmosphere comes down: more flooding rainfall. Physics.
The earth runs on energy. We’re trapping more of it near the planet’s surface because of the carbon dioxide that comes from burning coal and gas and oil. That energy expresses itself in melting ice sheets, in rising seas, in the incomprehensible roar of the wind as a giant storm crashes into a city of steel and glass. It’s not, in the end, all that complicated.
In the past seventy years, the United States has averaged three land-falling storms a year; Ida is the seventeenth in the past two years.
Amid the torrent of news reports and Webcam photos and anguished GoFundMe appeals, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this calamity is the predictable result of simple physics. Hurricanes, as Emanuel pointed out, draw their power from heat in the ocean.
If there’s more heat, the hurricane can get stronger. Physics. Warm air can hold more water than cold air can. So in warm, arid areas you get more evaporation, and hence more drought, and hence more fire. Physics.
The water that’s been evaporated into the atmosphere comes down: more flooding rainfall. Physics.
The earth runs on energy. We’re trapping more of it near the planet’s surface because of the carbon dioxide that comes from burning coal and gas and oil. That energy expresses itself in melting ice sheets, in rising seas, in the incomprehensible roar of the wind as a giant storm crashes into a city of steel and glass. It’s not, in the end, all that complicated.
Hurricane Ida Proves That We Need to Step Up the Political Fight on Climate Change
It’s past time to take the planet’s limits seriously.
www.newyorker.com