Why pets help us to get through hurricanes
It looks like the end of the world: videos of waves washing over whole towns, taking upturned cars and palm trees with them. Just one week after Hurricane Harvey swept the state of Texas, three more – Jose, Katya, and Irma – are tearing across the Atlantic. Scientists blame global warming, saying rising sea temperatures have made naturally occurring weather events more powerful. So is this the beginning of a new era of apocalyptic storms?
It’s true hurricanes seem to be getting worse. The average number of category 4 plus storms per year has more than doubled since 1900, and their wind speed has increased. Floods such as those caused by Harvey are supposed to strike any one area only every 500 years; Houston has seen three in three years.
Yet even as hurricanes get bigger, they are growing less lethal. Global death rates from extreme weather have dropped by 98 per cent since the 1920s, and by two thirds in the past three decades. This is, in part, because richer countries have fewer weather deaths and the whole world is getting richer. But we are also getting far better at dealing with hurricanes.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, killing almost 2,000 people, it shocked the US political system. Since then, weather forecasters have narrowed their range of error when predicting hurricane paths from 110 nautical miles to 65 and increased warning times by 12 hours. Before Katrina the US federal government covered just 17 per cent of relief costs on average; since Katrina, it has covered 62 per cent.
Evacuation procedure has also improved. New Orleans residents were ordered to leave just one day before the storm, trapping thousands on gridlocked roads. This time, Houston told people to stay in their homes or go to nearby shelters. These are a world away from the Superdome football stadium where Katrina refugees were trapped in burning heat without enough food or water. Most shelters even admit animals. Why? Some 44 per cent of those who refused to flee Katrina did so because they didn’t want to leave their pets behind, so today disaster planners are obliged to provide for them.
Even so, won’t the storms keep getting worse? President Donald Trump’s climate change scepticism is alarming. But it isn’t all up to him. The price of green energy is plummeting, with solar and wind now cheaper than fossil fuels in more than 30 countries. Meanwhile, manufacturers are planning for the end of petrol cars. Annual carbon emissions have actually stabilised; the UK’S are now the lowest since 1894 and the US hit its peak in 2005. Of course that’s just a start, and they need to drop further. But even if governments dither, the private sector is sure that the future is in renewables. That should give us some hope of avoiding or minimising what the scientist James Hansen called “the storms of my grandchildren”.