Smart hurricane fixes are not climate fixes

This is what global warming looks like, opinion pieces quickly declared in Politico and CNN about devastating Hurricane Harvey. A week later, news media and politicians said the same thing about Hurricane Irma.

Jumping the gun on linking disasters to climate change is dangerous. It points us toward policies that will have little to no impact on future devastation.

The science is clear but also nuanced: Climate change will worsen some extreme weather events, and it will improve others.

An excellent peer-reviewed analysis in the journal Weather, Climate and Society by University of Manchester scientists Vladimir Janković and David Schultz cites the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations’ global panel of climate change experts, and finds, “Not all extreme weather events will change, nor will some of the changes ... be detectable.”

The researchers conclude, “The sound bite of ‘climate change means more extreme weather’ is a massive oversimplification ... of the science.”

Heat waves will increase, but cold waves will decrease. Because many more people die from excessive cold than excessive heat, it is likely that the amount of deaths will decline.

As for hurricanes such as Harvey and Irma: Before Harvey, the USA just ended a record 12-year absence of strong hurricanes. Hurricanes are not hitting the U.S. more — over the past 120 years, major hurricane landfalls have declined from 7.5 per decade to five per decade.

Storms are causing more damage, but this is entirely explained by more people with more wealth living closer to coasts.

Today more people live in Florida’s Dade and Broward counties alone, than lived in all 109 coastal counties from Texas through Virginia in 1930. With more people living in more expensive homes, there are higher damage costs. But adjusted for population and wealth, hurricane damage from

1900-2016 actually decreased. The problem with blaming a disaster such as Harvey or Irma on global warming is that this tells us the answer should be a global warming answer: carbon cuts. That won’t help.

Research shows that the Kyoto Protocol, the first major global deal to cut carbon and rein in temperatures (and, it would follow, help prevent hurricanes) failed to achieve a thing. The Paris climate treaty is on track to cost the globe about $1 trillion to

$2 trillion per year for the rest of the century. That is an infuriatingly bad investment. It is little wonder that a Royal Society report concludes that cutting CO2 has “extremely limited potential to reduce future losses.”

Effectively tackling hurricane damage in rich countries is almost exclusively about reducing vulnerability, through better zoning (stop building on flood plains and coasts), better building codes, reducing federally subsidized insurance, and allowing for more wetlands to handle flooding. For the world’s poor, policies that reduce poverty are the most effective way of building resilience.

This is what responding to hurricanes needs to look like.

Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.