The Right Number of Hurricanes
By: Philip Backman
Tags: Energy, Weather, Climate

Hurricanes on the Horizon

A year ago, I attended a lecture hosted by my University’s engineering department. The speaker was Dr. David Novog, who according to his biography is “an internationally recognized researcher and engineer with 25 years of experience in academia and industry, and holds an Industrial Research Chair in Nuclear Safety.” Further literature provided before the talk expands on Dr. Novog’s activities: “An emerging area of research in Dr. Novog’s group examines the vital role of large and small modular reactors (SMRs) in reducing humankind’s CO2 footprint and he is the Principal Investigator for the federally funded Small Modular Advanced Reactor Training (SMART) program.”

“The Grand Energy Challenge: An uncertain future and how nuclear energy can give us hope” was the title of his talk, and as an an advocate of nuclear power I looked forward to hearing his thoughts on the topic.

Near the beginning of Dr. Novog’s talk he presented a PowerPoint slide containing 4 images. Thinking back to that evening, I can picture three of the four: a hurricane, a forest fire, and a lake suffering a drought condition. I would later learn that the pictures provided motivation: if humanity did not move away from carbon dioxide emitting fossil fuels and adopt alternatives (such as nuclear) our world would witness storms of greater severity and frequency, forest fires of increased intensity, and a greater occurrence of lands suffering from drought.

After Dr. Novog completed his presentation I was keen to ask a question. The auditorium was filled with young engineers, just beginning to gather the tools for an upcoming career, and I wanted Dr. Novog to clarify something for them and myself. For anyone considering the profession of environmental engineering and, I asked, interested in reducing the severity and frequency of storms, and decreasing forest fire intensity, and reducing drought, how will they know when the problem is solved? I was not being facetious and clarified further. I wanted to know — given the current consensus purporting that anthropogenic C02 emissions are a major driver of these modern weather and weather related extreme events — what exactly is the right amount and severity of storms such as hurricanes? What is the right number of forest fires and what is the proper occurrence of drought? I felt it important that if one is going to tackle this problem of terrible man-made weather, the establishment of some metric of success would be needed.

Disappointingly, my question was not answered: Dr. Novog only acknowledged that events such as hurricanes, forest fires, and drought are getting worse. Implying strongly, it seemed, that these worsening conditions are the fault of mankind’s choice of fuel energy, and only will the environment return to “normal” once there is a retreat from the use of harmful CO2 emitters.

I do not consider it a leap of scientific deduction to conclude that Earth has experienced — from near its beginning I would assume — much in the way of weather and climate. Almost with certainty hurricanes, forest fires, and drought predate mankind and must — with even greater confidence — predate the industrial revolution where the burning of fossil fossils expanded rapidly. If we extend Dr. Novog’s thinking, are we to assume that the quality and quantity of weather events occurring before the 18th century industrial growth represent what is acceptable and that this is to be the baseline where, for success, we must return to today? It must be. I cannot imagine that any realistic measure of success could be more radical — it could not be, for instance, an expectation of complete elimination of hurricanes, forest fires, and drought.

This connection of individual weather events to mankind’s fossil fuel use raises many questions not easily answered.

For the hurricane that forms today how can we determine if it is man-made or natural, or some combination of the two? Do we proclaim it — at the end of its life — at least partially man-made only if it exceeds a certain level of destruction and death? If so, what is the appropriate threshold of destruction and death dividing the purely natural from the partially unnatural? If man-made (just a bit), then, do we conclude it an unacceptable storm, where the only solution lies in the elimination of the internal combustion engine, the oil or coal burning electric plant, and the charcoal briquette?

If a hurricane, by some measure, should be concluded as purely natural in origin — the type encountered had you lived 500 years ago — yet also results in destruction and death, how do we respond? Are such hurricanes free to roam about, but man-made ones stopped at the expense of the collapse of the fossil fuel industry and our modern energetic lifestyles? Are deaths from natural hurricanes acceptable while deaths from those man-made unacceptable? If fossil fuel use determines man-made hurricanes, should we determine the genesis of natural hurricanes and eliminate that cause too?

Applying destruction and death as the measure separating natural from man-made has a serious limitation — seems only after the event occurred is a storm’s causal origins determinable. Much better if we know such a fact aprior. However, if our reactionary steps are to be dependent on a storm’s genesis (man-made — reduce fossil fuel use, natural — ?) what is the pre-event data needed to support a properly informed decision? And about this data, what facts are needed and will collecting it be difficult? Curiously, if a storm is classified as man-made and blamed on fossil fuel burning, I wonder how many years earlier would the burning have had to stop, or to what extent reduced by, for that storm not to have formed? How could we ever answer such a question!

It becomes a bewildering conversation that grows ever more complicated.

Consider this. If specific weather events are getting worse, and we need a return to the “right” level of severity, do we have the accurate statistical records from 250 years ago (or more) clearly documenting worldwide hurricanes and fires and droughts of that pre-industrial age? We need such data, do we not, if our young environmental engineers are to have a target — a bullseye of success — to aim for?

Without knowing this baseline, we face a daunting problem: what tempers us from concluding — potentially endlessly — a direct link between fossil fuel use and individual weather events ascribed arbitrarily as “extreme?” If a clear dichotomy between normal (i.e. absent human contribution) and extreme does not exist — and what a challenge it will be establishing such a line — how are we to rationally pick our appropriate reaction? Lack of clarity on this question is evident today from these two examples: the two consecutive years of flooding along the Saint John river in New Brunswick and a recent airliner flight where passengers sustained injuries resulting from atmospheric turbulence. Whether true or not, for both events a connection was made to anthropogenic caused climate change. Given the intractable job of determining a cause, sadly it seems the temptation will continue to blame fossil fuel use for any destructive storm or fire or drought or related event that feels like it deviates from a “normal” that is held in our ephemeral memories.

Given that rivers have flooded over their banks for eons and the sun has been mixing the atmosphere for even longer we may face, at times, unpleasant earthy environments with or without fossil fuels. For this reason, it would be unfortunate if, in lieu of an understanding of what is natural and what is man-made, we erroneously react to this uncertainty and accept a fanciful believe in a climate utopia only after the last fossil fuel is burned by a human being.

And lastly, it is not beyond reason to think that our modern scientific society — powered to a great degree by fossil fuels — could imagine and develop technological solutions aimed at mitigating the detrimental impact from all storms, whether natural or man-made. Alas, to a large degree this is already true.