Foresight in the Age of the Storm
By Jamais Cascio of WorldChanging.com
In the age of climate disruption, clear-eyed foresight is a necessity -- but hurricane Katrina was a reminder that foresight means more than imagining the worst and preparing for it.
Katrina came as a surprise to few of its victims. The storm, which had been just a Category 1 when it crossed Florida, grew stronger over the warm ocean as it drew towards the Gulf Coast; in the age of real time satellites and doppler radar, residents of the region had ample warning that danger was coming. Nor was Katrina's arrival a surprise to meteorologists at the National Weather Service, who had "earlier this month"http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2484.htm predicted that this hurricane season would be a strong one. Katrina's strength was certainly no surprise to climate scientists such as Kerry Emanuel or Kevin Trenberth, each of whom had published recent articles in top-notch journals arguing that greater hurricane intensity is the inevitable effect of global warming.
No, climate foresight means recognizing the signs that the game has changed, and that simply doing more of the same, but better, won't suffice.
It means, for example, that the reconstruction of New Orleans and the other devastated Gulf Coast cities has to take into account more than "what if this happens again in the next 50 years?" -type questions. The real question needs to be, "what if this starts happening every decade?" What kinds of changes to building codes would be required if buildings are to regularly withstand 165+ mile per hour winds? What kinds of changes to zoning regulations are needed when flood plains are the hardest-hit areas over and over again? What kinds of changes to building density and construction materials have to happen to allow for better runoff during rain storms that happen with tropical intensity and troubling frequency?
On that last point, there's a telling moment early in this video (WMV), taken yesterday from a news helicopter over New Orleans after Katrina had passed through. In the midst of the survey -- showing drowned buildings as far as the eye can see, toppled structures, sunken communities, and even fires -- one of the newscasters makes a frustrated point, saying that the last time a big hurricane hit the area, large green areas could absorb much of the rain and flood in the soil and plants, allowing less of it to overrun the built-up zones. Now those green spaces are gone, covered over by development and concrete, so the water has nowhere to go.
We have at our disposal enormously powerful tools for telling us what might and likely will happen with our climate and weather. Although refining and improving those tools will be of great value, what we really need to do is to use those insights into the changing nature of, well, nature in order to change our own behaviors. We need better tools for alerting people to imminent danger, for making certain that evacuations cover everyone (many of those who stayed behind did so because they simply couldn't afford to evacuate), for assessing the risk to buildings and infrastructure.
Over the coming days, and weeks, and months, we will learn the scale of the damage (Katrina is already estimated to be one of the costliest storms on record) and lessons in how to respond better to disasters of this magnitude. Recovery from the December tsunami will inform the process of recovery from Katrina; rebuilding after this hurricane will, in turn, inform the efforts of subsequent storms and natural disasters. But the real lesson we need to be learning -- the real goal of foresight -- is how to prepare ourselves for disasters we know are coming. We need to know how to minimize our losses (of life, of property, of hope) before they happen, not just how to rebuild after they are gone.
This article is republished from WorldChanging.com:
Foresight in the Age of the Storm
