To the Editor:
It is certainly true that "the link between man-made warming and hurricane activity is unclear."
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2012 that a relationship between global warming and hurricanes has not been demonstrated. In their September 2013 assessment report, they had only "low confidence" that damaging increases will occur in tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) due to global warming.
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change** report, also released in September, asserted "in no case has a convincing relationship been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in any of these extreme events."
While Typhoon Haiyan was certainly tragic, the number of tropical cyclones making landfall in the Philippines has not changed in over a century. Globally, we are near a 30 year low in worldwide Accumulated Cyclone Energy, a measure of total cyclone activity.
Tropical cyclones will happen occasionally no matter what we do. So, instead of wasting money trying to stop them, we must adapt to them by burying electrical cables underground and reinforcing buildings and other infrastructure. Thousands of people died in the Philippines because their storm shelters collapsed. A similar typhoon hit Queensland, Australia in 2011 and not a single person died because their shelters were much stronger.
At the UN climate conference now underway, adaptation takes a distant second place to trying to stop what might happen decades from now. Of the $1 billion/day spent on climate finance across the world, only six per cent of it goes to adaptation, effectively assigning more value to the lives of people yet to be born than those suffering today. Our representatives should tell conference delegates that this approach is immoral and must be changed.
Tom Harris, Ottawa, ON.
