SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Witnesses to Cyclone Yasi’s destructive tear across northeastern Australia described it as a monster for its size and ferocity.
It was also an omen.
Climate scientists say global warming is heating up the world’s oceans and atmosphere, providing more fuel for tropical cyclones and creating ever greater risks for crops, miners and billion-dollar beachfronts.
The risks from stronger storms strike right through the heart of the global economy, affecting food security and inflation, iron ore and coal production and higher insurance losses.
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Particularly vulnerable are Asia’s booming coastal megacities from Manila to Karachi, large areas of the U.S. around the Gulf of Mexico and the east coast, Australia’s iron ore and northern coal mines and tropical Asia’s rice-growing river deltas.
Insurers say unrelenting development along coastlines is placing more homes, businesses and infrastructure in the path of destruction that will drive up insurance losses.
United Nations data says the number of people living in cities in Asia is expected to grow to more than three billion in 2050 from 231 million in 1950.
Climate change and stronger storms are also a growing threat to Asia’s rice crop. Asia grows 90 percent of the world’s rice, and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) estimates an additional eight to 10 million tonnes of rice needs to be produced each year.
This means that disruption from droughts, floods and storms can hurt supplies and cause price spikes.
Reinsurer Munich Re said 950 natural catastrophes were recorded last year, 90 percent of which were weather-related events such as storms and floods, making it the year with the second-highest number of natural catastrophes since 1980.
A major climate study in 2010 based on the results of a range of computer models concluded there was likely to be a substantial increase in the number of storms in the severe category range of three to five, with five being the maximum.
Overall, storms would be two to 11 percent more intense by 2100 and rainfall would increase 20 percent near the centre, it predicted.
“Since the early 1990s, we have seen a significant increase in the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic,” said Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re, pointing to a natural cycle in which hurricane numbers vary over several decades.
“We think now we have a mixture of two phenomena, one is the natural oscillation and the other is the steady increase in sea surface temperatures due to global warming. And this adds up to increased risks.”
Although the study also found there might be a drop in the number of storms in the Pacific Ocean and around Australia, the storms that did form would tend to be more dangerous.
Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005 highlighted that risk, as did Hurricane Andrew that struck Florida in 1992.
According to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, Katrina killed 1,500 people and caused $81 billion in damage while Andrew caused $26.5 billion in losses, not adjusted for inflation.
In Asia, there was a danger in assuming nothing needs to be done if storm numbers don’t increase, said climate scientist Johnny Chan, one of the authors of the 2010 review.
“It is a grim picture. Even if the number of storms is not increasing, the amount of rain that comes out of these storms is increasing,” said Chan, director of the Guy Carpenter Asia-Pacific Climate Impact Centre at the City University of Hong Kong.
Fellow climate scientist John McBride said there was little doubt storms would become stronger as seas warm.
Oceans soak up much of the excess heat and carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuels, and the oceans have already warmed on average about 0.5 C.
“You should expect a shift towards more intense cyclones. That’s coming across as a stronger prediction,” said McBride of the Centre for Aust ralian Weather and Climate Research.
The World Bank says typhoons Ketsana and Parma caused damage and losses to crops, property and infrastructure worth $4.4 billion in the Philippines in 2009, or 2.7 percent of gross domestic product. Storms led to the loss of 1.3 million tonnes of rice paddy, forcing the country to import.
A year later, Typhoon Megi, a maximum category 5 storm, killed 26 people in the Philippines and caused rice crop losses of more than 520,000 tonnes.
Tropical Asia’s vast river deltas are also at risk from flooding and powerful storm surges from cyclones.
Cyclone Nargis, which ripped through the Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar in 2008, killed or left missing 140,000 people and triggered a 2.5 metre storm surge that inundated much of the delta, wiping out a third of the rice crop.
Reiner Wassmann, IRRI’s co-ordinator of climate change research, said new varieties of rice that were flood and salt water tolerant would help reduce losses from storms. Fastergrowing varieties could also help farmers avoid the typhoon season.
Australia’s $2 billion sugar cane crop is particularly vulnerable to more powerful storms.
Floods over the past several months caused losses of $500 million, said Steve Greenwood, chief executive officer of Queensland’s Canegrowers Association.
Cyclone Yasi, a large category 5 storm, caused further losses of up to a quarter of the remaining crop.
While Greenwood said there was little farmers could do faced with 250 km/h winds that smashed cane stems, new varieties could at least reduce losses from flooding.
Hoeppe expected insurance losses to rise, partly because of greater risks to mines. Australia is the world’s top iron ore exporter and also a top thermal and coking coal producer.
Climate change was already pMunich Re says weather related natural catastrophes have tripled in the past 30 years in Australia.
“I think what people are still coming to grips with is how the traditional civil engineering design guidelines around return periods. Those are going to change,” said Peter Lilly, a senior minerals and energy strategist at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.
“The historical one in 100, one in 200 and one in 500 years events are going to change. The traditional design criteria are going to have to change.”
