Quote of the Day: The difference between Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) and Hurricane Camille

The difference, which is more than an order of magnitude, is largely (but not completely) due to poverty. Despite experiencing roughly five landfalling tropical cyclones per year, Philippine infrastructure simply isn’t as sound as it is in wealthier countries. As a grim example, a number of Haiyan’s casualties actually occurred in government-designated shelters that collapsed in the roaring eyewall. 

In addition, the transportation infrastructure simply couldn’t handle a mass evacuation. If a similar situation applied to the U.S. Gulf Coast, Camille would have killed thousands at landfall, a fact noted in the Hurricane Center’s report on the 1969 season. Where Haiyan hit in the Philippines, there simply weren’t any roads capable of evacuating the citizens of Tacloban City safely inland, forcing them to ride it out dangerously close to the invading ocean and exposed to winds that pulverized most structures.

So, while we really don’t know which storm had higher winds, we do know that more affluent societies are much less affected by even the strongest storms. As Indur Goklany, (who writes frequently for Cato) has pointed out, if left to develop, the entire world will be much more resilient to climate change than it would be if the ineffective policies to “stop” it slowed economic growth.

This from Patrick J Michaels, climatologist and director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute