Typhoon Bopha, the largest typhoon to hit the Island of Mindanao (second largest of the islands in the Philippines archipelago) in recorded history, has been very deadly.
Super typhoon Bopha smashed into the southern Philippines island of Mindanao early this morning [Tuesday] with estimated sustained winds of 160 mph and torrential, flooding rains. […]
The UK Met office says Bopha was the most intense typhoon on record to strike the island of Mindanao. It adds the storm produced 3.6 inches of rain in 6 hours at Malaybalay, a city on the island.[…]
Bopha just missed being the closest-to-equator category-five equivalent typhoon on record in the western North Pacific Basin (or any other basin, for that matter), reaching that intensity at 7.4 degrees north latitude Monday morning (U.S. time). Only Typhoon Louise in 1964, becoming a category-five equivalent typhoon at 7.3 degrees north latitude, was closer to the equator.
The most recent death toll from Bopha is rapidly approaching 300 deaths, with may more people still unaccounted for, and thousands made homeless by the storm and the flooding the resulted.
(NEW BATAAN, Philippines) — Stunned parents searching for missing children examined a row of mud-stained bodies covered with banana leaves while survivors dried their soaked belongings on roadsides Wednesday, a day after a powerful typhoon killed nearly 300 people in the southern Philippines.
Officials fear more bodies may be found as rescuers reach hard-hit areas that were isolated by landslides, floods and downed communications. […]
… Bopha roared quickly across the southern Mindanao and central regions, knocking out power in two entire provinces, triggering landslides and leaving houses and plantations damaged. More than 170,000 fled to evacuation centers.
Here’s a satellite picture of Bopha (source CIMSS where other images of the storm are available):
Perhaps we are becoming immune to the magnitude of such storms, or perhaps because the Philippines is half a world away, it doesn’t register with many Americans. Still this one tropical storm was far more deadly that Hurricane Sandy, though Sandy hit a far more densely populated area in our Eastern Seaboard. Nonetheless, Typhoon Bopha (also named Pablo) is a devastating tropical of unusual size and wind speed, particularly for a tropical storm so close to the Equator. Most typhoons in the Northwest Pacific appear at higher latitudes. In that sense Bopha does share something with Hurricane Sandy, which struck much farther north than most hurricanes that originate in the Atlantic or the Caribbean. Typhoons and hurricanes close to the Equator are considered extremely rare, much less a Category 5 storm such as Bopha.Typhoon Bopha shares another thing with Hurrican Sandy – both occurred near the end or outside the typical tropical storm season for their respective geographical regions: Sandy in late October and Bopha in early December.
In any case, Typhoon Bopha is another extreme weather event for 2012, to go with so many others this year: wildfires in Chile, heat waves and severe droughts across the Western and Midwestern US this year, wildfires in the Western US, extreme snowstorms in Eurasia, Japan and Alaska, damaging derecho thunderstorms in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions of the US, flooding and landslides in Brazil, severe storms and flooding in Australia(the most recent in November), the extreme droughts in Africa, specifically the deadly one in the Sahel region, The warmest winter on record in the Continental US to go with one of the coldest on record in Europe, record sea ice loss in the Arctic, record ice melting in Greenland, etc.
All of these many extreme weather events caused death, destruction and economic losses. Typhoon Bopha is just another example that our “weird” weather is truly global and that to refer to it as “weird” is now an oxymoron. This is our new planetary normal. Yet we continue to pump gigatons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the principal driver of climate change, and the reason climate scientists accept that such extreme weather events are linked to climate change and will continue to occur on and ever more regular basis.
I chat online with a retired Navy man who lives in Ologapo and he said the storm passed south of them, leaving them with rain and non-damaging winds. This time. They got hit last year with another typhoon that washed them nearly out of their home, and they sought shelter in higher grounds until they could go back safely.
He’s a staunch Republican, and is very dismissive of any talk about global climate change, but even he has to admit things are getting worse every season there. The storms are always a threat, and sooner or later I expect they’ll get hit so badly that they will have to start completely from scratch.
Scary stuff.
Wow. People really are not invested in this issue. Or if it’s not in this hemisphere then it doesn’t matter?
Wondering. In that part of the world is it Spring? In that case we would see an ealier start to the Typhoon season? Either way, the season is not just opening up but these storms sooner or later are going to get recognized as disasters for commerce. A big hurricane hasn’t hit Hawaii since ’92 with Iniki which is unusual. When and if the hurricanes move into the northern lattitudes we’ll see the relatively untouched coast from Long Beach northwards where the Pacific Rim trade lands in big time trouble.
Picturing Long Beach harbour with its container traffic, Seattle or Vancouver BC hit by a hurricane is a helluva visual.
This is in the Northern hemisphere, where it’s late autumn. Not sure what you mean by “When and if the hurricanes move into the northern lattitudes”. And I think it’s because of the coriolis effect that northern hemisphere hurricanes and typhoons tend towards the west, thereby hitting the east side of continents, and not impacting, e.g., Long Beach or Seattle.
But, but, but, fiscal cliff!! Tax cuts! Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!
That’s unfair, of course, but it is indeed quite surreal to watch ostensibly “civilized” humans willfully ignore–and, of course, deny like the navy imbecile in the comment above–the greatest danger we have ever faced as a species. The Hitler movement was child’s play compared to this.
We have now blown by our chance to stop the warming at 2 degrees C, and are on our way to 4 degrees C and above. Above that it hardly matters, as organized society will almost certainly be impossible at 4 degrees warming, including complete authoritarian dictatorships. Perpetual drought, massive destructive storms, organized agriculture impossible, unendurable heat, coastal zones inundated, entire oceans dead zones, loss of all species other than the rat and cockroach. So much for the America Right’s blathering about “LIBERTY!!”
The natural climate is now gone for eons and we all live in a new man-made climate. Our pathetic climate “records” are now all meaningless, and we have no “normal”. They might as well be climate records from another planet. What the world’s climate will now look like for the rest of our lives is anyone’s guess. But it will not ever look like the natural climate that we remember. That is now part of the irretrievable past. Blame will need to be assessed–and the leading candidate is the American “conservative” movement.
The scientists now know that we face a catastrophic crisis and must act immediately to make major emissions cuts or the 4 degree world will become a certainty. They were woefully wrong on how slowly the changes would come, and how great they would be even in the 2 degree world. It turns out we did not have decades and decades of time, and that allowing China to become the manufacturing giant of the world was a colossal blunder—again, thanks to our corporate plutocrats.
But Obama does not even mention the issue. It’s verboten. We mumble our way through one UN climate conference after another, where no action is even remotely contemplated by the world’s “leaders”. Quite curious, since polls show large majorities of ordinary schmoes believe something should be done—and they don’t even know the half of it, since the worthless corporate media doesn’t report this issue to any degree.
Anyway, the gig is up for humanity. As a species, we are showing our, um, limitations, shall we say. We’ll do anything to stop Adolph Hitler, but nothing to save the planet. That will be our epitaph.
a very good book to read about this is;
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
by Mark Lynas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a_Hotter_Planet
.