Posted by Sherman in Idaho [72.47.153.105] on Monday, November 11, 2013 at 10:24:17 :
In Reply to: Re: OT: Winter in Alaska...Climate Change? posted by gmharris [71.105.35.249] on Monday, November 11, 2013 at 05:02:54 :
I should have added "short human memory" to "global media" and "marginal land". We've had huge devastating storms for a long time too. I don't have the time or space here to write down a list of even a few of them here, but I'd include the Galveston hurricane of 1900 which had a comparable death toll to this one in the Philippines, and the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone/floods with 10X as many killed. The further you go back in time, the less record there is of devastating storms, but it's not because they didn't happen. It's because there was no Internet, and then no satellite TV, and then no film reels, and then no cameras and telegraphs, and then no newspapers. There's a limit to how long people remember what their grandfather's grandfather told him about the big storm.
Also, news reports always make it sound like a huge area was wiped out when it really wasn't. The pictures of devastation coming out of the Philippines today are of damage to a couple of main coastal cities caused by the storm surge, which is always what causes most of the death and damage in a hurricane, but by definition doesn't go very far up hill. I remember when Mt St Helens erupted lots of my friends and neighbors had worried relatives from back east calling them to see if Seattle was still in existence, because watching the news, they could easily imagine it wasn't.
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