What’s the likely effect of global warming on the marine weather phenomena around here?
Probably not very much for the next several decades. The water’s actually going to slow down global warming for us. The polar regions heat up more rapidly than the rest of the planet, and the continents heat up more rapidly than the oceans. The eastern oceans heat up more slowly than the western oceans, and we’re downstream from an eastern ocean. We’re going to be buffered by the ocean for quite a while. What does the perfect storm look like in this area, and where are you going to be when it hits? The perfect storm probably has existed already. It’s the Columbus Day storm of 1962. That was the greatest mid-latitude cyclone to hit not only here, but any place in the continental United States in the last 100 years. That storm, if it hit now, would probably cause tens of billions of dollars of damage. We’re talking about winds along the coast that were over 150 miles an hour in some places, over 100 miles per hour in Puget Sound and the Willamette Valley. That storm was the perfect storm
