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video shows irma ripping through island - cnn video

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Video shows Irma ripping through island - CNN Video

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Live video captures Hurricane Irma strike the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean.

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Hurricane Wilma Video - Miami Beach, Florida

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Hurricane Katrina Historic Storm Surge Video - Gulfport, Mississippi

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Hurricane Irma damage | Video compilation

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Hurricane Irma Hits Caribbean, Heads Toward Florida

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Hurricane Irma threatened more West Indian islands Thursday after killing at least 10 people in the Caribbean and sparking widespread power outages in Puerto Rico, as forecasts put the powerful storm on a possible collision course with Florida and other Southeast U.S. states.

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Hurricanes: The Greatest Storms on Earth : Feature Articles

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Few things in nature can compare to the destructive force of a hurricane. Called the greatest storm on Earth, a hurricane is capable of annihilating coastal areas with sustained winds of 155 mph or higher and intense areas of rainfall and a storm surge.

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Hurricane Irma made landfall this week in the Caribbean as one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded.

Here is a guide to The New York Times's coverage of the Category 5 storm as it sweeps toward Florida. For dispatches from journalists across the region, see our live briefing with up to the minute developments. For an overview, see this story.

The path of the storm

On Wednesday, Irma struck land for the first time, hitting the island of Barbuda with winds of up to 185 miles per hour.

It passed over St. Martin and Anguilla as it headed west, leaving a path of destruction, as seen in this vivid footage:

Puerto Rico was largely unscathed, but most of its households lost power. The storm was expected to reach South Florida this weekend, according to our hurricane path tracker.

Hurricane Irma's trajectory is by far the most important question facing forecasters right now, but its intensity is a concern as well. The Upshot explained how experts are gathering data on the storm's strength.

Florida gets ready

With good forecasting, government officials can brace for the worst. We are covering the way Florida is preparing for evacuations, power losses and recovery efforts.

The state has a long history of hurricanes, as highlighted in this article about Hurricane Andrew, which struck in 1992. (One of our reporters wrote a gripping first-person account last year about what it was like to ride out that storm.)

But Irma's destruction could be particularly devastating because there has been so much new development in Central and South Florida, as our analysis shows.

A bit of advice

Here are tips on how to prepare to evacuate your home, and how to pack an emergency kit.

And if you're planning to travel somewhere in the path of the storm, here's what you should do.

Keep an eye on the forecasts. More storms are forming in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, with hurricane watches in Antigua and Barbuda and in Mexico.

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Hurricane Irma: What's Happened and What's Next

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Hurricane Irma made landfall this week in the Caribbean as one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded. Here is a guide to The New York Times's coverage of the Category 5 storm as it sweeps toward Florida. For dispatches from journalists across the region, see our live briefing with up to the minute developments.

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Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm with winds of up to 175 miles an hour, continued to tear through the Caribbean on Thursday, leaving devastation in its wake and prompting evacuation orders across the region.

The death toll was at least seven on Thursday afternoon, and the authorities warned that the number could rise as communications improved. Prime Minister Édouard Philippe of France said that four people were confirmed dead on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, lowering a previous toll of eight deaths given by local rescue officials.

A St. Martin official said on Wednesday night that "95 percent of the island is destroyed."

More than 70 percent of Puerto Rico households were without power on Thursday, though the territory appeared to be largely unscathed, the governor said. It was the latest blow for a territory mired in bankruptcy and debt that have left public works like power plants and retaining walls in poor shape.

Irma, one of most powerful Atlantic storms ever recorded, was between Hispaniola and Turks and Caicos on Thursday afternoon, though its winds had weakened slightly. A hurricane watch was issued for South Florida, the Florida Keys, Lake Okeechobee and Florida Bay, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida urged residents to heed the advice of local officials in preparing for a powerful storm that could quickly change its course. "Every Florida family must prepare to evacuate regardless of the coast you live on," he said at a news conference.

* Sign up for the Morning Briefing for hurricane news and a daily look at what you need to know to begin your day.

Deteriorating conditions in Turks and Caicos.

A national shutdown was declared on the Turks and Caicos Islands on Thursday afternoon, halting emergency services as the storm passed.

"All residents and tourists are instructed to stay indoors, as responders will not be able to provide relief services during this time until further notice," said Virginia Clerveaux, the director of the Disaster Management Department.

The few supermarkets in the city of Providenciales were crammed with residents stocking up on food, and there were long lines at gas stations.

Ms. Clerveaux warned of deteriorating conditions on the island after 2 p.m. "We expect to have very strong storm surges, and roads will be severely flooded," she said.

Scores of people were already in emergency shelters that had opened on Wednesday evening.

Haiti closes public and private institutions.

The Haitian government called for all institutions, public and private, including banks and stores, to be shut down from noon on Thursday until further notice.

President Jovenel Moïse said in a televised speech that his cabinet had spent a week preparing for the hurricane, but he also outlined the challenges ahead, noting that 77 percent of the country was mountainous, much of it inaccessible by road.

He urged people to heed the hurricane warnings and get to a safe place. "The hurricane is not a game," he said.

All schools in the country were closed on Wednesday and Thursday, and the more than 800 temporary shelters set up across the country have started providing food to people affected by the storm.

The police are working with local officials to evacuate people from the most vulnerable areas along the northern coast, "by force if necessary," Interior Minister Max Rudolph Saint-Albin said at a news conference on Thursday.

The concern is not just about possible drownings and injuries from the storm, but also that a surge of cholera could follow, as happened last year after Hurricane Matthew devastated the country's southwest.

The Minister of Public Health, speaking on national television and radio, urged people to add bleach to their drinking and bathing water and to put together first-aid kits at home.

To date this year, government reports show that 104 people have died from the waterborne disease that broke out in Haiti starting in 2010.
- CATHERINE PORTER
'Our prayers were answered.'

In Puerto Rico, nearly 70 percent of households were without power in the wake of the storm, which otherwise left the island largely unscathed, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said on Thursday.

Roughly 40 percent of the territory's hospitals were functioning, he said, and were accepting transfers of about 40 patients from the United States Virgin Islands.

Power outages have left about 17 percent of the territory without running water, he said.

"We would like to start out thanking the Almighty," Mr. Rosselló said of the relatively small impact the storm had on Puerto Rico, with fallen trees and electrical poles making up the bulk of the damage on the main island. "Our prayers were answered."

Total rainfall on the island ranged from two to eight inches, the governor said, but southern regions are still at risk of flooding because the rain there had not stopped.

Concern had been greatest for the small island of Culebra. Communication with the island remained difficult, but Mr. Rosselló said that the authorities had managed to speak with the mayor and the police lieutenant there.

"The information we have - again, thank God, because Culebra did see wind gusts above 100 m.p.h. - is positive," he said.
- FRANCES ROBLES
A record period of 185 m.p.h. winds.

Irma's 185 m.p.h. wind speeds persisted for more than 24 hours, the longest period ever recorded. The French weather service described it as the most enduring superstorm on record.

Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda said that half of Barbuda had been left homeless from the storm. Officials declared a state of emergency there on Thursday.

Around 11 a.m., the storm's eye was off the northern coast of Hispaniola, which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the National Hurricane C enter said. It is expected to remain a Category 4 or 5 storm throughout the day.

The storm is expected to move near the Turks and Caicos Islands and the southeastern Bahamas on Thursday night, before coming close to Cuba on Friday or Saturday.

In the Dominican Republic, officials evacuated some areas near the beachfront town of Cabarete on the north coast, though some residents chose to stay boarded up their homes and ride it out.

President Danilo Medina canceled work for public and private companies, and schools were closed until Monday as emergency workers spread out to manage the storm's expected fallout.

Seventeen provinces, mostly along the nation's northern, eastern and southern coastlines, had been under a red alert since Wednesday. But the center of the storm was passing in the north, with winds and rains lashing areas like Puerto Plata.

Evacuations took place in Samana, a popular resort area, where heavy winds and rain struck the beaches and roads. Residents in Cabarete said that so far the effects of the storm were relatively mild.

"It's really not that bad," said Lindsay Sauvage, who lives with her family in Cabarete and said the electricity had shut off around 3 a.m. "We expected much worse."
- CARL JOSEPH and AZAM AHMED
'It's just unbelievable. It's indescribable.'

Four people have been confirmed dead on the island of St Martin, Mr. Philippe, the French prime minister, said on Thursday, lowering a previous toll of eight deaths given by local rescue officials.

Around 50 people were injured, including two seriously, he said, and 60 percent of homes on the island are so badly damaged that they are now uninhabitable. Rescue workers assessing the damage on St. Martin and St. Barthélemy.

At least three deaths were reported elsewhere.

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Hurricane Irma, Churning Over Dominican Republic, Heads Toward Turks and Caicos

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Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm with winds of up to 175 miles an hour, continued to tear through the Caribbean on Thursday, leaving devastation in its wake and prompting evacuation orders across the region. The death toll was at least seven on Thursday afternoon, and the authorities warned that the number could rise as communications improved.

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A tropical cyclone is a general term for an intense low-pressure weather system that forms over and is fueled by tropical ocean waters. In the North Atlantic Ocean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, strong tropical cyclones are called hurricanes, but they have other names in other ocean regions. The beginning of life for any hurricane is a pre-existing disturbance in the atmosphere that requires certain atmospheric and oceanic conditions to develop into a hurricane. Mature hurricanes are nearly circular in shape and are typically a few hundred miles in diameter.

Hurricane winds rotate cyclonically (counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere). The strongest winds are located in a hurricane's eyewall, which surrounds a nearly calm eye at the storm's center. A hurricane's eye is typically tens of miles in diameter. Clouds in both the eye wall and the spiral bands outside the eye wall can produce very heavy rain.

Hurricanes are steered by larger-scale, global winds, such as the trade winds and the Bermuda/Azores High, which is an area of high pressure that exists over the Atlantic Ocean. A hurricane interacts with the ocean before landfall and with the land after landfall. Land interaction generally causes a hurricane to decay.

Hurricane activity varies by season and also due to weather and climate patterns that vary on time scales of weeks to years to decades. Hurricane activity may also be affected in the longer term by climate change. In recent years, the relationship between hurricanes and climate change has become a source of public interest, significant scientific debate, and a focus for current research.

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How Do Hurricanes Form? | NASA Space Place – NASA Science for Kids

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The economic cost of Hurricane Irma could rise as high as $300bn (£227bn) as the storm lashes Florida, damaging homes, businesses and key crops including orange groves.

Analysts said some $2trn of property lay in the storm's path, and also pointed to the potential impact on US food prices. Florida is the second-largest produce grower in the US and the world's second-largest producer of orange juice.

Torsten Jeworrek, a member of the board of the German reinsurance giant Munich Re, said on Sunday that Irma was "a major event for Florida and also a major event for the insurance industry".

The hurricane has already unsettled the financial markets, sending insurance stocks falling and orange juice futures surging last week. The price of contracts for November deliveries of frozen orange juice concentrate spiked as investors feared the worst after the destruction Irma wrought in the Caribbean.

Barrie Cornes, an analyst at the stockbroker Panmure Gordon, put the overall economic cost at $300bn, with insurance firms potentially on the hook for between $100bn and $150bn when the clean-up operation gets under way.

Florida also grows other important crops including tomatoes, grapefruits, watermelons and sugar cane. Irma could wipe out as much as 20% of the state's citrus crop, an significant part of its economy, analysts have suggested.

Alan Konn of the Chicago-based commodity trading firm Price Asset Management said: "The damage to the orange crop is twofold, both short term disruption but also to the extent crops are completely destroyed."

Irma could also have a longer term impact because it takes a few years to grow an orange tree to production, which would limit supply for an extented period, he said in an interview on the financial website MarketWatch.

The insurance industry is still assessing the cost of Hurricane Harvey, which caused severe flooding in parts of Texas last month. Initial estimates suggest the final bill could be as much as $100bn. That compares with economic damage of $176bn inflicted by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which included $82bn of insured losses, according to the Swiss Re Institute.

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Economic cost of Hurricane Irma 'could reach $300bn'

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The economic cost of Hurricane Irma could rise as high as $300bn (£227bn) as the storm lashes Florida, damaging homes, businesses and key crops including orange groves. Analysts said some $2trn of property lay in the storm's path, and also pointed to the potential impact on US food prices.

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As cleanup efforts begin in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey's record-setting rainfall over Houston, Corpus Christi, Texas, and the surrounding Gulf region, analysts are still trying to figure out exactly how severely the deluge dinged the U.S. economy's overall trajectory.

Gas prices spiked as oil refineries were forced offline. Trade through Gulf ports was stalled or rerouted, in some cases raising prices for shippers and consumers as products took longer to get to their intended destinations. And local businesses were ravaged by floodwaters and lost foot traffic as community members evacuated and were unable to return to their homes.

And with Hurricane Irma barreling toward Florida - ripping up large swaths of the Caribbean that lie in its path - analysts are predicting a perfect storm of labor market disruption as unemployment climbs and gross domestic product readings fall.

"The primary concern related to both hurricanes is the human story, not the economic one," Jim Baird, partner and chief investment officer at Plante Moran Financial Advisors, said in a statement Thursday. "Nonetheless, the near-term economic impact of what increasingly appears to be two severe natural disasters in close proximity to one another will be a clear negative, and disruptive to the regional economies in the impacted areas."

Indeed, initial unemployment claims climbed to 298,000 last week in the aftermath of Harvey's landfall - the metric's highest reading since April 2015. That represents a 62,000-claim jump and is well above what economists had expected to see. Filings in Texas, specifically, soared by nearly 52,000, making up the lion's share of the increase.

"The first impacts of Hurricane Harvey are beginning to be seen in the U.S. economic data," Scott Anderson, chief economist and executive vice president at Bank of the West Economics, wrote in a research note Thursday. "The Harvey impact will be felt for several more weeks as initial [jobless] claims remain temporarily elevated and net payroll job gains sink for the month of September."

It's not uncommon for unemployment filings to increase in the wake of a disastrous storm, but analysts generally weren't counting on such an abrupt uptick.

"The one-week jump in claims of 62,000 was the biggest since an increase of 81,000 in November 2012 in the wake of Superstorm Sandy," Gus Faucher, chief economist and senior vice president at The PNC Financial Services Group, wrote in a research note Thursday, also noting that "claims jumped by 96,000 in the week after Hurricane Katrina in September 2005."

Those increases could end up weighing on the broader U.S. unemployment rate, which ticked up slightly to 4.4 percent in August but could be revised higher in the months ahead as the government collects more information on the impacts of a storm that's already shaping up to be one of the costliest and most destructive in recent history.

The founder, president and chairman of AccuWeather predicted last week that total losses from the storm would "reach $190 billion, or one percent of the nation's gross domestic product." Not all damage estimates are that lofty. But should that prediction hold true, it would mean Harvey was more costly than Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina combined.

"If the past is any guide, Q3 real GDP could be marginally weaker than expected due to the offline effects of the storm and the fact that Houston accounts for 3.2 percent of U.S. GDP, in addition to being a key energy and shipping hub," Joe Quinlan, managing director and chief market strategist at U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management, wrote in a research note Thursday. "To this point, in the weeks following Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, unemployment claims spiked, industrial production dropped and higher gasoline prices dampened real personal consumption expenditures."

A common narrative in the immediate aftermath of Harvey's landfall was that the storm would wreak havoc on local communities but wouldn't materially hold down the broader U.S. economy. But as the days went on and the full extent of its damage was assessed, outlooks and predictions began to darken.

"The storm's effect on U.S. GDP is likely to be substantial, but substantial when it comes to large storms is measured in tenths of a percent rather than full percentage points," a team of researchers at UBS wrote in a research note last week. "The fall in U.S. GDP comes from an outright decline in employment as well as a curtailment of exports, especially exports of petroleum products."

In a more recent note published Thursday, UBS researchers warned that "Harvey's economic implications point to more downside risk to payrolls and near-term GDP growth than initially anticipated."

Still, an outpouring of charitable giving and the passage of a $15 billion federal relief package through Capitol Hill this week are aimed at mitigating the losses and hardship engulfing communities damaged by the storm. But Anderson warned a "one-two punch" is on the way in the form of Hurricane Irma - whose heavy winds and driving rain are expected to slam into southern Florida in the coming days.

Barclays researchers earlier this week predicted the Category 5 storm could generate up to $130 billion in insured damage.

"It is estimated that 2 million people in Florida could lose power and Florida's agriculture sector will be hit too, which could lead to price increases for tomatoes, oranges, green beans and cucumbers," Anderson said.

Price increases, community upheaval and unemployment upticks are expected to weigh on national economic growth in the months ahead - but analysts have been quick to point out that previous catastrophic storms didn't completely derail the economy's progress over the long haul. The economy is likely to take on water in the months ahead, but few are expecting growth to completely halt.

"Monthly job growth weakened in the wakes of Katrina and Sandy, but did not outright decline," Faucher said. "Outside of the storms, the U.S. labor market remains in solid shape. With improving demand businesses continue to hire, and the economy is at close to full employment."

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As cleanup efforts begin in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey's record-setting rainfall over Houston, Corpus Christi, Texas, and the surrounding Gulf region, analysts are still trying to figure out exactly how severely the deluge dinged the U.S. economy's overall trajectory. Gas prices spiked as oil refineries were forced offline.

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A look inside the giant heat engine that keeps a hurricane alive.

Credit: Karl Tate, Livescience.com contributor

A hurricane is a rotating storm system up to hundreds of miles across. A region of low air pressure at the center is called the eye. Powerful thunderstorms (rain bands) spiral outward from the eye. The high winds of a hurricane sweep across the ocean water producing a dangerous storm surge, a wall of water that can cause massive flooding even miles inland.

Hurricanes are a type of storm called a tropical cyclone. These storms have different names around the world but all of them form the same way, in the warm ocean waters near the Earth's equator.

A hurricane is a giant heat engine, converting the energy of warm ocean air into powerful winds and waves. A distinctive feature is that their center is warmer than the surrounding air in what's called a warm core storm system. A hurricane requires warm ocean water (the "fuel" of a hurricane) and a wind pattern near the surface that spirals air inward. As the warm air in the center of the storm rises, a central area of low pressure is produced, called the eye. The eye is about 20 to 30 miles wide (32 to 48 kilometers) and relatively calm. As the central pressure drops, more air is pulled in at the surface.

In the Northern Hemisphere, air spirals counter-clockwise toward the eye (clockwise south of the equator). Rising warm air emerges from the top of the eye, spiraling in the opposite direction.

The spiralling winds push on the sea surface, causing the water to pile up into a storm surge. The highest storm surge forms to the east of the eye. Once a hurricane moves over land, it loses its supply of "fuel" -warm ocean air - and the circulation of the storm starts to weaken.

Embed: Paste the code below into your site.

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A hurricane is a rotating storm system up to hundreds of miles across. A region of low air pressure at the center is called the eye. Powerful thunderstorms (rain bands) spiral outward from the eye. The high winds of a hurricane sweep across the ocean water producing a dangerous storm surge, a wall of water that can cause massive flooding even miles inland.

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Hurricane Irma is expected to pose at least a temporary setback to Florida's sizzling economy as it takes aim at the heart of the nation's citrus production and batters its robust tourism industry.

But if the storm causes extensive damage that discourages incoming retirees and tempers runaway population growth, the economic effects could be more substantial, analysts say.

More: Hurricane Irma: Where is the powerful storm now?

More: Hurricane Irma: A complete list of cruises canceled, delayed

More: Why Hurricane Harvey could hurt U.S. economy: 'Houston is not just an oil town anymore'

Florida is the nation's top citrus producer and also leads in sugarcane, tomatoes, watermelons and fresh market cucumbers, according to state government data. Farmers are trying to drain fields of excess water, secure equipment and ensure water pumps work in the event of flooding, says Lisa Lochridge, spokeswoman for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association.

"With a storm of this size, people are very, very concerned," she says.

The most immediate worry is the vast orange crop in central and south Florida. Risks to the crop have increased since forecasts altered the storm's projected path westward, says Chris Hyde, agricultural meteorologist at MDA Weather Services.

"It's really in the cross-hairs of this thing," he says, adding that a vast majority of the citrus crop could be destroyed.

Since Wednesday, orange futures prices have risen 11%, and a similar impact could ripple through grocery stores across the U.S., depending on the actual damage, Hyde says.

Tourism, the state's largest industry, also faces major disruptions. Florida had 112.4 million out-of-state and international visitors last year and tourism generated $90 billion in economic activity. As of Thursday, the Walt Disney World theme parks in the Orlando area continued to operate as normal but some nighttime events were cancelled on Saturday and Sunday. SeaWorld and Legoland were both closed Friday.

Some major cruise lines canceled voyages out of the nation's big three cruise ports - Port of Miami, Port Canaveral and Fort Lauderdale's Port Everglades. And Orlando Melbourne International Airport will suspend commercial flights and close the terminal at 6 p.m. ET Saturday.

The total economic losses from the storm are likely to be similar to Hurricane Harvey in the Houston area, says Kwame Donaldson, economist at Moody's Analytics. Moody's projects Harvey-induced losses from property damage and lost economic output will total $108 billion, though other estimates have been closer to $160 billion.

For Florida, the nation's fourth-largest economy, that could slice estimated third-quarter economic growth of 3.7% by as much as a percentage point, Donaldson says. The pullback would be offset in subsequent quarters as homes and businesses are rebuilt and consumers make delayed purchases.

For the U.S. economy, the decrease in economic gains would be a more modest two- to three-tenths of a percentage point, he says.

If the hurricane hits Georgia it likely will have lost strength by then, causing minimal economic damage, says Jeff Dorman, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Georgia. But he says $1 billion to $2 billion of crops, particularly cotton, are at risk.

Florida's economy has resuscitated dramatically since the mid-2000s housing crash put it among the hardest-hit states during the Great Recession. The long bull market that began in 2009 has replenished the investments of retirees and so they again have been flocking to the state, says Sean Snaith, an economist at the University of Central Florida. Hispanic immigration also has been brisk.

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Home prices have recovered, though unlike average national housing values that have reached new heights, they're still about 15% below their pre-crisis peak. But the state's economic and job growth was more than double the U.S. pace last year. And before the hurricane, Donaldson forecast growth of 3.9% this year and 5.6% in 2018, up from a healthy 3% last year.

Snaith doesn't believe Irma will significantly affect the state's turnaround. "I think, by and large, it's a temporary thing," he says.

But if many homes are destroyed or severely damaged, "The attractiveness of the real estate market could be affected in the short term," says John Quelch, dean of the business school at University of Miami.

A widespread impact also could slow population growth, and, in turn, the economy.

"It could very well be felt in people deciding not to move to Florida - which is the golden goose of Florida's" strong economic gains, Donaldson says.
Contributing: Florida Today
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Hurricane Irma could cool Florida's hot economy

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CLOSE Hurricane Irma is expected to pose at least a temporary setback to Florida's sizzling economy as it takes aim at the heart of the nation's citrus production and batters its robust tourism industry. But if the storm causes extensive damage that discourages incoming retirees and tempers runaway population growth, the economic effects could be more substantial, analysts say.

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Hsiang and Jina looked at 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes observed from 1950 to 2008 and the economic fortunes of the countries they struck in the years that followed. With their data, Jina and Hsiang can decisively say: These storms are bad-very bad-for economic growth.

"There is no creative destruction," Jina told me. "These disasters hit us and [their effects] sit around for a couple of decades." He added, "Just demonstrating that that was true was probably the most interesting aspect for me to start with."

Hsiang and Jina find that such storms (which they group under the umbrella term "cyclones") can be as bad as some of the worst sorts of man-made economic challenges. A cyclone of a magnitude that a country would expect to see once every few years can slow down an economy on par with "a tax increase equal to one percent of GDP, a currency crisis, or a political crisis in which executive constraints are weakened." For a really bad storm (a magnitude you'd expect to see around the world only once every 10 years), the damage will be similar "to losses from a banking crisis." The very worst storms-the top percentile-"have losses that are larger and endure longer than any of those previously studied shocks."

Here's a little chart they made comparing these different sorts of disasters:

The effects are lasting: Overall, they find that "each additional meter per second of annual nationally-averaged wind exposure lowers per capita economic output 0.37 percent 20 years later" (emphasis added). Put simply, economies "do not recover in the long run."

So what does this mean for a planet with a changing climate?

Projections for storm patterns as the planet's climate morphs are, as Jina put it, "a very complex area." How do you choose which model to rely on? You go with, Jina says, "the best": those of Kerry Emanuel at MIT, world expert on cyclone patterns.

When they meshed their backward-looking empirical calculations with Emanuel's forward-looking projections, the number they got was startling: $9.7 trillion-the present discounted value "of expected losses due to enhanced cyclone activity" if we don't take any action to dial back greenhouse-gas emissions. (This is the calculation they make at the 95 percent confidence interval, though the figure could range from $3.9 trillion to $15.5 trillion.)

"For me," Jina says, "it is a very convincing argument to say that we need to mitigate as much climate change as we can."

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How Much Do Hurricanes Hurt the Economy?

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Hsiang and Jina looked at 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes observed from 1950 to 2008 and the economic fortunes of the countries they struck in the years that followed. With their data, Jina and Hsiang can decisively say: These storms are bad-very bad-for economic growth. "There is no creative destruction," Jina told me.