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E-mailScientists in Taiwan warned yesterday that global warming increases the danger from typhoons, saying that in the next two years, the island was likely to be hit by a storm as powerful as Typhoon Morakot, which wound up claiming the lives of about 700 people back in August 2009.
Morakot raged through the southern part of Taiwan for three days, dumping a record 3,000 millimeters (120 inches) of rain and causing massive mudslides. In the wake of the typhoon, the president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, said that the damage it wreaked cost about $1.5 billion.
Speaking to Agence France Presse (AFP), Wang Chung-ho, a research fellow at the Institute of the Earth Sciences at Taiwan's top academic body Academia Sinica, said that there was a clear trend for increasing precipitation over Taiwan during the monsoon season over the long term.
During the past six years, the average monthly rainfall of the six-month monsoon period, which begins in May, has reached up to 400 millimetres. In the years before 2004, the average was only 380 millimetres.
"It's pretty remarkable to see this kind of humidity in the atmosphere over such a sustained time period," Wang said. He saw it as an indication that the environment has changed, which is probably the result of global warming.
Should a future typhoon with the size of Morakot strike the northern part of Taiwan, which is more densely populated, the results would be even more devastating, he warned. Shihmen Dam, a reservoir along a river that runs past Taipei county, could burst as a result of the torrential rains unleashed by a typhoon, putting millions of people in grave danger.
Ho Tsung-hsun, an influential environmentalist, predicted that typhoons on the scale of Morakot would occur more often as the environment changes. "This is a grave warning from nature. It could end up exceeding our worst fears," he said.
A typhoon expert at the Chinese Culture University, Liu Ching-huang, said there was no way of knowing when another deadly typhoon would hit, adding that the next one "might unleash, say, 5,000 millimetres of rainfall".
Wang said that government must be prepared for similar disasters in the near future, and work out effective countermeasures.
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