Eve of Destruction

Two stories in the news recently made me want to build an underground shelter. The first regards natural disasters; the second involves a man-made one.

First, the meteorological department at Colorado State University is predicting an above-average Atlantic hurricane season for 2013, with at least eighteen named storms, nine of which will be hurricanes and four of which will major hurricanes. The chances of a major hurricane hitting the United States is 72 percent - 47 percent for the Gulf Coast, 48 percent for the East Coast.

When Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey, the state had long been overdue to be hit by a major tropical system. Sandy was not it. By a "major" hurricane, the meteorology professors at Colorado State mean a Category 3 or above, and it's been a long time since such a hurricane hit the Garden State . . . and the chances of a stronger hurricane hitting it are greater than ever. If this sounds alarmist, remember that after Tropical Storm Irene hit New Jersey in 2011 - the first tropical storm to hit the Garden State in 108 years - it was followed by Sandy only a year an change later, so the meteorological trend is clearly going against New Jersey. Somehow, the thought of a college varsity sports team network in Miami or a professional hockey team in Charlotte named the Hurricanes seems quaint. If the Carolina Hurricanes ever move to the Meadowlands, the won't have to change their nickname.

Oh yeah, and don't start asking what a bunch of weather geeks from a land-grant college in the Rockies knows about tropical storms. These guys know plenty; they've predicted active seasons that turned out to be more active than they could have imagined! They forecast fifteen named storms in 2011 and sixteen named storms in 2012. In each season, nineteen storms formed.

We could get another monster storm a couple of days before Halloween - say, October 29, a year to the day after Sandy struck. To respond to the insistence that such a thing couldn't happen again on the same day, remember - it's already happened twice in a row! Sandy struck exactly one year after the October 2011 snowstorm, which knocked out power at my house for three days (though, admittedly, that had nothing to do with the tropics), while the blackout Sandy caused us lasted twice as long. For this October, I'm betting double or nothing on the weather. I'm convinced we'll get a Category 3 hurricane that gives us a 12-day outage - double the outage from Sandy - during which we'll have nothing in the way of power or anything else.

Halloween will be ruined again. And we might get another tree on our garage.

Oh yeah, the man-made disaster. When the Soviet Union and the United States divided Korea into respective northern and southern zones of occupation after Japan ceded control of it at the end of World War II, the Soviets hoped to create a worker's paradise in what is now North Korea. It created a monster instead. After consistently downplaying the nuclear capability of North Korea, the U.S. government has admitted, that, well, perhaps, the Communist country does have the ability to lob a nuclear missile into a target two thousand miles away. Kim Jong Un, the current leader of North Korea, promises to demonstrate his country's capability on Monday, the birthday anniversary of his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, who founded the country with help from the Soviets.

And don't start bringing up the "silver lining" that Kim Jong Un is too rational to start a war that could bring the world to the brink of Armageddon (or at least turn his own country into an ash pit) and too smart to attack the U.S. or South Korea after giving both countries a very fair warning and ruining the necessary element of surprise. He's thirty years old; when was the last time a 30-year-old did something rational or smart?

Between the hurricanes and Kim Jong Un, I'll take the hurricanes. At least hurricanes come and go. Kim Jong Un will be around for a long, long time.