Benjamin Yeh Yahoo News 1 Mar 10;
TAIPEI (AFP) – Global warming is raising the danger from typhoons, Taiwan experts warned Monday, saying the island may be hit in a year or two by a powerful storm like the one which killed more than 700 last August.
Typhoon Morakot dumped a record 3,000 millimetres (120 inches) of rainfall and caused massive mudslides in the south of the island, and the government should be prepared for similar disasters in the future, they said.
"A typhoon as powerful as Morakot is very likely to strike Taiwan in a year or two," said Wang Chung-ho, a research fellow at the Institute of the Earth Sciences at Taiwan's top academic body Academia Sinica.
"The government must work out effective countermeasures," he told AFP.
Ho Tsung-hsun, an influential environmentalist who has called for the reduction of high energy-consumption industries in Taiwan, warned of repeated disasters in the coming years.
"Typhoons of the Morakot scale hitting Taiwan will become normal as the Earth's environment changes," he said.
"This is a grave warning from nature. It could end up exceeding our worst fears."
Typhoons require ocean waters of at least 26.5 degrees Celsius (80 Fahrenheit) to fuel them.
"Who knows when another deadly typhoon may hit, and next time it might unleash, say, 5,000 millimetres of rainfall," said Liu Ching-huang, a typhoon expert at the Chinese Culture University.
Wang said there was a clear long-term trend for increasing precipitation over Taiwan during the monsoon season.
The average monthly rainfall of the six-month period beginning in May has topped 400 millimetres during the past six years, compared with an average of 380 millimetres in the years before 2004.
"It's pretty remarkable to see this kind of humidity in the atmosphere over such a sustained time period," Wang said.
"This indicates the environment has changed, and that change probably resulted from global warming."
Typhoon Morakot was the worst to hit Taiwan in half a century, and seven months later reconstruction work is still taking place in the southern counties where the impact was greatest.
Morakot highlighted how exposed Taiwan is to changing weather patterns, due to its geographical location, analysts said.
"Taiwan is unique," said Wang. "It sits on a juncture between the temperate zone and the tropical zone, the mainland (China) and the ocean"
A future typhoon the size of Morakot could be even more devastating should it strike the more densely populated north of the island.
Torrential rains unleashed by a typhoon could burst the Shihmen Dam, a reservoir on a river that flows past Taipei county, where millions of people reside, he warned.
Scientists at Academia Sinica warned late last year that global warming would cause the amount of heavy rain dumped on Taiwan to triple over the next 20 years.
The projection was based on statistics showing the incidence of heavy rainfall has doubled in the past 45 years, which the scientists say has coincided with a global rise in temperatures.
Taiwan has also become a hotter place, reflected in figures from Taipei, where the number of days with "excessive heat" over 36 Celsius has doubled since 1961, data showed.
