No, WaPo, We SHOULD Continue to Call Hurricanes 'Natural Disasters'

Kerry Emanuel at the Washington Post thinks we need to stop referring to hurricanes as "natural disasters." Why is that? No, he's not claiming there's a Bond villain with a hurricane ray menacing the American South.

Nope, nothing like that, but he still thinks we shouldn't call these storms "natural":

As the United States struggles to recover from two back-to-back hurricanes, it would be wise to reflect on why we keep having such calamities and whether they are likely to get worse.

We must first recognize the phrase “natural disaster” for what it is: a sham we hide behind to avoid our own culpability. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and wildfires are part of nature, and the natural world has long ago adapted to them. Disasters occur when we move to risky places and build inadequate infrastructure.

In the United States, we have in place a range of policies that all but guarantees a worsening string of Katrinas, Sandys, Harveys and Irmas as far as we can see into the future. Climate change acts as a threat-multiplier to these policy-generated disasters, making them progressively worse than they would have been in a stable climate.
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