Predictions and Postmortems: Hurricanes and the Horrors of War
Hurricane Ian and Putin's attack on Ukraine have a good deal in common. They're warnings about a changing environment and world order, and of our failure to get their messages right.
Making predictions is tough, the New York Yankees’ philosopher-catcher-manager Yogi Berra purportedly said, especially about the future. Writing about why things happened after the fact? Not so much.
Explanations abound for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as well as Hurricane Ian that decimated the Florida coast. Two headlines this week are the latest examples. “How Western Experts Got the Ukraine War So Wrong,” announces the conclusions of an essay in the Geopolitical Monitor by Taras Kuzio, a professor in Kyiv. “US Atlantic Coast Now a Breeding Ground for Supercharged Hurricanes,” a story in the Guardian, previews research by climate scientists on why Ian’s fury means worse storms are on the way.
Given the destructive scale of the events, the gushers of ink spilt on the weather and the war are hardly surprising. From parsing the mystical visions of Russia’s would-be czar and dissecting his retreating army’s performance to reprising warnings about a warming world and its tipping points, the experts on conflict and climate have been working overtime. Their output lacks for neither detailed analysis nor prognoses that lay out its implications, predictions included.
The news media also are doing their part, reporting not only on events but also the accumulating conventional wisdom. As news stories go, the aftermath of Hurricane Ian as well as Ukraine’s battles are beginning to reveal their half-lives. Both can still lead the news, although much of the reporting is slowly but surely migrating below the fold. When it comes to disasters and crises, the cycle isn’t only a reflection of editorial decisions. It also tracks the country’s seemingly inevitable political script.
Take Hurricane Ian. The heartbreaking stories of homes and businesses destroyed and lives upended, not to mention the long slog to rebuild, now and again still make the news. Inquiries into what happened and didn’t before and after the storm are coming next. In fact, the questions for mayors and county bureaucrats—whether they warned early enough, had plans up to snuff, and educated their towns’ newcomers on what to expect—already are putting them in the dock.
But the answers that Florida’s fate can provide won’t come from grading the details of Fort Myer’s emergency management plan or finding who was asleep at the switch. Unfortunately, the question that could address what matters most isn’t likely to be asked: if a warming climate produced this monster, what will it take to prevent or endure the next? Asking what Hurricane Ian’s impact means for a region that remains a destination address should be atop any postmortem’s to-do list. If you’re waiting for Governor DeSantis to raise it, don’t hold your breath.
The challenge requires getting beyond the usual blame-laying and thinking big—for example, an examination of the neighborhood’s risks. CoreLogic, a real estate data company, estimates 33 million homes along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts are vulnerable to hurricane-force wind damage. Some 7.8 million also face destructive storm surge. To size the vulnerability, CoreLogic put the combined cost of their reconstruction at nearly $13 trillion. Compared to the measly $41-70 billion estimated cost for rebuilding after Hurricane Ian, the magnitude alone ought to make the risk top of mind.
The same ought to be the case for the war in Ukraine where postmortems examining who knew and wrote what when aren’t far away. Odds are the Congress, inspectors general, and depending on the political heat, perhaps even a special commission will investigate prewar intelligence on Putin’s aggression. It’s easy to predict the likely proposed fixes at the end of their well-worn trails: more human sources, less group think, better coordination, more dissent, less consensus, more invites to outside experts. Hearty perennials all, they are certain to blossom once more.
The intelligence postmortems should be done. But like the post-hurricane inquiries, don’t expect their nets to be cast too widely; for instance, examining the questions the policymakers asked—their “requirements” in the jargon of the trade—or how they dealt with the intelligence received, including whether they paid attention at all. If history is a guide, what the consumers who found the spies’ and analysts’ products on their desk did with them will get short shrift, if any at all.
A cynic would say, what's new? Or as one wag put it, in Washington there are only intelligence failures and policy successes. And what president is eager to have his performance critiqued while still on stage? Fixing the airplane while flying it is a formidable task. So is fending off political opponents who would be perfectly satisfied to see a crash. In any case, the record is clear. From the invasion of Iraq to Ukraine, intelligence critiques are one thing, hearings into policy missteps another.
The big wheels turning the small ones that will grind down any effort to highlight Hurricane Ian as the latest clarion warning about the environment’s growing threats are no less obvious. A half-billion dollars or so poured over decades by Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and others into the coffers of climate change deniers and the campaigns of politicians in their thrall may be paying diminished dividends. But it continues to pay, nonetheless.
And finally, consider the experts, the environmental and social scientists who respectively analyze the climate’s trends or an authoritarian’s utterances and capabilities. How many will sign their names to their forecasts that the worst will happen—that the next hurricane could well make Ian look like a warm-up act, or that Putin’s megalomania will throw Russian forces against, say, Poland or the Baltic states?
Credit Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History for one explanation why. A historian of science, Butterfield wrote his 1931 essay on historiography, the study of historical writing. The Cambridge don called out his colleagues for a fixation on picking winners; that is, looking only for evidence in the past explaining the inevitable progress of events that created the present. That predilection, Butterfield asserted, oversimplifies history as well as our understanding of why we arrived where we are today.
“If we can exclude certain things on the grounds that they have no direct bearing on the present, we have removed the most troublesome elements in (the past’s) complexity,” Butterfield wrote concluding, “the crooked is made straight.” Among history’s greatest lessons, he argued, is its demonstration of “the unpredictable character of the ultimate consequences of any given act or decision of men. It’s also a lesson, Butterfield noted, “that can only be learned in detail.”