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Typhoon hits Siberia, kills at least three. And yes, climate change is involved. [1]

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Date: 2023-08-11  

Although it hasn’t been reported much in the western press, the remnants of Typhoon Khanun hit Siberia this week, causing floods in several districts. The storm left left at least three people dead in Russia's far eastern region of Primorye, the part of Siberia that is closest to North Korea.

RFE/RL’s Siberian Realities reported today (in Russian) that a woman drowned in Ussuriysk, and that two children, aged 10 and 12, disappeared near the Bolshaya Ussurska river in the Khorolsky District and were later found dead.

According to today’s Moscow Times, the independent news outlet Govorit NeMoskva reported that animals were panic-stricken. One shelter housing 700 animals was reported sinking, with volunteers trying to save them since official rescue workers were nowhere to be found. A prison in Ussuriysk was inundated, with inmates being forced to haul prison guards away on horse carriages, reportedly “so that so that their feet wouldn’t get wet”.

The storm also killed two people in Okinawa and one in South Korea. The number of deaths in North Korea is unknown.

Although Typhoon Khanun was the first tropical storm to pass north through the Korean Peninsula since record keeping began in 1951, it is not the first typhoon to hit Siberia. In 2002 the remnants of Typhoon Rusa skimmed Primorye’s coastline, and in 1964 the remnants of Typhoon Flossie crossed the border from China into Primorye. I have not found any reports of deaths in Siberia due to these earlier storms.

(At this point a mainstream media account of this flooding — if there was one at all — would probably stop, or would merely note that we can’t link any specific storm to climate change. But this is Daily Kos, where I have the freedom to write about climate change without my boss censoring me, so I’ll write a little about that.)

In 2019 an international team of scientists published a highly-cited paper “Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change Assessment Part II: Projected Response to Anthropogenic Warming” that reported, among other things, that there is good evidence that tropical cyclones have been expanding toward the poles, and that there is increased storm activity near Hawaii. The paper’s authors did not come to a consensus whether this poleward expansion would continue as Earth’s climate continues to get hotter, writing, “Confidence levels in that projection ranged from low (one author) to low-to-medium confidence (four authors), to medium (three authors), to medium-to-high (three authors).”

In short, there’s a good chance Siberia will see more typhoons and flooding due to global warming, but we’re not sure.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/11/2186682/-Typhoon-hits-Siberia-kills-at-least-three-And-yes-climate-change-is-involved

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