Pielke's new analysis considered 207 hurricanes that hit the United States between 1900 and 2005. He looked at their strength and course and then overlaid them on a modern map that included all development over the years.
He found that the most devastating storm, had it occurred today, would be the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, popularly known as the Big Blow. Its path through the now heavily developed southern tip of Florida would have caused $157 billion in damage, followed by Katrina, whose toll was $81 billion. Six of the top 10 most damaging storms occurred before 1945.
Pielke and his colleagues determined that with each decade, the damage potential for any given storm doubled, on average, because of development.
Malaria, another problem that may worsen with global warming, also has solutions.
Higher temperatures could allow malaria-carrying mosquitoes to move into Africa's highland regions, where people have little natural immunity from the parasite. Still, the extra burden would be a fraction of the millions of cases that afflict the continent each year.
"If you look at Africa, only 2% is above 2,000 meters," said Paul Reiter, an expert on mosquito-borne disease at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He said that far more deaths would come from the malaria parasite's growing resistance to drug treatments.
"We should be more concerned with controlling the disease than trying to change the weather," said Reiter, who recommended heavier use of pesticides to kill mosquitoes -- the same strategy that eradicated malaria in the United States and elsewhere.
The World Health Organization estimates that over the next decade annual malaria deaths could be cut from 1 million to 250,000 for $3.2 billion a year.
But critics say a major flaw in the adaptation strategy is that the effects of global warming will be unpredictable. It may be possible to adapt to some easily identifiable effects, but when the ecology of an entire planet is altered by rising levels of carbon dioxide, nobody understands the full range of potential perils.
Dealing with the effects without cutting emissions is "like mopping up the floor while keeping one of the faucets still running," said Dr. Jonathan Patz, an environmental health scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a member of the U.N. climate panel.
Other scientists say that some changes could be so catastrophic -- such as sudden changes in the ocean currents that control regional climates -- that it would be impossible to adapt to them.
