WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Recent hurricanes that have battered  the U.S. east coast, flooding towns, drowning livestock and  sweeping away beaches, are nothing compared to what's on the way, climate scientists said on Saturday.
 
"People think Camille and Andrew were devastating, but we  haven't seen anything yet," Kam-biu Liu of Louisiana State  University in New Orleans said. Camille, which struck in 1969, killed 256 people, and Andrew, which hit in 1992, killed 56 people and caused $26.5  billion in damage.

"If we switch back to a more active state, the U.S. could be hit a lot more frequently than we've seen in our lifetimes,"  Liu told a meeting of the American Association for the  Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Liu's presented research shows the hurricane activity of the  most recent millennium was mild. Storms have been less frequent  and less intense in the past 1,000 years than in the centuries  before.

His team looked at sediment in coastal lakes and marshes along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean,  and has been able to track hurricane damage, including layers of  dumped sand, going back 5,000 years. "Our records of hurricanes only go back about 150 years, and that is a short time to observe these storms and to predict the probability of being hit by a catastrophic hurricane," Liu said in a statement.

The worst hurricane is a Category 5 -- with winds greater than 155 miles per hour. A category 4 has winds of 131 to 155 miles  per hour.  In 1935 a Category 5 hurricane smashed the Florida Keys and  killed 600 people, while Camille devastated the coast of  Mississippi. Andrew was a Category 4.

"We need to look back longer to put the present climate into perspective. If we don't look far enough back in the past,  we don't know what could be in store for us in the future," Liu  said.

He found that catastrophic hurricanes, in categories 4 and 5, hit the U.S. mainland every 300 to 600 years.  James Elsner, a climatologist at Florida State University, found that the past 30 years has been especially mild in terms  of hurricanes.

He agrees with Liu that it is becoming increasingly likely a Category 4 or 5 hurricane will hit the Gulf coast within the nest 10 to 20 years.

 The potential for damage is greater now that more people live along the shore and have built up huge, expensive developments, Liu and Elsner both said.

"The Gulf Coast has experienced tremendous population and  construction growth over the last 30 years and we have greatly  increased our vulnerability to devastating damage by developing  heavily in these coastal regions over a period when storms were  less frequent," Elsner said.

Mitch Battros
Producer - Earth Changes TV
http://www.earthchangesTV.com