We all know that things are shifting, and we also know the current administration cares the least about environmental issues than any other administration since WWII. The question is how that affects things at the zip code level. The planet is warming, storms are getting stronger, frost-free days are getting longer. We can talk about these things in general terms, but it's really difficult to apply to what happens in your own backyard, because weather and climate are not the same thing. Weather is what's happening to you right now or tomorrow, climates are broad bands, so it's often best to just speak in the broadest possible terms.
We've got an event going on in the Central Pacific, in Guam, in the Mariana Islands that allows these two things to interact though, in a way that is unfortunately very specific. The issue is we have a super typhoon (Pacific hurricane), that is striking the Mariana Islands, which includes the US military facilities in Saipan and Guam specifically.
Now Guam is the premier American leaping off point for pretty much all of Asia. The advantage of having Guam in the American stack is that it's American territory, so we don't have to worry about negotiating with anyone, and it's a couple thousand miles off the mainland, so there's really no good weapon systems that can reliably project power to it. The Chinese might, for example, be able to hit it with a missile, but that's not the same as being able to do an easy amphibious landing (remember, China has a large navy, but only a handful of ships are blue-water capable, over 90% of their fleet only have a range of appx. 1000miles (1,610km).
So if you can take care of the missile defense issue, it's perfect to project power everywhere from Northern Japan to the Strait of Malacca. Well, it's getting hit by a class 5 typhoon right now (April 18th at time of writing this) and that means they've reduced themselves to what they call emergency services, which is U.S. Navy speak for..”Holy shit!! Please don't ask us to do anything right now because we can't even go outside!!
Guam gets hit by a regular typhoon about every seven to nine years, and this is the second super typhoon that has hit it in under seven years. Plus it was still recovering from the damage of the last one in 2019/2020, the flooding is already extreme and it's only going to get worse in the next 24 hours, it's pretty nasty. Also, this is shaping up to be a super El Niño year on top of that. While people living here in the U.S. or North America, that's kind of a mixed bag, but if you're in the Central or South Pacific, your chances of getting hit by a typhoon are roughly triple. So here we have a tiny little footprint of an island in the South Pacific that is critical for American power projection throughout the entire Asian theater.
It's obviously at sea level, so you've got that problem, but the weather is basically pummeling it over and over and over again and with the direction things are evolving that will probably happen more and more often. Now, going from flooding and damage, to the inability to function there, are two very different things, but if you look at a map of the region, you will notice that there is nothing else around. As a rule, the islands in this part of the world are low and coral based, so it doesn't take much flooding to do immense damage. there is no alternative here.
So it's not just an issue of rebuilding after, it may, in a few years, be about having to abandon the Guam facility and finding a different way to project power. At a minimum, that would require a different sort of hardware, or simply writing off the entire military strategies for dealing with things like Taiwan. So, the danger is here now, the damage is here now, and it is VERY real, but there is no good substitution for what we use Guam for. There's really no other place to plant a flag and project power from, and this is just going to be the nature of this part of the world for at least the rest of the century, or until we invent a new sort of naval warfare technology.
