A direct hit on Shanghai, a metropolis of 18 million people and the financial hub of China, could make Katrina look like a minor squall.

Any chance you could flesh out this comparison? Does Shanghai have an analogue of Katrina's system of levees (to fail)? Could large parts of it be rendered uninhabitable for years? I admit to even being flummoxed by the typhoon vs. hurricane thing.

I do recall hearing that roughly half of the world's population lives within a meter or two of sea level. Any storm surge going beyond that will adversely affect them. Sea levels rising with melting icecaps over the coming years will affect them globally, not just locally, as storms will.

And I believe a typhoon is just a hurricane-force storm on the other side of the International Dateline.

Stupid comment.

Has Lenard ever lived in Shanghai? Likely not.

The only thing that could hit Shanghai is a tsunami like what happened to LOS (Thailand) in 2004.

Try this one Lenard: "What would an asteroid like the one that hit siberal 100 years ago do to New York?"

I've visited Shanghai twice, though not for awhile.

Thankfully, typhoon Wipha made landfall south of Shanghai, so we don't get to find out, this time, what happens when a monster typhoon directly hits a coastal city of 18 million.

Shanghai regularly gets huge and nasty floods.

And the people brush it off without much care...huge winds and great rain make for fun nights of ma jong and bai jiu.

How? A sense of comradeship, well built (cement not wood) houses and apartments, lots of rice and other foods stored up in the average fangzi and a history of (man-made) disasters because their 'city-state' is in China.

The Katrina comparison is silly...

The only thing that could wipe out Shanghai is a tsunami...as that was purely nature destroying lives while Katrina was nature plus some rotten 'human nature.' Get it?