Typhoon Noul batters southern China, displaces 340,000 as Hong Kong braces

Before dawn on a late July Sunday, Typhoon Noul — a name meaning the glow of sunrise or sunset — swept across southern China, forcing more than 340,000 people from their homes and stilling the machinery of daily life across Guangdong province and Hong Kong. It was the twelfth Pacific typhoon of the year and the third to strike China in a single month, arriving in a region still counting the dead from the storms that preceded it. The storm is both a meteorological event and a moral one, arriving at the intersection of a civilization's vast carbon output and its equally vast investment in a clea