Quotulatiousness

October 1, 2024

Devastation in the Carolinas

Filed under: Environment, Personal, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

My oldest friend moved to the United States many years ago, moving around the country as his job dictated, but a few years back he and his wife found their perfect house near Asheville, NC. We had emailed to see how they were doing, but got no answer. Yesterday, I got a call from my friend’s cell phone to say that he and his wife were fine and they’d taken in an elderly neighbour until things get back to normal, but they currently don’t have electricity, land line telephone, or municipal water, but they’re otherwise fine. Their house is well above flood level, and he has sufficient camping supplies to keep them going for a while. He loaned his chainsaw to another neighbour who was trying to organize work parties to cut away fallen trees and branches and get more of the local roads open again (my friend recently had lyme disease and doesn’t want to trust his hands doing something as risky as running a chainsaw). We kept the call as short as possible, as he’ll have to manually recharge his phone until power is restored.

Virginia Postrel is originally from that same area of western North Carolina and northwestern South Carolina and reports on how her family in the area is doing in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene:

One of the many examples of the “horizontal forest” on nearly every road in Greenville, SC.
Photo by Virginia’s brother Sam M. Inman IV.

If you read my autobiographical reminiscences, you may have realized that I have family in Upstate South Carolina and western North Carolina, which have been hit hard by the unexpected ferocity of Hurricane Helene. Power has been out in Greenville, SC, for days and roads are nearly impassable because of downed trees on nearly every block.

My brother Sam, who went out in a truck on Friday to buy gasoline for his generator, said only about half the stations that had working pumps and were running out of gas quickly. “Lines of cars around the block … reminiscent of the 1970s”, he texted. He went out again today and found a stark difference between local QuikTrip stations and others. At QT, the lines were longer but flowed faster because stations had closed all but a single entrance and exit. Elsewhere, stations were chaotic traffic jams. At one point, he found himself unable to exit after fueling up because the cars behind and in front of him left no to maneuver room. (He persuaded the one behind him to ease away from his bumper.)

The assisted living place where my mother lives has a generator and at first continued to operate its kitchen and elevators. By today, however, the generator had become unreliable, the lights were flickering, few employees could get to work, and the kitchen was offering dry Cheerios for breakfast. Sam brought our mom to his house, which has no power. He later realized that he needed to return to get her medicine, which usually is delivered daily. I can only imagine how residents who don’t have local family — or who are in the memory care wing! — are managing.

Even people who were prepared with generators, many bought after a blizzard 20 years ago, needed gasoline to power them and, they soon realized, adapters to connect them to household appliances. The adapter aisle at Home Depot was quickly depleted.

The good news is that food is available. Grocery stores are operating more or less as normal, assuming you can get to them. When you sell frozen food, you apparently install large, reliable generators.

Meanwhile, my cousin in Asheville finally got weak cell signal back today. We’d been unable to communicate with her before now. With her husband, pets, and 95-year-old mother, she’s evacuating to Winston-Salem through the weekend, hoping Duke Power will live up to promises that power will be restored by Friday but preparing in case it takes a few days longer.

Although terrible in some areas, the flooding isn’t as bad as it might be, thanks to the region’s many man-made lakes. They absorbed water that otherwise would have flowed into populated towns.

December 16, 2023

Do Droughts Make Floods Worse?

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 5 Sept 2023

The answer isn’t as simple as you might think!

One statistician famously said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. And even something as simple as the flow of water into the soil has so many complexities to keep track of. Like most answers to simple questions in engineering and in life: the answer is that it’s complicated.
(more…)

August 31, 2023

Disaster response plans? I’m sure they’ve established terms of reference for the to-be-appointed blue-ribbon committees to look into that … eventually

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line Jen Gerson discovers once again that our federal government is much more interested in making dramatic announcements — usually repeated many, many times — than in actually doing anything. Their response to her inquiry about federal disaster response planning is anything but comforting to worriers among the citizenry:

Front page of the Calgary Sun after major flooding hit downtown Calgary in June, 2013.

The clever and devoted readers of The Line will have already surmised that I am a touch neurotic, prone to catastrophize, and gifted with one of those imaginations that is perfectly capable of picturing in vivid detail every worst-case scenario playing out simultaneously.

And so, dear devotee, you will have no trouble picturing my mental state in recent months, in what will come be known as the Summer of Fire. Until next summer, anyway. Until then, it’s always fun to watch two cities burn (or come close to burning) over the course of a single weekend, eh?

Watching the long lines of cars fleeing Yellowknife, or the beachcombers lining the shores of Lake Okanagan as swathes of West Kelowna disappeared, I have to admit that my mind wandered into its darker wings.

Yellowknife and Kelowna are cities, yes, but relatively small ones: Yellowknife is remote and served by only one road, making it a particular logistical challenge to evacuate. But it’s still only a town of 20,000 people. This ought to be well within the capacity of a wealthy, organized G7 country.

What if wildfires threatened, say, Edmonton? A city of a million. How would we get everyone out? Where would they go? What would they eat?

And this line of internal paranoia brought me to the media landing page of the minister of Public Safety Canada. I have questions — to my mind, basic questions — about this country’s capacity to handle major catastrophes. They were as follows:

  • What are the transportation resources typically available to facilitate an evacuation: in an emergency, how many people could we move by air or land, and how quickly?
  • Does the federal government maintain stores of food or other basic goods? How much? How many people could we feed?
  • Do we have the capacity to establish temporary housing for evacuees displaced by an emergency situation? If so, how many people could it hold, and for how long?

I also had a few more general queries. I am aware that they may not have been fully answerable by the federal government, but I was curious about what the response would be. Specifically:

  • Are we going to rebuild everything that burns down, or do we have to accept that climate change will make some previously inhabited sections of Canada unlivable?
  • What kind of resources will the federal government marshal toward hardening infrastructure to prepare for more serious floods and fires in the future? Is this a priority?

To be clear, none of these questions are “gotchas”. I was not out to catch the federal government by surprise, nor to embarrass it in any way. I don’t think any of these questions is unreasonable; in fact, I expected some fairly stock answers. That is, I expected that a federal government would keep at least a basic running inventory of things like temporary housing or food supplies. Further, I would have been perfectly content with very general answers. Perhaps some of my questions were misguided, and I would have been happy to understand that as well.

What I got was, well, I’m going to show you exactly what I got, offer a little of my own running commentary, and allow you to come to your own conclusions.

July 5, 2023

Why Engineers Can’t Control Rivers

Filed under: Environment, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 4 Apr 2023

💧 The unintended consequences of trying to change the course of rivers
(more…)

March 15, 2023

Not only is the science “settled” … it’s already in the school textbooks

Filed under: Books, Education, Environment, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Friedman on his attempts to follow up on claims made in a textbook on climate change already in use in US public schools:

Introduction to Modern Climate Change by Andrew Dessler is an elementary climate science textbook, now in its third edition. In Chapter 9, “Impacts of Climate Change”, it has:

    Scientists predict that sea level will rise 47 to 73 cm (19 to 29 inches) above 1995–2014 levels by 2100. This may not sound like a significant challenge, but it is much larger than the 18 cm of sea level experienced over the twentieth century, which is already challenging for many who live near sea level. Like temperature, these predictions of sea-level rise might sound small but, also like temperature, they are not. In Florida, for example, a sea-level rise in the middle of the projected range would inundate 9 percent of Florida’s current land area at high tide. This includes virtually all of the Florida Keys as well as 70 percent of Miami-Dade County. Almost one-tenth of Florida’s current population, or nearly 2 million people, live in this vulnerable zone, and it includes residential real estate valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. It also includes important infrastructure, such as two nuclear reactors, three prisons, and 68 hospitals.

That struck me as implausible, given what else I had seen on the effect of sea level rise. The footnote for the claim was to Stanton and Ackerman (2007), which turned out to be not a peer reviewed journal article but a report commissioned by the Environmental Defense fund, an environmentalist group. It includes the same claims, but for 27 inches of sea-level rise not the 24 inches that is Dessler’s “middle of the projected range”. It refers the reader to Appendix C for “detailed sources and methodology”. Going there, I found:

    To estimate the impact of sea-level rise on land area, populations, and public and private assets and infrastructure, we began with a 1:250,000 Digital Elevation Model (DEM) map of the State of Florida, and divided the state into “vulnerable” and “not vulnerable” zones demarcated by 1.5 meters of elevation and other factors described by Titus and Richman (2000) as corresponding to 27 inches of sea-level rise.

So what they are showing as the vulnerable area is not the 27 inch or 24 inch contour but the 1.5 meter (5 feet) contour. The explanation, from Titus, J.G. and C. Richman (2001). “Maps of lands vulnerable to sea level rise: modeled elevations along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts“. Climate Research 18: 205–228, a journal article written by two EPA people and presumably peer reviewed:

    Thus, at a typical site, the 1.5-meter contour would be flooded by spring high tides (i.e., high tides during new and full moons) when sea level rises 80 cm

Figure 1 below (Titus and Richman Figure 4) is a map of Florida with the region within the 1.5 meter contour colored red, the region between 1.5 and 3.5 blue. Dessler’s middle of the projected range is 60 cm. Stanton and Ackerman’s 27 inches is 68.6 cm. The map shows what its authors claim would be flooded at 80cm.

Figure 2 below is a population density map of Florida from Wikipedia to which I have added the 1.5m contours from Figure 1. The large flooded area on the southern tip of Florida includes none of the densely populated area around Miami; only one of the tiny areas farther north appears to be in part on a populated area. That is not surprising — areas very close to sea level are likely to be marsh, in this case the everglades, and poor places to build on.

Stanton and Ackerman claim that their own calculations, using data bases of elevation and population, produce a total population in the at-risk area of 1.5 million. That was the figure Dessler gave in his first edition, presumably increased to almost 2 million in the third edition to reflect the increase in Florida’s population. Figure 2 shows why I don’t believe it. The flooded areas are in places almost all of which have very low population density, making it hard to see how flooding nine percent of the land area, most of it in the everglades, can flood almost ten percent of the population. Even if all of the Florida Keys are flooded, their total population is only about 80,000.

That problem is in addition to the fact that Dessler’s claim is for 60 cm of sea level rise, Stanton and Ackerman’s, from which Dessler got his figure for how many people are flooded, is for 68.6 cm (27 inches), and Titus and Richman get the 1.5 m contour that Stanton and Ackerman say they are using by assuming 80cm of sea level rise. Further reasons for suspicion are that Stanton and Ackerman gave figures for sea level rise substantially higher than either the IPCC figure at the time or the current IPCC figure, which suggests that they were trying to make the consequences of climate change look as scary as possible, and that they write “1.5 meters of elevation and other factors described by Titus and Richman (2000) as corresponding to 27 inches of sea-level rise” when Titus and Richman actually describe 1.5 meters as corresponding to 80 cm (31.5 inches) of sea level rise.

April 22, 2022

QotD: George Carlin’s appropriate-for-Earth-Day monologue

Filed under: Environment, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Let me tell you about endangered species, all right? Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control nature. It’s arrogant meddling. It’s what got us in trouble in the first place. Doesn’t anybody understand that? Interfering with nature. Over 90%, way over 90% of all the species that have ever lived on this planet, ever lived, are gone. They’re extinct. We didn’t kill them all. They just disappeared. That’s what nature does.

We’re so self-important. So self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven’t learned how to care for one another, we’re gonna save the fucking planet?

I’m getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I’m tired of fucking Earth Day, I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. They don’t care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.

Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet … the planet … the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!

We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.

You wanna know how the planet’s doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet’s doing. You wanna know if the planet’s all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic … asshole.

So, the plastic is here, our job is done, we can be phased out now. And I think that’s begun. Don’t you think that’s already started? I think, to be fair, the planet sees us as a mild threat. Something to be dealt with. And the planet can defend itself in an organized, collective way, the way a beehive or an ant colony can. A collective defense mechanism. The planet will think of something. What would you do if you were the planet? How would you defend yourself against this troublesome, pesky species? Let’s see … Viruses. Viruses might be good. They seem vulnerable to viruses. And, uh … viruses are tricky, always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed. Perhaps, this first virus could be one that compromises the immune system of these creatures. Perhaps a human immunodeficiency virus, making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along. And maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction.

Well, that’s a poetic note. And it’s a start. And I can dream, can’t I? See I don’t worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we’re part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron … whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while.

George Carlin, “The arrogance of mankind”.

February 25, 2022

This tiny railway across the sea has an important job

Filed under: Environment, Germany, History, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 15 Nov 2021

The Lorenbahn, the Lüttmoorsiel-Nordstrandischmoor island railway, is famous for the tiny, private trains that take residents to and from the mainland. But that’s not why it was built: and it’s got a more useful purpose as well.

Thanks to everyone from Landesbetrieb für Küstenschutz, Nationalpark und Meeresschutz Schleswig-Holstein, and to the islanders, for all your time and patience!

Camera operator: Richard Bielau
Producer: Maximilian Thesseling of Klein Aber https://kleinaber.de/

I’m at https://tomscott.com
on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott
and on Instagram as tomscottgo

November 21, 2021

British Columbia’s annus horribilis

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson does a distressingly good imitation of Cassandra’s warnings … and just like Cassandra, her words are probably going to be ignored until things get much worse:

“A job well done by @RCAF_ARC’s 442 Transport & Rescue Squadron. Using 3 CH149 helicopters and supported by a CC115 Buffalo, the Sqn evacuated 311 people, 26 Dogs and a Cat to safety in Agassiz after being trapped by landslides on roads in BC.
RCAF Operations, Nov 16, 2021 (https://twitter.com/RCAFOperations/status/1460664604648947721)”

So now here it is. We have flooding so acute that we are airlifting food supplies to small towns in British Columbia cut off by destroyed transport routes that it may take weeks to repair. The damage has cut off rail and road links from the city of Vancouver to the rest of Canada. Not only does this trap all the rail and truck resources now stranded in the isolated areas, it also cuts off one of the largest ports in North America in the midst of a global supply chain crisis.

On top of that, many of those economists who told us inflation was not going to happen are now hedging their bets. Oh, and we are still dealing with a pandemic, and its lingering health and economic damage.

Once again we have proven ourselves utterly dependent on the military to manage a domestic crisis — a military that is so profoundly underfunded and under equipped that it has reached a state of generational decline. (For more on that, read Matt Gurney’s piece in The Line from yesterday [linked here].)

Meanwhile, we’ve been writing here at The Line about the utter collapse of our institutional capacity; the unavoidable fact that our governments seem totally unable to anticipate obvious, immediate, and pressing disasters. A recent example of that came from the federal government’s failure to sound the alarm on COVID-19 back in 2020. However, the residents of British Columbia sure didn’t get the same kind of notice of imminent danger that their American counterparts surely did.

God help us if a really bad winter storm hits somewhere in this country over the next six to eight weeks. Another severe ice storm, or a real blizzard; I genuinely fear we would have people starving to death in their homes for lack of resources to spare to dig them out.

I am a 37-year-old woman who had never seen an empty shelf in a grocery store until COVID-19. Now I’m seeing scenes out of Kamloops supermarkets that look like something out of The Walking Dead. No serious shortages in 35 years — and now I’ve seen two episodes of panic buying clearing out the shelves in the past two.

We keep on acting as if this disaster is the peak. This is the worst year ever, and we’re going to get back to normal any minute now.

Maybe.

But what if we don’t?

May 23, 2018

Why The Netherlands Isn’t Under Water

Filed under: Europe, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Engineering
Published on 31 Oct 2017

September 5, 2017

The 100 Year Flood Is Not What You Think It Is (Maybe)

Filed under: Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:21

Published on 6 Mar 2016

Today on Practical Engineering we’re talking about hydrology, and I took a little walk through my neighborhood to show you some infrastructure you may have never noticed before.

Almost everyone agrees that flooding is bad. Most years it’s the number one natural disaster in the US by dollars of damage. So being able to characterize flood risks is a crucial job of civil engineers. Engineering hydrology has equal parts statistics and understanding how society treats risks. Water is incredibly important to us, and it shapes almost every facet of our lives, but it’s almost never in the right place at the right time. Sometimes there’s not enough, like in a drought or just an arid region, but we also need to be prepared for the times when there’s too much water, a flood. Rainfall and streamflow have tremendous variability and it’s the engineer’s job to characterize that so that we can make rational and intelligent decisions about how we develop the world around us. Thanks for watching!

FEMA Floodplain Maps: https://msc.fema.gov/portal
USGS Stream Gages: http://maps.waterdata.usgs.gov/mapper

“So, let’s consider the concept of a ‘500-year flood'”

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Charlie Martin explains how it’s possible to have two “500-year floods” in less than 500 years:

There have been a lot of people suggesting that Harvey the Hurricane shows that “really and truly climate change is happening, see, in-your-face deniers!”

Of course, it’s possible, even though the actual evidence — including the 12-year drought in major hurricanes — is against it. But hurricanes are a perfect opportunity for stupid math tricks. Hurricanes also provide great opportunities to explain concepts that are unclear to people. So, let’s consider the concept of a “500-year flood.”

Most people hear this and think it means “one flood this size in 500 years.” The real definition is subtly different: saying “a 500-year flood” actually means “there is one chance in 500 of a flood this size happening in any year.”

It’s called a “500-year flood” because statistically, over a long enough time, we would expect to have roughly one such flood on average every 500 years. So, if we had 100,000 years of weather data (and things stayed the same otherwise, which is an unrealistic assumption) then we’d expect to have seen 100,000/500- or 200 500-year floods [Ed. typo fixed] at that level.

The trouble is, we’ve only got about 100 years of good weather data for the Houston area.

August 30, 2017

“Houston is built on what amounts to a massive flood plain”

Filed under: Environment, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While nobody expects 50 inches of rain to fall in one storm, Houston is still badly situated to withstand flooding even from lesser weather events due to its location on a flood plain:

Houston is built on what amounts to a massive flood plain, pitted against the tempestuous Gulf of Mexico and routinely hammered by the biggest rainstorms in the nation.

It is a combination of malicious climate and unforgiving geology, along with a deficit of zoning and land-use controls, that scientists and engineers say leaves the nation’s fourth most populous city vulnerable to devastating floods like the one caused this week by Hurricane Harvey.

“Houston is very flat,” said Robert Gilbert, a University of Texas at Austin civil engineer who helped investigate the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “There is no way for the water to drain out.”

Indeed, the city has less slope than a shower floor.

Harvey poured as much as 374 billion gallons of water within the city limits, exceeding the capacity of rivers, bayous, lakes and reservoirs. Experts said the result was predictable.

The storm was unprecedented, but the city has been deceiving itself for decades about its vulnerability to flooding, said Robert Bea, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and UC Berkeley emeritus civil engineering professor who has studied hurricane risks along the Gulf Coast.

The city’s flood system is supposed to protect the public from a 100-year storm, but Bea calls that “a 100-year lie” because it is based on a rainfall total of 13 inches in 24 hours.

“That has happened more than eight times in the last 27 years,” Bea said. “It is wrong on two counts. It isn’t accurate about the past risk and it doesn’t reflect what will happen in the next 100 years.”

Some of the blame (a lot of the blame) for locating vulnerable properties in flood-prone areas is due to the US government’s flood insurance program:

Texans, watch out. An aftershock is following behind the catastrophic flooding produced by Hurricane Harvey in coastal Texas: The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is coming up for reauthorization.

The main lesson that the public and policymakers ought to learn from Harvey is: Don’t build in flood plains, and especially don’t rebuild in flood plains. Unfortunately, the flood insurance program teaches the exact opposite lesson, selling subsidized insurance whose premiums do not come close to covering the risks home and business owners in flood prone areas face.

As a result, the NFIP is currently $25 billion in debt.

Federally subsidized flood insurance represents a moral hazard, Kevin Starbuck, Assistant City Manager and former Emergency Management Coordinator for the City of Amarillo, argues, because it encourages people to take on more risk because taxpayers bear the cost of those hazards.

Federal Emergency Management Agency data shows that from 1978 through 2015, 3.8 percent of flood insurance policyholders have filed repetitively for losses that account for a disproportionate 35.5 percent of flood loss claims and 30.5 percent of claim payments, Starbuck says. Most of these properties were grandfathered in before the NFIP issued its flood insurance rate maps. The NFIP is not permitted to refuse them insurance or charge them rates based on the actual risks they face.

Clearly, taxpayers should not be required to subsidize people who choose to build and live on flood plains. When Congress reauthorizes the NFIP, it should initiate a phase-in of charging grandfathered properities premiums commensurate with their risks. This will likely lower the market values of affected homes and businesses and thus send a strong signal to others to avoid building and living in such risky areas.

August 28, 2015

QotD: The unusually lucky 20th century, meteorologically speaking

Filed under: Environment, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I read a lot of history and thus know a fair bit about how weather impact has been perceived by humans over time. It is a fact that the 20th century was an abnormally lucky hundred years, meteorologically speaking. The facts I managed to jam into tweets included (a) the superstorm that flooded 300 square miles of the Central Valley in California in the 1860s, (b) rainfall levels we’d consider drought conditions were normal in the U.S. Midwest before about 1905, and (c) storms of a violence we’d find hard to believe were commonly reported in the 1800s. I had specifically in mind something I learned from the book Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, which relays eyewitness accounts of thunderstorms so intense that travelers had to steeple their hands over their noses in order to breathe air instead of water; but a sense that storms of really theatrical violence were once common comes through in many other histories.

We had a quiet century geophysically as well — no earthquakes even nearly as bad as the New Madrid event of 1812, which broke windows as far north as Montreal. And no solar storms to compare with the Carrington Event of 1859, which seriously damaged the then-nascent telegraph infrastructure and if it recurred today would knock out power and telecomms so badly that we’d be years recovering and casualties would number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly the millions.

(I’m concentrating on 19th-century reports because those tended to be well-documented, but earlier records tell us it was the 20th century calm that was unusual, not the 19th-century violence.)

The awkward truth is that there are very large forces in play in the biosphere, and when they wander out of the ranges we’re adapted to, we suffer and die a lot and there really isn’t a great deal we can do about it; we don’t operate at the required energy scales. For that matter, I can think of several astronomical catastrophes that could be lurking just outside our light-cone only to wipe out all multicellular life on Earth next week. Reality is like that.

Eric S. Raymond, “Heavy weather and bad juju”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-03.

February 13, 2014

Flooding in Britain – call for the Witchfinder Floodfinder General!

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Rob Lyons asks who is to blame for the current flooding in Britain. The answer may be … nobody:

Floods in the UK are getting worse. There’s not much we can do it about it. It’s caused by climate change, which in turn is caused by human beings. It’s payback time.

There you go. In one paragraph, I’ve saved you having to read British newspapers or watch British TV news for the next few days. Of course, the recent flooding is a nightmare for those affected. It’s also a dream for lazy TV news editors who want to plonk their reporters in front of some interesting backdrop offering trite statements about a human-interest story. But the discussion about the causes of the floods and whether we can – or should – do anything about them is rather more worrying than TV’s dumbed-down ‘news values’.

[…]

A briefing published by the UK Met Office earlier this month highlights just how unusual the weather is at present. ‘Although no individual storm can be regarded as exceptional, the clustering and persistence of the storms is highly unusual. December and January were exceptionally wet. For England and Wales this was one of, if not the most, exceptional periods of winter rainfall in at least 248 years. The two-month total (December + January) of 372.2mm for the south-east and central southern England region is the wettest any two-month period in the series from 1910.’ It’s the conveyor belt of stormy weather, rather than any particular individual event, which is causing the problems. The ground is already soaked and rivers are already high; further rainfall has nowhere to go but out on to the flood plains.

However, a quick look at the Met Office briefing shows that while rainfall in southern England in January was very exceptional, it is hard to glean any particular overall pattern – other than that rainfall is very variable.

January rainfall, southern England, 1910-2014. Source: Met Office

January rainfall, southern England, 1910-2014. Source: Met Office

Indeed, just two years ago, Britain was in drought. Consecutive winters of below-average rainfall had left water companies enforcing restrictions on supply. Then the heavens opened, and it seems to have barely stopped raining since. So how on earth did the head of the Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, conclude that while there was ‘no definitive answer’ to what caused the storms, ‘all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change’? Indeed, Slingo is not alone in her assessment. The prime minister, David Cameron, said in January that he ‘suspected’ climate change was behind the floods. Labour leader Ed Miliband declared that climate change was sure to bring ‘more flooding, more storms’. Yet less than a year ago, scientists were assuring us that climate change would lead to more droughts in the future in the UK.

January 24, 2014

Government subsidies that make flooding worse

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

Chris Edwards on the oddity of an EU subsidy that inadvertently makes it more likely that floods will be worse:

… Britain has been suffering from river flooding, and a Daily Mail article explains how subsidies are a key culprit: “Thought ‘extreme weather’ was to blame for the floods? Wrong. The real culprit is the European subsidies that pay UK farmers to destroy the very trees that soak up the storm.”

The author is a liberal environmentalist, but his piece illustrates how liberals and libertarians can share common ground on the issue of government subsidies.

The article describes how forests in the upstream areas of watersheds can mitigate floods. However, there “is an unbreakable rule laid down by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment … that land has to be free from what it calls ‘unwanted vegetation.’ Land covered by trees is not eligible. The subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills.”

In the United States, we’ve got our own environment-damaging farm subsidies. We’ve also got the Army Corps of Engineers, which the Daily Mail could be describing when it refers to British policy: “Flood defence, or so we are told almost everywhere, is about how much concrete you can pour.

Another foolhardy thing, in the long term, is government subsidizing people to rebuild after devastating floods … in the same location that is just as likely to be damaged in the next flood. If you can’t get property insurance without getting the government to force insurers to offer it, you’ve probably built in an area that you shouldn’t have. A lot of the perception that major storms are more dangerous now than fifty years ago is that a lot of buildings are being erected in areas where storm damage is more likely to occur.

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