I’m sure almost everyone saw dramatic and scary images of “Hurricane Sandy” like this one that went round my friends’ Facebook timelines yesterday:
As you’ve probably guessed from the title, this is a ‘shopped image. RJS Security has a quick primer on detecting doctored images using this example:
Whenever a major media event happens (like Hurricane Sandy), we are inundated with news. Sometimes that news is useful, but often it merely exists to create FUD… Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. While I have not personally seen any malware campaigns capitalizing on the event yet, it is inevitable. The pattern is generally as follows:
Event hits the news as media outlets try to one-up eachother to get the word out.
People spread the warnings, making them just a little bit worse each time they are copied.
Other people create hoaxes to ride the wave of popularity.
Still other people create custom hoaxes to exploit the disaster financially.
A few minutes ago, at least in my little corner of the internet, we hit stage 3 when this image was posted
ESR posts a “we’re fine” report on Google+ and then points out the damage to New York City’s power grid may be incredibly expensive and difficult to repair quickly:
Reporting from a diner in Paoli, PA, near 40°02′27″N 75°29′24″W.
Power went out in Malvern about 2AM this morning. After sleep, we have fled to where there is power and light and steak and eggs.
It feels like aftermath. The NOAA seems to no longer be issuing track updates and the storm track has disappeared from the Google crisis map, suggesting that the anticipated conversion to a large but normally (un)structured nor’easter has completed.
This area got off lightly, especially compared to the ration of apocalypse-now the storm handed New York City. Exploding high-power transformers are very bad news — they tell us that all that tunnel flooding seriously damaged the downtown end of the Manhatten power grid. That kind of equipment is extremely expensive and difficult to replace, and the halogen compounds they use as insulators are hazmats when they get loose. The prompt repair costs are going to be a large fraction of a billion dollars.
But that isn’t the worst of it. Considering that this will have have paralyzed the largest node in the international financial system for some time, downstream economic losses could easily crack a trillion dollars. The impact will be global and manifest as higher prices for everything with cross-border supply chains, rippling all the way down to Third-World farmers buying fertilizer.
Update: In almost record-setting time, here’s the first example of the Broken Window Fallacy to make it past the editors:
Disasters can give the ailing construction sector a boost, and unleash smart reinvestment that actually improves stricken areas and the lives of those that survive intact. Ultimately, Americans, as they always seem to do, will emerge stronger in the wake of disaster and rebuild better-making a brighter future in the face of tragedy.
Sandy is unusual storm and complex to gauge. Coming late in the season and combining with cold fronts to the west and north, it is really a post-tropical cyclone and has the potential to deliver epic destruction. However, coming so soon after Irene in August 2011, the level of anticipation and preparedness demonstrated by federal and state officials is commendable and should mitigate some losses-especially loss of life.
[. . .]
However, rebuilding after Sandy, especially in an economy with high unemployment and underused resources in the construction industry, will unleash at least $15-$20 billion in new direct private spending — likely more as many folks rebuild larger than before, and the capital stock that emerges will prove more economically useful and productive.
At Forbes, Tim Worstall patiently explains that the damage from Hurricane Sandy (or any major storm) will appear to boost GDP, because it only measures money spent to repair damage, not the costs incurred or the opportunities foregone because of the damage:
We know very well that Hurricane (or Frankenstorm as some are calling it) Sandy will leave a trail of destruction across parts of the US today. There will almost certainly be deaths, as there have been in the hurricane’s passage across the Caribbean. And there will also be a boost to the US economy. Which is really evidence of quite how wrong we are in the way that we measure the economy.
[. . .]
The problem with this is that it is only true because of the way that we calculate GDP. In our working of the numbers we assume that it’s final consumption at market prices: that is, the value that consumers put on everything. However, this is not true of government spending. It’s very difficult indeed to work out what government spending is actually worth: for as we’ve not a choice in it then there’s no market price nor accurate valuation from the people who actually get whatever is produced. Some government spending is most certainly worth more than the actual amount spent. The court system say: a pre-requisite of our having a complex society at all. Other parts not so much: what is the true value of a diversity adviser for example? So what we actually do is value all government spending, for GDP purposes, at the cost of that actual spending. Government spends $100, GDP goes up by $100. That’s just how we define it. This can cause amusement in measuring the success of welfare programs for example. Even Census admits that some of the people who receive Medicaid, or food stamps, value what they receive at less than the cost of providing it.
[. . .]
Now imagine that Hurricane Sandy does $10 billion of damage to that wealth (for our purposes it doesn’t matter whether it’s $100 billion or $1 trillion. Although this obviously matters to everyone except for the purposes of this example). The US is now worth $99.990 Trillion. GDP might rise to $15.1 trillion as we repair that damage. But we’re not in fact any richer at all: despite the fact that GDP has gone up. What has actually happened is that some of our stock of wealth has been destroyed and we’re having to do more work in order to rebuild it. This is exactly the same as our pollution example. We’re measuring what we produce but not the capital stock of what we have (or had).
Yes, the rebound from Sandy may well provide a boost to the economy. But that’s a function of the way that we measure that economy, not a real boost in our general wealth.
James Delingpole on the British government’s latest announcements on flood policy:
Yesterday it was reported that the Coalition had decided we should all be liable for the cost of flood damage, regardless of where we live. This puzzled me, as the Coalition’s decisions so often do. The only way it would make any kind of sense would be if you believed a) flooding is a new and unnatural phenomenon resulting directly from late 20th century Man Made Climate Change or b) that everyone is now so stupid they cannot be trusted to act in their own best interests and that it is therefore government’s job to hold their hands and wipe their bottoms for them from cradle to grave.
To discount a) you only have to go somewhere like the River Severn, just below Worcester Cathedral, and look at the flood marks on the wall. Many of the most dramatic inundations happened in years long before “man made global warming” was even a sinister glint in Al Gore’s eye. This isn’t to say that the cost of flood damage hasn’t risen to unprecedented levels these last few decades. But that has more to do with our insane practice of allowing property developments to be built on flood plains, together with our unfortunate habit of paving and tarmacking everything (such as the front gardens we would once have kept as front gardens) which means that in times of high rainfall floodwater is likely to accumulate in drains more rapidly. Plus, of course, we’re all richer — so there’s more expensive property for flooding to damage.
But it’s the b) aspect I find more worrying because of the way it rides roughshod over the most basic principles of free market economics. Can we really assume that when anybody buys a house by a river — or near a floodplain — they don’t do so in the full knowledge that flood-risk is one of the prices they pay for their pleasing waterside ambience? The very idea is a nonsense. Buyers, being rational, will factor this into their calculations: “OK, so it will be great for fishing and swimming and boating. But getting insurance will be a bugger and we’d better not keep anything too precious on the ground floor.” These complexities will be reflected by the market. While the value of the property may be enhanced by its attractive location, it will simultaneously be decreased by its flood-damage potential.
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David Akin on all the unusual happenings over the past week:
I suspect Alex felt that way because he and his staff had to deal with a) the ongoing battle between students and Premier Jean Charest b) a grisly murder that forced police in Montreal to issue an international warrant for kitten-killing gay porn star Luka Magnotta c) a freak rain storm that put 70 mm of water on the ground in 30 minutes pretty much flooding most of downtown Montreal for an afternoon. But enough of that, let’s get to God using a bear to deliver God’s own brand of justice [. . .]
“The corpse of a man eaten by a B.C. bear was that of a convicted killer, officials have confirmed.”
[. . .]
“46 mm of rain in half an hour floods Montreal.”
[. . .]
On Friday, heavy rain would contribute to flooding which would end up flooding and shutting down Toronto’s Union Station on Friday causing commuter chaos
[. . .]
The Montreal flash floods occurred as Quebec Premier Jean Charest was trying to broker a deal with post-secondary students who have been “on strike” for more than 3 months because they don’t want to pay an extra $350 or so a year in tuition — over five years. Charest has been over-patient. The students have been, as they say on St. Urbain Street, “stiff-necked”. So the two sides met and then talks broke down.
All that, plus the kitten-killing, body dismembering fugitive porn star…
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I had to shut down my computer last night as a thunderstorm rolled in. After the typical flashing and booming, the rain started. After a couple of minutes of rain, it changed to hail. The entire house was ringing with the impact of the hailstones. It continued off-and-on for about an hour and a half. It was so loud that both our dogs were huddled up to me, shivering. Once the worst of it was over, I went to bed.
This morning, I got up and noticed there were still drops of rain sitting on top of the gazebo in our back yard. A few minutes ago, I got up to let Xander out and noticed that the raindrops still appeared to be sitting on the gazebo roof.
They’re not raindrops:
A bit closer:
The entire roof of the gazebo looks like a “No Hunting” sign up north: riddled with bullet holes.
Kevin Myers on the folly of abandoning nuclear power generation in favour of renewables:
Russia’s main gas-company, Gazprom, was unable to meet demand last weekend as blizzards swept across Europe, and over three hundred people died. Did anyone even think of deploying our wind turbines to make good the energy shortfall from Russia?
Of course not. We all know that windmills are a self-indulgent and sanctimonious luxury whose purpose is to make us feel good. Had Europe genuinely depended on green energy on Friday, by Sunday thousands would be dead from frostbite and exposure, and the EU would have suffered an economic body blow to match that of Japan’s tsunami a year ago. No electricity means no water, no trams, no trains, no airports, no traffic lights, no phone systems, no sewerage, no factories, no service stations, no office lifts, no central heating and even no hospitals, once their generators run out of fuel.
Modern cities are incredibly fragile organisms, which tremble on the edge of disaster the entire time. During a severe blizzard, it is electricity alone that prevents a midwinter urban holocaust. We saw what adverse weather can do, when 15,000 people died in the heatwave that hit France in August 2003. But those deaths were spread over a month. Last weekend’s weather, without energy, could have caused many tens of thousands of deaths over a couple of days.
[. . .]
Frau Merkel has announced that Germany is going to phase out nuclear power, simply because of the Japanese tsunami. Well, that is like basing water-collection policies in Rhineland-Westphalia on the monsoon cycle of Borneo. As I was saying last week, the Germans have a powerfully emotional attachment to everything that is “green”, and an energy policy based on renewables will usually win German hearts. But it will not protect the owners of those hearts from frostbite and death due to exposure, for wind can often be not so much a Renewable as an Unusable, and also an Unpredictable, an Unstorable, and — normally when it’s very cold — an Unmovable.
The seriousness of this is hard to exaggerate. The temperature in the Baltic countries last weekend was -33 degrees Celsius. The Eurasian landmass from Calais to Naples to Siberia was an icefield in which hundreds of millions of people were trapped. Without coal, oil and nuclear energy, mass deaths of the old and the young would have occurred on the first night. Three nights on of such conditions, and even the physically fit would have been dying of exposure, as the temperature inside dwellings fell and began to match that of the outside, an inverse image of what happened during the French heatwave 10 years ago, when there was no escape from the heat.
BMW apologized after a PR strategy to pay for the naming rights to a weather system backfired — that system turned into the deep freeze that’s claimed dozens of lives across Europe.
The goal was to promote BMW’s Mini Cooper brand by paying Germany’s meteorological office 299 euros ($392) to name a system “Cooper” — a practice in place since 2002 to help fund weather monitoring work in Germany. Unfortunately for BMW, the system it was assigned to turned out to be a killer.
On the face of it, this seems like a pretty stupid notion: pay money to associate your brand with a major weather disturbance? Didn’t BMW’s PR folks notice that the association most people have with named weather is negative?
Ben Berkowitz has a big report on the the National Flood Insurance Program — something which is a veritable bucket of fail. In a nutshell, it undercuts private insurers and therefore is the only game in town; it insures only a small minority of homeowners; and it loses gobs of money. In September 2005, the NFIP was $1.5 billion in hock to the federal government; that number has now ballooned to $21 billion, and is certain to rise further.
There’s a simple answer to all these problems: let the NFIP raise its rates. And I don’t understand why it’s not being allowed to do so. If the rates rose, then that might allow private insurers into the flood-insurance game, giving consumers a choice and helping to get the word out about how insuring your home against flood damage is a really good idea. The NFIP could become profitable, and thereby start paying back all the money it owes. And while homeowners are quite price sensitive when it comes to flood insurance, the fact is that so few homeowners take out flood insurance right now that the number would be unlikely to fall dramatically if rates went up to a reasonable level.
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Environment Canada confirmed the Southwestern Ontario town was struck by either an F-2 or F-3 level tornado around 4 p.m. Sunday. The rating makes this the most powerful storm to strike Ontario since 1996, bringing winds of up to 300 km/h.
The one fatality, a 61-year-old man, was confirmed by officials as Norman Laberge of Lucknow, Ont. He had been working at a nearby salt mine when the tornado struck. Reports indicate he was working on a crane that collapsed during the storm.
Goderich’s historic square was hit directly by the storm and left completely ravaged. Several buildings had their roofs ripped off, numerous windows were shattered and a number of cars were tossed around. The downtown area, which has classic historic buildings, has been declared a “no-go” zone because of the severity of the damage.
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The House of Representatives is scheduled this week, as early as today, to consider an extension and “reform” of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), administered by FEMA. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the NFIP has been about $18 billion in the hole. And this is from a program that only collects around $2 billion a year in premiums, which barely covers losses and expenses in a normal year. So make no mistake, the NFIP is still on course to cost the taxpayer billions more in the future.
Even before Katrina, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the NFIP was receiving a subsidy of close to a billion dollars a year. Under CBO’s optimistic projections, the House’s reform bill would increase NFIP revenues by about $4 billion over the next ten years, making only a small dent in the program’s current deficit.
If private insurers aren’t willing to offer insurance to people and businesses located on flood plains, isn’t that a strong indication that building a house or a plant on that location is a bad idea? Why should people who chose not to locate in risky locations be forced to subsidize the risk-taking of those who do?
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I’ve been skeptical about the whole global warming issue, and I’d like to be equally skeptical about a new ice age threat:
What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth — far from facing a global warming problem — is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.
Lower sunspot activity translates into likely lower temperatures here on earth, just like in the “Maunder Minimum” period, also known as the “Little Ice Age”.
Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715. Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the “Little Ice Age” when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past.
As I wrote back in 2004, “I’ve never been all that convinced of the accuracy of the scientific evidence presented in favour of the Global Warming theory, especially as it seemed to play rather too clearly into the hands of the anti-growth, anti-capitalist, pro-world government folks. A world-wide ecological disaster, clearly caused by human action, would allow a lot of authoritarian changes which would radically reduce individual freedom and increase the degree of social control exercised by governments over the actions and movement of their citizenry. “
On the other hand, as Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, humanity is better adapted to dealing with higher temperatures than lower ones — as are most living creatures. Given a choice between the risks of increasing temperatures globally and the risks of a new ice age, it should be pretty easy to figure out which scenario allows the better chances for all of humanity to survive and thrive.
Update: Anthony Watts has more. “If we are right, this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades,” Hill said. “That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.”
Update, 15 June: My skepticism is overwhelmed by the skeptic-in-this-instance New Scientist‘s Michael Marshall, who does the quick math that a Maunder Minimum for the next 90 years would only lower global temperatures by 0.3C. And New Scientist is still bullish on the global warming potential of between 2 and 4.5 degrees Celsius over that same time period. They’re science writers and I’m not, but I have to say I’m still much more worried about the potential cooling than the potential warming.
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.
I had a great commute into downtown Toronto today: unlike my usual pattern of spending 20-30 minutes inching down the Don Valley Parkway from Finch to York Mills (and then sometimes another 20-30 minutes from there to Bloor/Bayview), today’s drive was actually pleasant. There was a bit of congestion in the right-hand lanes coming south on the 404 past the Sheppard/401 exit, but other than that, I didn’t even need to downshift until just north of Eglinton.
I’m sure some of this is due to the efforts of energetic, enthusiastic news and weather folks at 680 News and other media outlets. They’ve been in full pantswetting mode for the last 24 hours, warning us about the alarming possibility of snowfall. That drumbeat of doom must have persuaded lots of drivers to avoid coming in to the looming epicentre of severe winter weather at Yonge and Bloor.
For those of you unfamiliar with Toronto weather, you probably think we experience regular snowfall, with cold temperatures and high winds (like Montreal and Winnipeg often do). If Toronto did experience things like that, we wouldn’t be able to deploy any troops to Afghanistan, because they’d all be in Toronto trying to save the city from utter panic and absolute civic collapse. Toronto doesn’t handle winter very well at all.
I thought it was just the highways, but Darkwatermuse found the same phenomenon on city streets today:
Did anybody else notice the light traffic today? I had to head uptown on the bus for a mid-day appointment and the bus cruised slowly past each empty bus stop. Stops which normally have two or three people debarking or embarking the bus.
On the way home I found myself alone on the bus, not considering the driver. If the driver’s seat had been empty I would have snapped a photo of it with my smart phone and emailed the photo to the media. Assuming I survived the crash and after the bus came to a complete stop and having shown somebody at the TTC my valid transfer.
Alone. On the Sherbourne bus. That’s like being alone in the serving line at the shelter on Christmas Eve. Strangely, a lot of those same missing people normally take the Sherbourne bus so I wasn’t too fussed being alone for once.
For once the bus didn’t smell like 3AM vomit and an ashtray overflowing with Player’s Navy Cut cigarette butts. An unlikely outcome just like snowballs in hades or, apparently, snow in Toronto.
Of course, I may have to retract all of this if the weather really does (for once) come close to the media’s hyperventilated predictions: I’m meeting another member of the VRWC (libertarian sub-committee) after work tonight, so I’ll get to experience a bit more of the joy of Toronto in snow.
Update, 2 February: As we few, bedraggled survivors claw our way out of the Massive, Unprecedented, Crippling Snowfall, the CBC offers us their support and sympathy:
Bill Ray reports on the source of Finnish unhappiness with Apple iPhone performance:
Finnish iPhone users unhappy at the inability of the handset to operate below zero are entitled to their money back, even if the limitation appears in the small print.
The clarification comes from the Finland’s Consumer Agency, as reported by Finnish news agency YLE.fi, in response to numerous questions from concerned Finns who are unhappy that their shiny Apple toys won’t promise to work again until the spring, at best. So unless the shop specifically stated the zero-degree operational limit, then the regulator reckons iPhone-purchasing Finns are entitled to their money back.
Finland, like the UK, requires all items sold new to operate in the way they might reasonably be expected to do. Small print can’t negate those rights, and it’s reasonable for Finns to expect to be able to make phone calls outside, so refunds would seem to be in order. Meanwhile the regulator is preparing a list of questions for Apple about how it trains its staff, and how badly the iPhone breaks down when it gets cold.
