Hurricane Florence: Welcome to the New Normal

In a post last week I noted how six years ago Republican legislators in North Carolina had rejected the reality of climate change and ignored the recommendations of a non-partisan committee concerning sea level rise and future potential flooding.  The result was more construction on the coastal plain and flood plain areas.  Now, with Hurricane Florence the idiocy of such action is all too apparent.   Meanwhile, the Trump/Pence regime has pulled America out of the Paris climate accord and is actively working to destroy restrictions that would lessen carbon emissions and at least slow down elements fueling climate change.  All pure idiocy that ignores the growing dangers that past foolishness has set in motion.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the new normal and the danger of Trump/Pence policies - the irony, of course, is that North Carolina went for Trump in 2016.  Karma has already slapped the state hard across the face.  Here are column excerpts:

Hurricane Florence has drenched eastern North Carolina with more than 30 inches of rain, an all-time record for the state. Last year, Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston and dumped more than 60 inches of rain, an all-time record for the whole country. Also last year, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island of Puerto Rico and caused, according to an independent study, nearly 3,000 deaths.

Welcome to the new normal.  Tropical cyclones are nothing new, of course. But climate scientists say that global warming should make such storms wetter, slower and more intense — which is exactly what seems to be happening. And if we fail to act, these kinds of devastating weather events will likely become even more frequent and more severe.

Climate change is a global phenomenon. Authorities in the Philippines are still trying to assess the damage and death toll from Typhoon Mangkhut, a rare Category 5-equivalent storm that struck the archipelago Saturday with sustained winds of 165 mph. Mangkhut went on to batter Hong Kong and now, as it weakens, is plowing across southern China.

Every human being on the planet has a stake in what governments do to limit and adapt to climate change, including leaders who, like President Trump, prefer to believe global warming is some kind of hoax. I doubt the citizens of Wilmington, N.C. — a lovely resort town that was turned into an island by widespread flooding from Florence — feel there is anything illusory about the hardship they’re going through.

The most ambitious attempt to quantify the link between climate and weather — a blue-chip international consortium called World Weather Attribution — has not yet made an attempt to estimate any possible effect that global warming may have had on Florence or Mangkhut. But another group of researchers, the Climate Extremes Modeling Group at the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, estimated Sept. 12 that Florence would produce 50 percent more rainfall than if human-induced global warming had not occurred.

We know from direct measurement that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by more than 40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans started burning fossil fuels on a large scale. We know from direct observation that carbon dioxide traps heat. We know from direct measurement that both atmospheric and ocean temperatures have been rising sharply. We know from direct measurement that warmer water takes up more space than cooler water, which is the main reason ocean levels are rising.

We know that warmer water is more easily evaporated, which means there is more moisture available to fuel a storm such as Florence or Harvey — and to be released by such storms as rainfall.

If humankind suddenly stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we would still have to adapt to the climatic changes we have already set in motion. . . . . We will be coping with massive tropical storms, tragic coastal and riverine flooding, deadly heat waves and unprecedented wildfires for the rest of our lives.

At the very least, we should be trying to reduce carbon emissions and keep global warming to a manageable level. With the landmark Paris agreement, the nations of the world agreed to try. But Trump foolishly decided to pull the United States — the world’s second-biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind only China — out of the deal.

The administration has already proposed weakening restrictions on carbon emissions from automobiles and coal-fired power plants. And last week, there were reports that the administration also wants to loosen rules governing the release of methane, which traps even more heat than carbon dioxide.

Another news item from earlier this month should be instructive: A cargo ship is presently making the journey from Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast, to the German port of Bremerhaven via the Arctic Ocean, rather than taking the usual southern route through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar. Until now, the northern route has always been impassible because it was blocked by polar ice. But because of climate change, a lot of the ice has melted.

Climate change is no longer theoretical. It is real, it is all around us, and it is going to get much worse.

How We Know Climate Change Is Real

The recent short term cold snap in the Midwest and Northeast US caused Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, a/k/a the idiot-in-chief, to tweet mocking the science behind climate change and touting his decision to pull out of a global deal to combat planetary warming.   The stupidity and ignorance of the tweet prompted the Weather Channel to shoot back and explain the difference between weather (short term events) and climate (long term phenomenon), and reconfirm that that 2017 is still projected to be the warmest year on record and that, in fact, the eastern cold snap Trump referenced in his tweet was actually evidence of a warming climate.  Sadly, Trump and his ignorance embracing evangelical base despise science and knowledge that counter their strongly held prejudices or, in the case of evangelicals, fantasy world.  A column in the New York Times looks at how we know climate change is real and that it is increasing severe climate events.  Here are highlights:

This was a year of devastating weather, including historic hurricanes and wildfires here in the United States. Did climate change play a role? Increasingly, scientists are able to answer that question — and increasingly, the answer is yes. 

Consider Hurricane Harvey, which caused enormous destruction along the Gulf Coast; it will cost an estimated $180 billion to recover from the hurricane’s storm surge, high winds and record-setting precipitation and flooding. Did global warming contribute to this disaster?

The word “contribute” is key. This doesn’t mean that without global warming, there wouldn’t have been a hurricane. Rather, the question is whether changes in the climate raised the odds of producing extreme conditions.

It is therefore critical to examine all of the contributing factors. In the case of Hurricane Harvey, these include the warm ocean that provided energy for the storm; the elevated sea level on top of which the storm surge occurred; the atmospheric pressure pattern that contributed to the storm’s stalling over the coast; and the atmospheric water vapor that provided moisture for the record-setting precipitation.
 The first step is to ask whether historical changes have been observed in any of the factors. For example, ocean temperatures have increased in recent decades. Applying the same statistical techniques used in engineering, medicine and finance, we can analyze whether those increases have changed the odds of achieving this year’s warm temperatures in the tropical Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
 Based on previous warm years, we can expect to find that human-generated warming influenced this year’s ocean temperatures.  We also know that global warming is increasing the moisture in the atmosphere, meaning that a given storm can produce more precipitation.
 Further, Hurricane Harvey’s stalling over the coast was critical for the record rainfall. The exact meteorological causes are complex, but the pattern of atmospheric pressure across North America played an important role. We have found that global warming increased the odds of the pressure pattern that contributed to the 2010 Russian heat wave that killed more than 50,000 people. We can likewise look back at pressure patterns during past hurricane seasons and examine whether global warming has altered the odds of patterns similar to Hurricane Harvey’s.

In addition to the heavy rainfall, storm surge contributed to coastal flooding. When hurricanes make landfall, low pressure and strong winds push water onto land. By increasing the mean sea level, global warming has “raised the floor” from which storm surge occurs. As a result, a storm is more likely to cause extensive flooding. Sea-level rise tripled the odds of Hurricane Sandy’s flood level in 2012. A similar analysis can be applied to the Hurricane Harvey storm surge.

Our scientific framework can also be applied to other events. Like Harvey’s devastation, California’s ravaging wildfires arose from a confluence of factors. Strong, dry winds were the most immediate contributor. In addition, the protracted drought that killed millions of trees created substantial fuel. After the drought, an extremely wet winter was followed by severely hot, dry conditions in the summer and fall, which together produced near-record fuel for fires. Although each of these specific factors will need to be analyzed, we already know that global warming has increased fuel aridity in the West, meaning that fires are more likely to encounter large amounts of dry fuel.

There is now ample evidence that global warming has influenced extremes in the United States and around the world through such factors as temperature, atmospheric moisture and sea level. This doesn’t mean that every event has a human fingerprint. But it does mean that we can expect more years like this one, when our old expectations no longer apply.

Conspiracies, Corruption and Climate

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, the head of Der  Trumpenführer's EPA said that it was "insensitive" to discuss climate change - and that was before the damage wrought by hurricane Irma.  Then, of course right wing blow hard Rush Limbaugh said that hurricanes were a "liberal conspiracy" - before he evacuated his very ample ass out of south Florida.  Indeed, almost everywhere on the right side of the political spectrum, one sees denial of climate changes reality and even any admission that warming temperatures and oceans are perhaps making storms more fearsome than in the past.  Why? Here's what  Leonard Pitts noted in a recent Miami Herald column:

So conservatives pretend science is somehow suspect when it says the planet is warming because of fossil fuels. And we should accept it as just — What? Coincidence? — that the fossil fuels industry donated $55.1 million to the Republicans in 2016 alone?

Once upon a time, the GOP and Republicans prided themselves on being the party of science, education and knowledge.  Then came the rise of the Christofascists - typically the least educated and most inclined to ignore objective reality - within the Party base.  Now what we see is grumblings about conspiracies and even the lunacy of blaming natural disasters on gays (I would counter, perhaps Trump voting states are being punished if god is so vengeful).  A column in the New York Times looks at the insane asylum that has become the Republican Party and the right wing political sphere. Here are excerpts:

After the devastation wreaked by Harvey on Houston — devastation that was right in line with meteorologists’ predictions — you might have expected everyone to take heed when the same experts warned about the danger posed by Hurricane Irma. But you would have been wrong.

On Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh accused weather scientists of inventing Irma’s threat for political and financial reasons: “There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it,” he declared, adding that “fear and panic” help sell batteries, bottled water, and TV advertising.

He evacuated his Palm Beach mansion soon afterward.

In a way, we should be grateful to Limbaugh for at least raising the subject of climate change and its relationship to hurricanes, if only because it’s a topic the Trump administration is trying desperately to avoid. For example, Scott Pruitt, the pollution- and polluter-friendly head of the Environmental Protection Agency, says that now is not the time to bring up the subject — that doing so is “insensitive” to the people of Florida. Needless to say, for people like Pruitt there will never be a good time to talk about climate.

So what should we learn from Limbaugh’s outburst? Well, he’s a terrible person — but we knew that already. The important point is that he’s not an outlier. True, there weren’t many other influential people specifically rejecting warnings about Irma, but denying science while attacking scientists as politically motivated and venal is standard operating procedure on the American right. When Donald Trump declared climate change a “hoax,” he was just being an ordinary Republican.

And thanks to Trump’s electoral victory, know-nothing, anti-science conservatives are now running the U.S. government. . . . . Almost every senior figure in the Trump administration dealing with the environment or energy is both an establishment Republican and a denier of climate change and of scientific evidence in general. [T]here is, after all, an overwhelming scientific consensus that human activities are warming the planet. When conservative politicians and pundits challenge that consensus, they do so not on the basis of careful consideration of the evidence — come on, who are we kidding? — but by impugning the motives of thousands of scientists around the world. All of these scientists, they insist, motivated by peer pressure and financial rewards, are falsifying data and suppressing contrary views. This is crazy talk. But it’s utterly mainstream on the modern right . . . . Why are U.S. conservatives so willing to disbelieve science and buy into tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories about scientists? Part of the answer is that they’re engaged in projection: That’s the way things work in their world. . . . . there was a time when some conservative intellectuals had interesting, independent ideas. But those days are long past: Today’s right-wing intellectual universe, such as it is, is dominated by hired guns who are essentially propagandists rather than researchers.

And right-wing politicians harass and persecute actual researchers whose conclusions they don’t like — an effort that has been vastly empowered now that Trump is in power.

[C]onservatives have grown increasingly hostile to science in general. Surveys show a steady decline in conservatives’ trust in science since the 1970s, which is clearly politically motivated — it’s not as if science has stopped working. The bottom line is that we are now ruled by people who are completely alienated not just from the scientific community, but from the scientific idea — the notion that objective assessment of evidence is the way to understand the world. And this willful ignorance is deeply frightening. Indeed, it may end up destroying civilization.

South Florida Evacuates; Scamvangelists Blame the Gays

The Miami Herald reports that Miami-Dade is considering the first evacuations in over a decade (evacuations of the Florida Keys began this morning - we have a friend who is visiting and now trying to evacuate).  Here are excerpts:

Miami-Dade County plans to order evacuations for Miami Beach and much of the mainland coast in advance of Hurricane Irma’s menacing track toward South Florida.

Mayor Carlos Gimenez said to expect evacuation orders late Wednesday or early Thursday, but emergency officials who report to him are already assuming hundreds of thousands of residents will be asked to leave their homes in the coming days out of fears of historic coastal flooding from Irma.

“This is a powerful storm which poses a serious threat to our area. We will be taking some extraordinary actions to ensure that the residents of Miami-Dade County are safe,” Gimenez said at an afternoon press briefing Tuesday. “I would rather inconvenience our residents on this occasion than suffer any unnecessary loss of life if we are hit by Hurricane Irma.”

The planned instructions to flee the county’s A and B evacuation zones — A covers coastal areas in southern Dade, Key Biscayne and a pocket north of Miami, while B encompasses Brickell Avenue, more inland areas and Miami Beach and other cities along the ocean — represent the most dramatic example of Miami-Dade’s efforts to clear out in advance of a hurricane that reached Category 5 status on Tuesday. Miami-Dade’s schools chief canceled classes Thursday and Friday, and most governments and colleges announced similar shutdown plans for an already shortened holiday week. 

Meanwhile, up until the Trump/Pence regime it was considered socially and politically improper if not reprehensible to openly and loudly announce white supremacist and/or Neo-Nazi views or suggest genocide of certain minority groups. Now, per Der  Trumpenführer, such racists and hate mongers are deemed to include many "fine people."  One group has unfortunately found itself a permissible target for open hatred and condemnation even before the rise of Trump. With much of the Texas coast devastated from Hurricane Harvey and South Florida beginning evacuations in advance of the approach of Hurricane Irma, the scamvangelists are back focusing on their favorite targets of condemnation and hatred: the LGBT community.  As Right Wing Watch reports some of the usual suspects were hard at it:

Right-wing pastor Rick Joyner joined televangelist and End Times prepper pastor Jim Bakker on his television program yesterday, where they declared that Hurricane Harvey was God’s judgment on the city of Houston and used the devastation wrought by the storm to promote Bakker’s line of survival products.

Joyner said that Key West, Florida, had been hit by a hurricane “on the day they’re supposed to have the Day of Decadence parade” and another hurricane hit New Orleans right before it hosted another Day of Decadence festival. “Coincidence? I don’t think so,” he said. “We have to stand up against the perversion of our times and call it what it is.”

Of course, Joyner and Bakker - who did jail time for fraud - are just the tip of the scamvangelist iceberg (anorexic drag queen look a like Ann Coulter has made similar statements).   But, there is irony in their whining: to my way of thinking, if one wants to use their version of a wrathful god who punishes the wicked, perhaps Texas and seemingly now Florida are being punished for having voted for Donald Trump, perhaps the most foul and immoral individual to ever occupy the White House.  Your thoughts on this?  Is it the evangelical Christians who elected Trump rather than the gays who are really responsible for god's purported wrath?

Today's GOP: Defending the Indefensiblle

With the narcissism, intellectual laziness and general moral bankruptcy of Der Trumpenführer on daily display, it is often easy to forget that the leadership of the Republican Party paved the way for his election.  Trump merely loudly said what the GOP has whispered and messaged through dog whistle racism and white nationalism for decades at this point.  Worse yet, the Party's leadership continues to defend policies that aid the rich, harm the less fortunate and work against the best interests of the county despite it's wrapping itself in the flag and shows of feigned patriotism  on Memorial Day, the 4th of July and when speaking to members of the military.  No true patriot pushed policies that harm a majority of the citizenry.  Actions speak far louder than words and the actions of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell show their efforts to increasingly defend the indefensible.  Winning and retaining power now matter more than the good of the country and the citizens they claim to represent.  A piece in the New Yorker  from back in May, 2017, looks at this disgusting state of affairs which has become more urgent than ever given the latest boasts of North Korea about a hydrogen bomb that can hit America and the massive devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey.  Here are excerpts:

The old-school Mafiosi are fading into the past, pale imitations of their pharaonic forefathers. As the late Murray Kempton, the greatest of all New York columnists, once wrote, “Where are the scungilli of yesteryear?” In the late nineties, federal agents insinuated an informer into the ranks of the DeCavalcante crime family, of New Jersey, and the resulting wiretaps and transcriptions revealed a dying language of secrecy, petty schemes, and blood oaths gone wrong. Sad old veterans of the Punic Wars of Essex County talked about selling old comic books and Viagra to make money, and yet they knew that they were losing touch with the new world.

They make money with the computer,” a gangster named Joseph (Tin Ear) Sclafani said incredulously about the young. To which another associate replied, “These [expletive] kids—twenty-five, twenty-six years old—will teach you things you could not ever believe.”

I thought of this exquisite sampling of the DeCavalcante tapes after reading the riveting serio-comic report in the Washington Post by Adam Entous describing a meeting in June, 2016, on Capitol Hill, at which Republican Party leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, gathered to talk business. Let’s not be unfair, much less libelous. It’s not that the members of Congress present were involved in crimes or illegal activity of any kind; no, it’s that they seem so craven, cynical, and, ultimately small-time. They have sunk so low that they are willing to get behind a candidate for whom they clearly have no regard. Because, well, that’s “this [expletive] life that we live.”

In the transcript published by the Post, McCarthy speculates that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computers and, in the process, discovered whatever opposition-research materials the Democrats had gathered on Trump.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy said, according to Entous, a superb reporter who heard a tape recording of the colloquy. “Swear to God.”

Dana Rohrabacher is a Republican from California with a peculiar amalgam of views: pro-marijuana, dubious about climate change, pro-torture.  . . . Like Trump, Rohrabacher has been highly solicitous of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last year, Politico ran an article on Rohrabacher called “Putin’s Favorite Congressman.”

In the Post piece, McCarthy’s remark is met with laughter, and Ryan cautions his colleagues, “This is an off the record . . . No leaks! . . . All right?”  And then, amid more laughter, Ryan says, “This is how we know we’re a real family here.”

In fairness, Entous makes clear in his report that there was laughter throughout the exchange, and it is entirely possible that McCarthy was not serious at all about his conjectures. And yet the tape and the transcript do deepen the impression of blithe hypocrisy when it comes to the business of electing an obviously erratic man as President. Almost everyone in the room endorsed Trump.

Ryan made distancing gestures from time to time, expressing oblique disgust at Trump’s hosannas for Putin and his pussy-grabbing braggadocio, but those faint stirrings of a moral conscience soon passed, and his endorsement of Trump before the nominating Convention and his fealty ever since have been consistent. Ryan—like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—could hardly assume a position in immediate opposition to a President of his Party, and the leaders of the Republicans in Congress decided to muffle their misgivings and moments of revulsion in service of their conservative agenda: tax cuts, “repeal and replace,” and a generalized rollback of the Obama years.

These men must know that they are still defending the increasingly indefensible: an unstable and incompetent man flailing in the wind. It’s hardly different at the White House. In the West Wing, senior aides have become increasingly disgusted by the behavior of the President, as he spends his days wallowing in fury, self-pity, self-aggrandizement, distraction, defensiveness, and delusion.

The political question that may matter most is this: At what point will private misgivings tip over into a withdrawal of support and a demand for an end to this prolonged emergency? . . . . Whatever evidence James Comey or Paul Manafort or Carter Page or anyone else has to provide, it must be heard and seen.

If Mueller, who is widely respected in Washington, can maintain his independence from any meddling, subtle or broad, by the White House, this will count as a step forward.

What recent weeks have also made clear is that, outside government, the Fourth Estate has worked hard to put pressure on power, its most essential role. And a large measure of that pressure has been the result of the daily battle between the Times and the revitalized Washington Post. What fresh horror will tomorrow bring?

Again, the piece is from 4 months ago, but the questions it raises are more relevant than ever. What will it take for the GOP leadership to put the interests of the country as a whole first?  Or is this asking the impossible of a Party now devoid of any morality and decency?

Critical Questions about Hurricane Harvey Are Not Being Asked

As I sit in a house located roughly 500 feet or less from Hampton Roads harbor and perhaps less than 50 feet from Robinson Creek, a tidal creek that connects to the nearby harbor, it is hard to not think about rising sea levels and the changing climate that is exacerbating the sea level rise.  Looking across the harbor from our master bedroom, one sees the Norfolk Naval Base where the sea level has risen roughly a foot and a half since early in the last century and where the City of Norfolk is experiencing increasing issues with tidal flooding and stormwater run off that has nowhere to go due to the higher sea levels. On the first floor of our home, one is reminded of past flooding in the 2009 Nor'Ida storm by the marble floors and non-water absorbent wainscoting that rises 3 feet above the floor throughout the entire first floor, closets and laundry room included. And then there are the 3 industrial sump pumps which can pump the equivalent of a swimming pool every hour strategically located (and camouflaged as shown in the photo at the end of this post) to deal with potential future flooding and the natural gas fueled 20,000 kilowatt generator to power them in the event of a power outage in a hurricane.  Thoughts of climate change are ever present for us.  Yet even with the disaster that has befallen Houston and much of the Texas coast with Hurricane Harvey, the discussion of climate changes role in Harvey's destructive power is minimal.  It's easier - and more comforting - to blame bad planning practices in Houston (which did play a role) than to face the larger problem and America and the world's failure to adequately address it.  A piece in The Guardian looks at the self-imposed silence on perhaps the most pressing emergency of the day, climate change.  Here are highlights:

It is not only Donald Trump’s government that censors the discussion of climate change; it is the entire body of polite opinion. This is why, though the links are clear and obvious, most reports on Hurricane Harvey have made no mention of the human contribution to it.

In 2016 the US elected a president who believes that human-driven global warming is a hoax. It was the hottest year on record, in which the US was hammered by a series of climate-related disasters. Yet the total combined coverage for the entire year on the evening and Sunday news programmes on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News amounted to 50 minutes. Our greatest predicament, the issue that will define our lives, has been blotted from the public’s mind.

This is not an accident. But nor (with the exception of Fox News) is it likely to be a matter of policy. It reflects a deeply ingrained and scarcely conscious self-censorship. Reporters and editors ignore the subject because they have an instinct for avoiding trouble. To talk about climate breakdown (which in my view is a better term than the curiously bland labels we attach to this crisis) is to question not only Trump, not only current environmental policy, not only current economic policy – but the entire political and economic system.

It is to expose a programme that relies on robbing the future to fuel the present . . . 

To claim there is no link between climate breakdown and the severity of Hurricane Harvey is like claiming there is no link between the warm summer we have experienced and the end of the last ice age. Every aspect of our weather is affected by the fact that global temperatures rose by about 4C between the ice age and the 19th century. And every aspect of our weather is affected by the 1C of global warming caused by human activities. While no weather event can be blamed solely on human-driven warming, none is unaffected by it.

We know that the severity and impact of hurricanes on coastal cities is exacerbated by at least two factors: higher sea levels, caused primarily by the thermal expansion of seawater; and greater storm intensity, caused by higher sea temperatures and the ability of warm air to hold more water than cold air.

Before it reached the Gulf of Mexico, Harvey had been demoted from a tropical storm to a tropical wave. But as it reached the Gulf, where temperatures this month have been far above average, it was upgraded first to a tropical depression, then to a category one hurricane. It might have been expected to weaken as it approached the coast, as hurricanes churn the sea, bringing cooler waters to the surface. But the water it brought up from 100 metres and more was also unusually warm. By the time it reached land, Harvey had intensified to a category four hurricane.

We were warned about this. In June, for instance, Robert Kopp, a professor of Earth sciences, predicted: “In the absence of major efforts to reduce emissions and strengthen resilience, the Gulf Coast will take a massive hit. Its exposure to sea-level rise – made worse by potentially stronger hurricanes – poses a major risk to its communities.”

To raise this issue, I’ve been told on social media, is to politicise Hurricane Harvey.  . . . . In other words, talk about it only when it’s out of the news. When researchers determined, nine years on, that human activity had made a significant contribution to Hurricane Katrina, the information scarcely registered.

I believe it is the silence that’s political. To report the storm as if it were an entirely natural phenomenon, like last week’s eclipse of the sun, is to take a position. By failing to make the obvious link and talk about climate breakdown, media organisations ensure our greatest challenge goes unanswered. They help push the world towards catastrophe.

Hurricane Harvey offers a glimpse of a likely global future; a future whose average temperatures are as different from ours as ours are from those of the last ice age. It is a future in which emergency becomes the norm, and no state has the capacity to respond. It is a future in which, as a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters notes, disasters like Houston’s occur in some cities several times a year. It is a future that, for people in countries such as Bangladesh, has already arrived, almost unremarked on by the rich world’s media. It is the act of not talking that makes this nightmare likely to materialise.

In Texas, the connection could scarcely be more apparent. The storm ripped through the oil fields, forcing rigs and refineries to shut down, including those owned by some of the 25 companies that have produced more than half the greenhouse gas emissions humans have released since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Hurricane Harvey has devastated a place in which climate breakdown is generated, and in which the policies that prevent it from being addressed are formulated.

Like Trump, who denies human-driven global warming but who wants to build a wall around his golf resort in Ireland to protect it from the rising seas, these companies, some of which have spent millions sponsoring climate deniers, have progressively raised the height of their platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, in response to warnings about higher seas and stronger storms. They have grown from 40ft above sea level in 1940, to 70ft in the 1990s, to 91ft today.

The problem is not confined to the US. Across the world, the issue that hangs over every aspect of our lives is marginalised, except on the rare occasions where world leaders gather to discuss it in sombre tones (then sombrely agree to do almost nothing), whereupon the instinct to follow the machinations of power overrides the instinct to avoid a troubling subject.

When Trump’s enforcers instruct officials and scientists to purge any mention of climate change from their publications, we are scandalised. But when the media does it, without the need for a memo, we let it pass. This censorship is invisible even to the perpetrators, woven into the fabric of organisations that are constitutionally destined to leave the major questions of our times unasked. To acknowledge this issue is to challenge everything. To challenge everything is to become an outcast.

A portion of the Norfolk Naval Base in a previous hurricane

A 7000 gallon/hour pump is covered by a removable cover under the vase in the photo

Hurricane Irma Just Hit Category 3

With the recovery i east Texas still not even started, yet a new potential menace to the United States east coast is developing: a new Atlantic hurricane, name Irma just hit category 3 and is projected to hit category 4 before it makes landfall either somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, Florida or the Atlantic coastline.  For the husband and I, it is always the "I" named storms that have hit Hampton Roads and resulted in flooding in our home: Isabel, Ida and Irene.  Now we have Irma headed westward from the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Since Ida and Irene, we have made the first floor of our home water resistant up to 3 feet above floor level, have installed a whole house generator and have installed 3 industrial grade sump pumps in the hope of never having standing water in our home again. Since the installation of the pumps and generator (which runs off natural gas and turns on automatically) we have never been tested.  The Atlantic looks at this new potential threat to America. Here are excerpts:

As Harvey moves on from southeastern Texas and floodwaters start to recede, meteorologists are tracking another storm brewing in the eastern Atlantic Ocean that they say could potentially approach the United States in the coming weeks.

Irma became a Category 3 hurricane late Thursday afternoon, making it the season’s second major hurricane. The hurricane now packs maximum sustained winds of 115 miles per hour, with stronger gusts.

Irma had already quickly transformed from a tropical storm into a Category 2 hurricane, according to the National Hurricane Center. It exhibits an unusual—but not unprecedented—rate of growth, according to meteorologists.

Like Harvey and other Atlantic hurricanes, Irma started as a tropical wave off the coast of Africa and began a slow, westward churn across the Atlantic. Irma will spent the next few days traveling toward the eastern Caribbean region. Beyond that, it’s still too early to predict exactly where the hurricane will go, meteorologists say.

The high-pressure system could launch Irma toward any number of targets, including the Bahamas and Bermuda and U.S. states like Florida, North Carolina, and Texas, McNoldy said.  “There’s no certainty. It has to go somewhere,” he said. “We just don’t know where.”

Perhaps the husband and I are gun shy, but Irma bears watching.

Trump Visits Flood-Ravaged Texas and Keeps the Focus on Himself

One of the attributes of a malignant narcissist is their inability to show empathy with others or to ever cease focusing on themselves.  These sociopathic behaviors were on open display as the ever self-obsessed Donald Trump visited parts of Texas yesterday.  Rather than display any true compassion for the suffering, Trump used the trip to preen and inflate his already insufferable ego.  Watching some of the video, I could only question whether the man has a heart at all.  Yet this is the man evangelical Christians have embraced and continue to support, thereby displaying their own moral bankruptcy.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump's disgusting behavior.  Here are excerpts:

As rescuers continued their exhausting and heartbreaking work in southeastern Texas on Tuesday afternoon, as the rain continued to fall and a reservoir near Houston spilled over, President Trump grabbed a microphone to address hundreds of supporters who had gathered outside a firehouse near Corpus Christi and were chanting: “USA! USA! USA!”

‘Thank you, everybody,” the president said, sporting one of the white “USA” caps that are being sold on his campaign website for $40. “I just want to say: We love you. You are special. . . . What a crowd. What a turnout.”

Trump managed to turn attention on himself. His responses to the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey have been more focused on the power of the storm and his administration’s response than on the millions of Texans whose lives have been dramatically altered by the floodwaters.

He has talked favorably about the higher television ratings that come with hurricane coverage, predicted that he will soon be congratulating himself and used 16 exclamation points in 22 often breathless tweets about the storm. But as of late Tuesday afternoon, the president had yet to mention those killed, call on other Americans to help or directly encourage donations to relief organizations.

By focusing on the historic epicness of the hurricane, Trump has repeatedly turned attention to his role in confronting the disaster — a message reinforced by comments and tweets praising members of his administration. While Trump’s top aides gathered with Vice President Pence at the White House over the weekend, Trump videoconferenced in. On Saturday, he wore a white campaign hat. On Sunday, he opted for a red version. As of Tuesday evening, both hats — which feature “USA” on the front, “45” on a side and “Trump” in the back — were being sold on Trump’s campaign website, prompting ethics watchdogs to accuse the president of trying to profit off the crisis. The president’s comments, which lasted mere minutes, angered many of those who served in President Barack Obama’s administration and could not imagine their former boss ever acting like this.

“It’s not a time for crowing about crowds,” said Alyssa Mastromonaco, a former deputy chief of staff of operations for Obama. “This weather event isn’t even over yet. They have no idea the damage that’s been incurred and how many people will need a place to live when this is over. It’s catastrophic, not epic.”

With his wife at his side, he sounded as if he were addressing a political rally instead of a state struggling to start to recover — but it was a tone that matched the screaming crowd. Some there carried pro-Trump signs and flags.

I'm sorry, but Trump's avid supporters are just as morally bankrupt as he is.  They remind me of 1930's and 1940's Germans who cheered Hitler no matter what he said or did.  Utterly, disgusting!!

Hurricane Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like

With rains to continue soaking Texas for days to come, flooding to spread to neighboring states, and a tropical system off the Atlantic coast, there are two words that one does not heard being said by Republicans: climate change.  Climate scientists have long said that the severity of tropical storm systems will intensify - Harvey was a category 4 with literally unprecedented rainfall - and as a piece in Politico points out, we are seeing a worldwide phenomenon of worsening rainstorms.  Locally, the Virginian Pilot reports this:

The system was moving northeast at 12 mph early this morning and had winds of approximately 40 mph. As the storm moves faster to the northeast, the hurricane center expects it to become extra-tropical and gain strength, with winds increasing to 60 to 80 p.m. – causing nor'easter-like conditions to Hampton Roads this evening. Winds could gust to 60 mph.

Compared to Harvey, this is nothing.  But we must not forget that last October, Hurricane Matthew caused unprecedented flooding in portions of Hampton Roads. Areas of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake which had never flooded in memory saw 2-3 feet of water, in many cases inundating homes.  Pretending that climate change is not happening and refusing to rethink development patterns and infrastructure needs is not a responsible solution.  Here are highlights from Politico:

In all of U.S. history, there’s never been a storm like Hurricane Harvey. That fact is increasingly clear, even though the rains are still falling and the water levels in Houston are still rising.

But there’s an uncomfortable point that, so far, everyone is skating around: We knew this would happen, decades ago. We knew this would happen, and we didn’t care. Now is the time to say it as loudly as possible: Harvey is what climate change looks like. More specifically, Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously.

Houston has been sprawling out into the swamp for decades, largely unplanned and unzoned. Now, all that pavement has transformed the bayous into surging torrents and shunted Harvey’s floodwaters towards homes and businesses. Individually, each of these subdivisions or strip malls might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in aggregate, they’ve converted the metro area into a flood factory. Houston, as it was before Harvey, will never be the same again.

Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years, but Harvey is in a class by itself. By the time the storm leaves the region on Wednesday, an estimated 40 to 60 inches of rain will fall on parts of Houston. So much rain has fallen already that the National Weather Service had to add additional colors to its maps to account for the extreme totals.

Harvey is now the benchmark disaster of record in the United States. As with Katrina, Harvey gives us an opportunity for an inflection point as a society. The people of Houston didn’t choose this to happen to them, but what happens next is critically important for all of us.

Climate change is making rainstorms everywhere worse, but particularly on the Gulf Coast. Since the 1950s, Houston has seen a 167 percent increase in the frequency of the most intense downpours. . . . While Harvey’s rains are unique in U.S. history, heavy rainstorms are increasing in frequency and intensity worldwide. One recent study showed that by mid-century, up to 450 million people worldwide will be exposed to a doubling of flood frequency. This isn’t just a Houston problem. This is happening all over. A warmer atmosphere enhances evaporation rates and increases the carrying capacity of rainstorms. Harvey drew its energy from a warmer-than-usual Gulf of Mexico, which will only grow warmer in the decades to come. At its peak, on Saturday night, Harvey produced rainfall rates exceeding six inches per hour in Houston, and its multi-day rainfall total is close to the theoretical maximum expected for anywhere in the United States. By continuing to pretend that we can engineer our way out of the worsening flooding problem with bigger dams, more levees and higher-powered pumping equipment, we’re fooling ourselves into a more dangerous future.

It’s possible to imagine something else: a hopeful future that diverges from climate dystopia and embraces the scenario in which our culture inevitably shifts toward building cities that work with the storms that are coming, instead of Sisyphean efforts to hold them back. That will require abandoning buildings and concepts we currently hold dear, but we’ll be rewarded with a safer, richer, more enduring world in the end. There were many people in Houston already working on making that world a reality even before Harvey came.

If we don’t talk about the climate context of Harvey, we won’t be able to prevent future disasters and get to work on that better future. Those of us who know this need to say it loudly. As long as our leaders, in words, and the rest of us, in actions, are OK with incremental solutions to a civilization-defining, global-scale problem, we will continue to stumble toward future catastrophes. Climate change requires us to rethink old systems that we’ve assumed will last forever.

The symbolism of the worst flooding disaster in U.S. history hitting the sprawled-out capital city of America’s oil industry is likely not lost on many. Institutionalized climate denial in our political system and climate denial by inaction by the rest of us have real consequences. They look like Houston.

Once Harvey’s floodwaters recede, the process will begin to imagine a New Houston, and that city will inevitably endure future mega-rainstorms as the world warms. The rebuilding process provides an opportunity to chart a new path. The choice isn’t between left and right, or denier and believer. The choice is between success and failure.

Scamvangelist Joel Osteen Closes Megachurch Amid Houston Flooding Crisis

The disaster that has overtaken the City of Houston, Texas and the surrounding region is quickly becoming a testimony of which churches put the Gospel message into practice and which ones merely give the Gospel message lip service only and see preaching as a road to self-enrichment.  My former neighborhood in southwest Houston through its Facebook page has been providing updates on disaster relief as information is gathered.  Among the reports are information that Westbury Baptist church  located at 10425 Hillcroft, will be serving as a drop-off and distribution place for food, water, toiletries, blankets and clothes.   In addition, Westbury Methodist located at 5200 Willowbend opened its doors yesterday as a shelter.  Additional information will be posted as information is gathered.  Meanwhile, one very high profile church is doing seemingly nothing to aid in the disaster releif effort.  Which church, scamvangelist Joel Osteen's 16,800-seat Lakewood Church near downtown Houston.  Osteens' church as of this time remains closed.  The New York Post looks at the situation.  Here are details:

Televangelist Joel Osteen cancelled services at his Houston megachurch Sunday and has yet to reopen its doors — despite the fact that thousands of flooded-out residents are desperately seeking shelter.

The perpetually smiling pastor told followers on Twitter on Monday to lean on their faith.  “Jesus promises us peace that passes understanding,” he wrote. “That’s peace when it doesn’t make sense.”

But Osteen’s comforting words didn’t sit well with critics, who want to know why the doors to his 16,800-seat arena at his Lakewood Church near downtown Houston are closed.

“You have taken so much money away from your people to live like a king,” entertainment publicist Danny Deraney blasted. “It’s the least you could do.”

Washington DC-based writer Charles Clymer tweeted pictures of Lakewood Church, which did not appear to be damaged by floods.

“It doesn’t make sense why you’re not opening up your mega church to house Houston citizens, help me understand that. Jesus,” according to Florida-based writer Emily Timbol.

While the church and its arena have not suffered any flood damage yet, ministry spokesman Donald Iloff said their property is inaccessible because of surrounding waters.

Osteen it should be noted, lives with his family in a $10.5 million home that is treated as church property and is tax-exempt.   As of 2012, Osteen's net worth is reportedly $56,508,500.00.  Oh, and lest I forget, Osteen is not accepting of LGBT individuals who he says need to "repent of their sins." Perhaps Osteen needs to do some repenting and stop fleecing the gullible and easily misled. 

America Still Hasn’t Learned the Lessons of Katrina

With Hurricane Harvey still ravaging Texas, a piece in Politico looks at the continuing problem plaguing America - a failure to take proactive actions to avert damage from hurricanes and rising sea levels.  Among the obstacles?  Republicans - with a few exceptions - who refuse to admit the reality of climate change and sea level rise; a fossilized Army Corps of Engineers; a pork barrel approach to funding appropriations; and a focus on disaster response rather than averting disasters.  Here in Hampton Roads, Virginia, cities like Norfolk are trying to forge onward alone (Miami-Dade County in Florida is doing likewise as is New York City after Hurricane Sandy) and has even hired Dutch consultants to devise ways to deal with sea level rise and the flooding goes with it.  Virginia Republicans meanwhile will not use the term sea level rise and instead refer to repetitive flooding, ignore the cause of the flooding.  As the piece notes, there are some bright spots, but overall little has been learned since Hurricane Katrina a dozen years ago.  Here are highlights:

Washington’s systems for protecting communities against weather disasters haven’t gotten better since that 2005 disaster, and in many ways may be worse. The State of Louisiana wasn't supposed to shoulder the Caminada Headland project itself: Rebuilding the island was originally the job of the Army Corps of Engineers, the 215-year-old entity charged with building and maintaining our country’s ports, harbors, locks, dams, levees and ecosystem restoration projects. Today, the agency is the single most important agency in coastal America's battle against rising seas, at the center of every major water-resources project in the country, either as builder or permitter. But the state of Louisiana, exasperated by federal delays and increasingly worried that the next big storm could just wipe out the port, eventually fronted the money and pumped the sand on its own. Today, despite years and millions of federal dollars poured into studying the Caminada Headland project and neighboring islands slated for restoration, the Corps has yet to push a dime toward construction.

Graves compares his experience with the Corps to that of a “battered ex-spouse”: “I feel like I’ve been lied to, cheated, kicked in the teeth over and over and over again.”

The sclerotic Army Corps of Engineers is the most visible and frustrating symptom of what many officials have come to see as the country’s backwards approach to disaster policy. From the way Congress appropriates money to the specific rebuilding efforts that federal agencies encourage, national policies almost uniformly look backwards, to the last storm, rather than ahead to the next. And the scale of the potential damage has caused agencies to become more risk-averse in ways that can obstruct, rather than help, local communities’ attempts to protect themselves. The Army Corps, for example, requires Louisiana to rebuild a full suite of five islands before it can reclaim any of the money it spent on the one headland—and is currently insisting it will take another half-decade simply to review an innovative wetlands restoration project the state has been working on for more than a decade and views as the linchpin of its coastal efforts. Meanwhile, new design standards inspired by Katrina have made levee projects wildly unaffordable.

As the effects of climate change play out, the risks posed by storms like Katrina and Harvey only stand to get worse. A not-yet-final draft of National Climate Assessment, produced by scientists across 13 federal agencies, predicts that global sea levels will likely rise between half a foot and 1.2 feet by 2050, and between one and four feet by the end of the century. In areas like the Northeast and the Gulf of Mexico, relative sea-level rise will happen much faster, researchers say. Coastal Louisiana is currently losing a football field’s worth of wetlands every 90 minutes, making it a harbinger for the crises that coastal communities around the country are expected to face.

Preparing for the looming disasters will require nimbleness, innovation, a willingness to take calculated risks and, as Louisiana has learned, respect for natural processes—all qualities that have been bred out of the Army Corps, and don’t get much consideration in federal policy. The agency molded itself around the earmark system, catering to the pet projects of individual lawmakers and then drawing them out as long as possible to keep the money flowing. Congress, too, learned to treat the Corps as a pork barrel: though Washington officially did away with earmarks a decade ago, lawmakers remain focused first and foremost on their local projects, pushing legislative language that serves their narrow ends without an eye to the mountain of red tape they are adding to the system as a whole.

And although preventing damage is widely considered to be cheaper than mopping up after the fact, congressional accounting creates incentives to spend money exactly the opposite way: Disaster relief bills are generally considered emergency spending, and thus not counted towards the federal deficit, while proactive investment in planning and protection must be funded through the normal budget cycle, which makes it look like cuttable federal spending at budget time.

Hurricane Katrina provided the real wakeup call, though: Residents saw firsthand that without the wetlands to help absorb their power, winds and waves pounded their communities with ferocious strength. In the wake of the storm, the Louisiana legislature passed major reforms aimed at professionalizing the state’s levee boards and coastal protection efforts. It embraced the concept of “multiple lines of defense”—a modern understanding of interlocking coastal systems, in which barrier islands and marshes play a role along with manmade structures like levees and pumping stations to shield communities from storms.

Today, Louisiana’s approach is seen as a model for states facing looming coastal crises, and its experts regularly host visitors from around the world seeking to learn from its resiliency efforts. Indeed, Louisiana is fostering this reputation, with a $60 million new “water campus” under construction in Baton Rouge, its flagship research center, the Water Institute of the Gulf, to be housed in a sleek, glass-encased building that straddles the levee and floats out over the main channel of the Mississippi River. But all this hard-won expertise has come with a side effect: A growing realization that the federal government—whose funding and know-how have been key to all projects of this scale—was far more of an obstacle than an ally. And the biggest frustration was with the Army Corps.

Hurricane Katrina showed that severe storms could be far harsher than previously thought, so the Corps adopted new mandates for federal levees to be built significantly bigger and stronger—a change that made sense in theory but instantly multiplied the price tag on projects to the point they became effectively impossible. One project, a massive levee system designed to protect highly vulnerable bayou communities and a major oil and gas hub in Terrebonne Parish, was approved by Congress at $887 million in 2007, just weeks before the new standards came out. When the post-Katrina standards were applied to it, the price tag suddenly multiplied nearly twelvefold, to $10.3 billion. . . . . they had virtually no shot of ever seeing it built.

[T]here’s a much bigger problem that the country is facing. And in this sense, the Corps—strangled in red tape as it may be—is no more than a tool of a larger system. Across government, virtually the entire philosophy of disaster relief is to react after disaster strikes rather than help communities and residents to prepare in advance. This leaves Congress funding billions in disaster aid when an investment of millions ahead of time could have warded off the worst. And the problem is only likely to grow as a warmer climate brings more frequent and severe hurricanes, floods and droughts.

The rare Republican who acknowledges the scientific consensus around climate change, Graves does not shrink from the future projections. He knows them first-hand—and sees them as a tool for solidly conservative fiscal planning rather than fanning environmentalist fears. “Statistically, we can prove that we have increased vulnerability. We’re spending more on coastal storms, and some of these areas are being inundated with increased frequency,” he says. “So, call it what you want, there’s an adaptation issue here that needs to be addressed—and it’s more fiscally conservative to step in and be proactive on some of these investments than it is to continue to rebuild after they’ve flooded and continue to be reactive.”

Hurricane Harvey is certain to teach this lesson again, in some form. With the storm expected to wreak billions of dollars in damage, there will likely be another of round of disaster aid, perhaps some more legislation directing the Corps to investigate the problem. But until the system fundamentally changes, it will simply be a waiting game, until the next, even stronger storm hits.