Too Much Ice Forces Arctic Climate Explorers To Give Up Campaign
In this newsletter:
1) Arctic Refuses To Melt As Predicted
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That,31 August 2017
2) Too Much Ice Forces Arctic Climate Explorers To Give Up Campaign
Watts Up With That, 31 August 2017
3) GWPF TV: Death Of A Climate Icon
Susan Crockford, GWPF TV, 31 August 2017
4) Roger Pielke Jr.: The Hurricane Lull Couldn’t Last
The Wall Street Journal, 1 September 2017
5) Bret Stephens: Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset
The New York Times, 31 August 2017
6) Rupert Darwall & Fraser Nelson: Resilience, Not Devastation, Is The Real Story Of The Texas Floods
7) Brendan O’Neill: Shame On The Eco-Ghouls Exploiting Hurricane Harvey
The Spectator, 31 August 2017
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That,31 August 2017
2) Too Much Ice Forces Arctic Climate Explorers To Give Up Campaign
Watts Up With That, 31 August 2017
3) GWPF TV: Death Of A Climate Icon
Susan Crockford, GWPF TV, 31 August 2017
4) Roger Pielke Jr.: The Hurricane Lull Couldn’t Last
The Wall Street Journal, 1 September 2017
5) Bret Stephens: Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset
The New York Times, 31 August 2017
6) Rupert Darwall & Fraser Nelson: Resilience, Not Devastation, Is The Real Story Of The Texas Floods
7) Brendan O’Neill: Shame On The Eco-Ghouls Exploiting Hurricane Harvey
The Spectator, 31 August 2017
Full details:
1) Arctic Refuses To Melt As Predicted
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That,31 August 2017
Greenland’s melt season ended a month ago, and since last September the ice sheet has grown at close to record rates.
Much was made of the anomalously warm year in 2012, which was quickly linked to climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/24/greenland-ice-sheet-thaw-nasa
I doubt whether Guardian readers will be allowed to read about the latest news.
Meanwhile Arctic sea ice extent is running well above the level of the last two years:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Full post
2) Too Much Ice Forces Arctic Climate Explorers To Give Up Campaign
Watts Up With That, 31 August 2017
From the arctic mission reports, where they try to put the best spin on this colossal failure as reported by the BBC:
Pen Hadow sets sail for North Pole as Arctic ice melts
British explorer Pen Hadow and his crew have set sail from Alaska, in an attempt to become the first people ever to sail to the North Pole. With Arctic ice melting at an unprecedented rate, previously inaccessible waters are opening up, creating the potential for their planned 5,500 km (3,500 mile) journey for the first time in human history.
Um, no. Here is the view of the North pole today, as reported by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC):
Image source: NSIDC, captions by WUWT
From NSIDC:
Cooler conditions, slower melt
August 21, 2017
A cooler than average first half of the month kept ice loss at a sluggish pace with little change in the ice edge within the eastern Arctic. Retreat was mostly confined to the western Beaufort and northern Chukchi seas. Ice extent remains above that seen in 2012 and 2007.
Here is the photo of the beached sailing vessel at the end-game:
http://www.arcticmission.com/follow-arctic-mission/
Full post
3) GWPF TV: Death Of A Climate Icon
Susan Crockford, GWPF TV, 31 August 2017
Since the start of this century, the polar bear has been the icon of human-caused global warming. But now the polar bear as poster child of catastrophic global warming is dead.
To watch the video, click on image above
In years past, the polar bear was routinely featured in public discussions about the effects of climate change, but today the polar bear is a much less common sight in the media and science.
A number of recent climate change reports even failed to mention polar bears in their discussion of Arctic sea ice decline.
The polar bear does not get mentioned once in the draft of the US Climate Science Special Report, even in the fifty page discussion on changes in the Arctic.
And NOAA’s annual Arctic Report Card has not mentioned the polar bear since 2014, in spite of highlighting the dangers faced by bear populations in every issue since 2008.
Even Al Gore seems to have forgotten to include the plight of polar bears in his newest climate change movie. Though it had a prominent role in his 2007 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the polar bear example was left out of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. It doesn’t even get a mention.
After years of campaigners’ and researchers’ claims that populations were in terminal decline, the ‘canary in the coal mine’ has been retired. It is now widely understood that polar bears are not suffering as predicted from years of low summer sea ice.
There have been no new reports of falling polar bear numbers, and images of fat, healthy polar bears abound.
Fat, healthy bears have been photographed around the Arctic on a regular basis in recent years, even in regions like Hudson Bay and Alaska where the bears were once said to be most at risk due to sea ice loss.
Full video
4) Roger Pielke Jr.: The Hurricane Lull Couldn’t Last
The Wall Street Journal, 1 September 2017
The U.S. hadn’t been hit by a Category 3 or stronger storm since Katrina in 2005. We were overdue.
A neighborhood near Addicks Reservoir in Houston, Aug. 29. PHOTO: DAVID J. PHILLIP/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Activists, journalists and scientists have pounced on the still-unfolding disaster in Houston and along the Gulf Coast in an attempt to focus the policy discussion narrowly on climate change. Such single-issue myopia takes precious attention away from policies that could improve our ability to prepare for and respond to disasters. More thoughtful and effective disaster policies are needed because the future will bring many more weather disasters like Hurricane Harvey, with larger impacts than those of the recent past.
For many years, those seeking to justify carbon restrictions argued that hurricanes had become more common and intense. That hasn’t happened. Scientific assessments, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. government’s latest National Climate Assessment, indicate no long-term increases in the frequency or strength of hurricanes in the U.S. Neither has there been an increase in floods, droughts and tornadoes, though heat waves and heavy precipitation have become more common.
Prior to Harvey, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm, the U.S. had gone a remarkable 12 years without being hit by a hurricane of Category 3 strength or stronger. Since 1970 the U.S. has only seen four hurricanes of Category 4 or 5 strength. In the previous 47 years, the country was struck by 14 such storms. President Obama presided over the lowest rate of hurricane landfalls—0.5 a year—of any president since at least 1900. Eight presidents dealt with more than two a year, but George W. Bush (18 storms) is the only one to have done so since Lyndon B. Johnson. The rest occurred before 1960.
Without data to support their wilder claims, climate partisans have now resorted to shouting that every extreme weather event was somehow “made worse” by the emission of greenhouse gases. Earlier this week, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt directed researchers “to shed some of the fussy over-precision about the relationship between climate change and weather.”
Turning away from empirical science—or “fussy over-precision”—comes with risks. But whatever one’s views on climate, there should be broad agreement today that bigger disasters are coming. Some may blame greenhouse gases while others may believe it to be some sort of karmic retribution. But there is a simpler explanation: Because the world has experienced a remarkable period of good fortune when it comes to catastrophes, we are due.
Agreement that more big disasters are on their way should provide opportunity for those otherwise opposed on matters of climate policy to come together and make some smart decisions. Here is where they might start:
• Establish disaster review boards. In the aftermath of every plane crash, the federal government convenes experts under the auspices of the National Transportation Safety Board to find out what went wrong and what might be done to prevent it happening again. Meteorologist Michael Smith of AccuWeather (a scientist who decades ago helped identify the “microburst” weather phenomena and its role in plane crashes) has long argued that the nation needs a National Disaster Review Board. After every disaster, it would evaluate what went wrong—and right—and distill lessons. The Trump administration should create such a board in the wake of Harvey.
• Encourage resilient growth. Disaster researcher Dennis Mileti has explained that the choices made at the local level—such as where to build—determine how a community will experience disasters. As communities develop, it can be difficult to see how local decisions might affect disasters years or decades down the road. This is particularly the case in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, when the push to “return to normal” might mean simply reinforcing the conditions that led to problems. Local communities need to take better advantage of experts who can explore development choices with an eye toward better preparing for an uncertain future.
• Enhance federal capacity. The federal government plays a crucial role in supporting states and local communities to prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. When Harvey was out at sea, accurate forecasts from the National Weather Service saved many lives. The National Flood Insurance Program shapes how communities develop, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies provide resources for those whose lives are upturned by natural disasters. President Trump should also appoint a science adviser, whose primary job traditionally has been to coordinate federal science agencies, facilitate budget requests and assess performance. There is no reason to go more than seven months without one.
Full post
5) Bret Stephens: Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset
The New York Times, 31 August 2017
Texans will find few consolations in the wake of a hurricane as terrifying as Harvey. But here, at least, is one: A biblical storm has hit them, and the death toll —38 as of this writing — is mercifully low, given its intensity.
This is not how it plays out in much of the world. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America and killed anywhere between 11,000 and 19,000 people, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua. Nearly a decade later Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar and a staggering 138,000 people perished.
Nature’s furies — hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, infectious diseases, you name it — may strike unpredictably. But their effects are not distributed at random.
Rich countries tend to experience, and measure, the costs of such disasters primarily in terms of money. Poor countries experience them primarily in terms of lives. Between 1940 and 2016, a total of 3,348 people died in the United States on account of hurricanes, according to government data, for an average of 43 victims a year. That’s a tragedy, but compare it to the nearly 140,000 lives lost when a cyclone hit Bangladesh in 1991.
Why do richer countries fare so much better than poorer ones when it comes to natural disasters? It isn’t just better regulation. I grew up in Mexico City, which adopted stringent building codes following a devastating earthquake in 1957. That didn’t save the city in the 1985 earthquake, when we learned that those codes had been flouted for years by lax or corrupt building inspectors, and thousands of people were buried under the rubble of shoddy construction. Regulation is only as good, or bad, as its enforcement.
Every child knows that houses of brick are safer than houses of wood or straw — and therefore cost more to build. Harvey will damage or ruin thousands of homes. But it won’t sweep away entire neighborhoods, as Typhoon Haiyan did in the Philippine city of Tacloban in 2013.
Harvey will also inflict billions in economic damage, most crushingly on uninsured homeowners. The numbers are likely to be staggering in absolute terms, but what’s more remarkable is how easily the American economy can absorb the blow. The storm will be a “speed bump” to Houston’s $503 billion economy, according to Moody’s Analytics’ Adam Kamins, who told The Wall Street Journal that he expects the storm to derail growth for about two months.
On a global level, the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. notes that disaster losses as a percentage of the world’s G.D.P., at just 0.3 percent, have remained constant since 1990. That’s despite the dollar cost of disasters having nearly doubled over the same time — at just about the same rate as the growth in the global economy. (Pielke is yet another victim of the climate lobby’s hyperactive smear machine, but that doesn’t make his data any less valid.)
Climate activists often claim that unchecked economic growth and the things that go with are principal causes of environmental destruction. In reality, growth is the great offset. It’s a big part of the reason why, despite our warming planet, mortality rates from storms have declined from .11 per 100,000 in the 1900s to .04 per 100,000 in the 2010s, according to data compiled by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser. Death rates from other natural disasters such as floods and droughts have fallen by even more staggering percentages over the last century.
Full post
6) Rupert Darwall & Fraser Nelson: Resilience, Not Devastation, Is The Real Story Of The Texas Floods
The Spectator, 31 August 2017
Houston’s response to Hurricane Harvey is a lesson for the world
Safe: Catherine Pham and her baby son are rescued in Houston
The numbers are awesome. In a matter of hours, Hurricane Harvey dumped nine trillion gallons of rainfall on Houston and southeast Texas: at one stage, 24 inches of rain fell in 24 hours. Like all American cities, Houston is prepared for hurricanes and floods — but Harvey was of a different magnitude. ‘We have not seen an event like this,’ the chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, William ‘Brock’ Long declared. It led rapidly to unprecedented flooding in one of the world’s richest cities.
The photos from Houston have been heartbreaking. Pensioners have been pictured sitting half-submerged in retirement homes, awaiting rescue. Some 30,000 may be forced into shelters, and officials are braced for almost half a million requiring federal assistance. We have seen parents walking knee-deep in water with their children in their arms, and belongings balanced in bags on their heads. Families wait on the rooftops of their homes, stranded by the flood.
Amid all this, another picture emerges: of the resilience of the city and its people, of the calm effectiveness of the emergency services and the orderliness of communities responding to an extreme set of circum-stances. The volunteers who took their boats to rescue those who had been stranded. There are people like Arthur Buchanan, who runs the C&D hardware store on 11th Street, who cycled to work through the floods. ‘We only close five days out of the year,’ he told reporters, who were amazed to find his shop open, ‘and this ain’t one of them.’ That’s Texans for you.
As early as 1937, local officials declared Houston to be a city ‘at the mercy of the relentless water’. Storms have battered the city several times over recent years: Hurricane Allison in 2001 and Rita in 2005 each had a significant death toll. Yet its population keeps growing, and the risk of hurricanes are factored into everyday life. As the storm approached, locals were telling journalists that they had filled the bath with water, had prepared plenty of food and were ready to stay put for a few days and sit the storm out.
Americans are less afraid of the weather than they used to be, and with reason. The pictures of Houston’s motorways turned into rivers look shocking, until you realise that this is their function. Houston has 2,500 miles of managed waterways, a network of drainage channels and sewers. They fill up when a hurricane strikes, but the idea is that the roads provide overrun and act as massive drains — saving neighbourhoods that might otherwise be underwater. More roads could, and should, have been upgraded in this way. Houston’s first ‘chief resilience officer’ said earlier this year that he needed about $3 billion to upgrade, but the city’s overall defences saved countless lives.
This is the story of human development: when a nation grows more prosperous, it is less at the mercy of the elements. When Superstorm Sandy struck New York five years ago, it took 74 lives — but if a similar storm had struck cities in the third world, the death toll could have run into the thousands. An MIT study of natural disasters between 1980 and 2002 found that America suffered an average of 17 deaths per windstorm, compared to almost 2,000 in Bangladesh. The average flood cost six lives in the US, but a couple of hundred in East Asia. It isn’t that the storms are more severe or more frequent — just that America has the money to cope better.
Outsmarting the weather is part of the basic story of human progress. Indur Goklany, a science analyst at the US Department of the Interior, once looked at all deaths from 8,500 droughts, wildfires, storms and floods over the last century. He found that in the 1920s there were nearly half a million deaths annually from extreme weather events. Although since 1900 the world’s population has more than tripled, global deaths from extreme weather have fallen by 93 per cent. (T he number of deaths from flooding has fallen by 99 per cent.)
And why? Not because the weather is any milder, but because developed countries can afford to protect people from it. Globally, mankind turned the corner after 1970, the year that deaths from storms, including hurricanes and typhoons, peaked.
Had Hurricane Harvey struck ten years ago, it might have been enlisted into the political battle about global warming. But the tone of debate is less hysterical now; only a few voices say that this is a taste of what we can all expect in the future. It’s not true to say that Harvey is ferocious by historical standards: some estimates rate its strength at 14th out of all the hurricanes that have made US landfall since 1851.
As our understanding of the science evolves, a new rationalism is supplanting the old climate hysteria. We might not be sure how much meaningful difference we can make to the trajectory of climate change, but we know that we can adapt to it — and that we can help the third world do the same. That’s why, as the Swedish author Johan Norberg has argued, it’s counterproductive to demand drastic and far-reaching efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions. The test for climate policies is that they should not impede the ability of poor nations to create more wealth and to bring power and shelter to those who need it. To force countries to adopt expensive energy policies risks keeping the world’s poor down.
Full post
7) Brendan O’Neill: Shame On The Eco-Ghouls Exploiting Hurricane Harvey
The Spectator, 31 August 2017
Here they come, the eco-ghouls, feasting on another natural disaster. This time it’s the floods in Houston.
No sooner had Hurricane Harvey caused terrifying waters to consume entire streets and trailer parks than the eco-set was rushing in to try to make moral mileage out of it all. This is climate change in action, they decreed. This is man’s fault, they insist. Our hubris caused this watery horror, they claim, sounding positively Biblical, like Old Testament patriarchs warning the sinful populace that God will punish it with floods. There’s nothing like a natural disaster to remind us how backward environmentalist thinking is.
They do it all the time. Come heatwave or tsunami or volcano eruption, they cock their fingers and point them at greedy, destructive, climate-change-denying mankind, us alleged makers of these natural calamities. ‘Harvey is what climate change looks like’, says a writer for Politico. This weather is ‘political’, he says. This echoes the bizarre phrase ‘Weather of Mass Destruction’, promiscuously used by greens, which treats weather events almost as sentient, as seeking to teach us mortals a lesson about our wickedness. Indeed, a columnist for the Washington Post says we can only ‘save the planet’ if we ‘heed Harvey’s hard lesson’ — which is that nature has been too ‘dramatically altered by man’ and ‘we have to take responsibility for what we’ve done’. So man has been too modern, too cocky, too ambitious, and these floods are our comeuppance.
The moralisation of Harvey’s floods, the cynical imbuing of them with a lesson for mankind, is most clear in the snarky commentary about the industries Texas is most famous for: oil and gas. Texas should use this ‘devastating tragedy’ to transition from an ‘epicentre for oil and gas to a world capital of alternative energies’, says the Washington Post. Not a single link has been established between Texas’s production of oil and these floods; instead, all the supposedly scientific talk is mere hypothesising that while a hotter climate doesn’t cause hurricanes, it might — note the word might — make them more intense than they would otherwise be. And yet observers casually draw a moral line from oil-drilling to deadly floods, from Texan industry to this Texan calamity, because their aim is not to be scientific at all but to be hectoring, to use this disaster as an exclamation mark to their already existing prejudices about industry and growth.
They don’t want to understand the floods — they want to exploit them. Likewise, New York magazine points to the ‘tragic irony’ that many of those whose lives have been wrecked by the floods were workers for the ‘oil business, which has worked tirelessly to undermine public understanding of climate change’. And now they find themselves pummelled by the ‘toll of our emissions’. Hilarious, right? Politicosmirks at the ‘symbolism’ of this awful flood hitting the ‘capital city of America’s oil industry’. Lesson: such industries, and the climate-change denialism they allegedly promote, ‘have real consequences’.
To reiterate: no one, but no one, has come anywhere close to proving a connection between oil excavation and this hurricane, or any other hurricane. It’s just assumed, invented. This hectoring of oil-sinful Texas is a secular version of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, only where those cities were destroyed by fire for the old sins of sexual deviance, Texas is apparently being pounded with wind and water for the new sin of hunting for oil and gas.
The eco-lecturing has been relentless. Hurricane Harvey is ‘our fault’, experts speculate. ‘There’ll be more disasters like Houston if Trump continues to cut climate-change regulations’, says a headline in the Independent. This is eco-blackmail: heed ‘Harvey’s lesson’ and rearrange America’s industrial and business life accordingly or more people will die. Harvey is even being used to try to correct people’s thinking, to chastise so-called ‘deniers’. ‘Harvey’s flood of evidence against climate-change denial’, says one headline. Apparently this disaster has ‘punched the ideology of President Trump… right in the mouth’. This horror will deal a ‘fatal blow to climate-change scepticism’, hopes one observer. Many hope the floods will open Trump’s eyes, and by extension the eyes of everyone who isn’t convinced climate change is the biggest problem facing the world: it might at least ‘dent’ our denialism, says American Prospect.
Full post
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That,31 August 2017
Greenland’s melt season ended a month ago, and since last September the ice sheet has grown at close to record rates.
Much was made of the anomalously warm year in 2012, which was quickly linked to climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/24/greenland-ice-sheet-thaw-nasa
I doubt whether Guardian readers will be allowed to read about the latest news.
Meanwhile Arctic sea ice extent is running well above the level of the last two years:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Full post
2) Too Much Ice Forces Arctic Climate Explorers To Give Up Campaign
Watts Up With That, 31 August 2017
From the arctic mission reports, where they try to put the best spin on this colossal failure as reported by the BBC:
Pen Hadow sets sail for North Pole as Arctic ice melts
British explorer Pen Hadow and his crew have set sail from Alaska, in an attempt to become the first people ever to sail to the North Pole. With Arctic ice melting at an unprecedented rate, previously inaccessible waters are opening up, creating the potential for their planned 5,500 km (3,500 mile) journey for the first time in human history.
Um, no. Here is the view of the North pole today, as reported by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC):
Image source: NSIDC, captions by WUWT
From NSIDC:
Cooler conditions, slower melt
August 21, 2017
A cooler than average first half of the month kept ice loss at a sluggish pace with little change in the ice edge within the eastern Arctic. Retreat was mostly confined to the western Beaufort and northern Chukchi seas. Ice extent remains above that seen in 2012 and 2007.
Here is the photo of the beached sailing vessel at the end-game:
http://www.arcticmission.com/follow-arctic-mission/
Full post
3) GWPF TV: Death Of A Climate Icon
Susan Crockford, GWPF TV, 31 August 2017
Since the start of this century, the polar bear has been the icon of human-caused global warming. But now the polar bear as poster child of catastrophic global warming is dead.
To watch the video, click on image above
In years past, the polar bear was routinely featured in public discussions about the effects of climate change, but today the polar bear is a much less common sight in the media and science.
A number of recent climate change reports even failed to mention polar bears in their discussion of Arctic sea ice decline.
The polar bear does not get mentioned once in the draft of the US Climate Science Special Report, even in the fifty page discussion on changes in the Arctic.
And NOAA’s annual Arctic Report Card has not mentioned the polar bear since 2014, in spite of highlighting the dangers faced by bear populations in every issue since 2008.
Even Al Gore seems to have forgotten to include the plight of polar bears in his newest climate change movie. Though it had a prominent role in his 2007 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the polar bear example was left out of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. It doesn’t even get a mention.
After years of campaigners’ and researchers’ claims that populations were in terminal decline, the ‘canary in the coal mine’ has been retired. It is now widely understood that polar bears are not suffering as predicted from years of low summer sea ice.
There have been no new reports of falling polar bear numbers, and images of fat, healthy polar bears abound.
Fat, healthy bears have been photographed around the Arctic on a regular basis in recent years, even in regions like Hudson Bay and Alaska where the bears were once said to be most at risk due to sea ice loss.
Full video
4) Roger Pielke Jr.: The Hurricane Lull Couldn’t Last
The Wall Street Journal, 1 September 2017
The U.S. hadn’t been hit by a Category 3 or stronger storm since Katrina in 2005. We were overdue.
A neighborhood near Addicks Reservoir in Houston, Aug. 29. PHOTO: DAVID J. PHILLIP/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Activists, journalists and scientists have pounced on the still-unfolding disaster in Houston and along the Gulf Coast in an attempt to focus the policy discussion narrowly on climate change. Such single-issue myopia takes precious attention away from policies that could improve our ability to prepare for and respond to disasters. More thoughtful and effective disaster policies are needed because the future will bring many more weather disasters like Hurricane Harvey, with larger impacts than those of the recent past.
For many years, those seeking to justify carbon restrictions argued that hurricanes had become more common and intense. That hasn’t happened. Scientific assessments, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. government’s latest National Climate Assessment, indicate no long-term increases in the frequency or strength of hurricanes in the U.S. Neither has there been an increase in floods, droughts and tornadoes, though heat waves and heavy precipitation have become more common.
Prior to Harvey, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm, the U.S. had gone a remarkable 12 years without being hit by a hurricane of Category 3 strength or stronger. Since 1970 the U.S. has only seen four hurricanes of Category 4 or 5 strength. In the previous 47 years, the country was struck by 14 such storms. President Obama presided over the lowest rate of hurricane landfalls—0.5 a year—of any president since at least 1900. Eight presidents dealt with more than two a year, but George W. Bush (18 storms) is the only one to have done so since Lyndon B. Johnson. The rest occurred before 1960.
Without data to support their wilder claims, climate partisans have now resorted to shouting that every extreme weather event was somehow “made worse” by the emission of greenhouse gases. Earlier this week, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt directed researchers “to shed some of the fussy over-precision about the relationship between climate change and weather.”
Turning away from empirical science—or “fussy over-precision”—comes with risks. But whatever one’s views on climate, there should be broad agreement today that bigger disasters are coming. Some may blame greenhouse gases while others may believe it to be some sort of karmic retribution. But there is a simpler explanation: Because the world has experienced a remarkable period of good fortune when it comes to catastrophes, we are due.
Agreement that more big disasters are on their way should provide opportunity for those otherwise opposed on matters of climate policy to come together and make some smart decisions. Here is where they might start:
• Establish disaster review boards. In the aftermath of every plane crash, the federal government convenes experts under the auspices of the National Transportation Safety Board to find out what went wrong and what might be done to prevent it happening again. Meteorologist Michael Smith of AccuWeather (a scientist who decades ago helped identify the “microburst” weather phenomena and its role in plane crashes) has long argued that the nation needs a National Disaster Review Board. After every disaster, it would evaluate what went wrong—and right—and distill lessons. The Trump administration should create such a board in the wake of Harvey.
• Encourage resilient growth. Disaster researcher Dennis Mileti has explained that the choices made at the local level—such as where to build—determine how a community will experience disasters. As communities develop, it can be difficult to see how local decisions might affect disasters years or decades down the road. This is particularly the case in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, when the push to “return to normal” might mean simply reinforcing the conditions that led to problems. Local communities need to take better advantage of experts who can explore development choices with an eye toward better preparing for an uncertain future.
• Enhance federal capacity. The federal government plays a crucial role in supporting states and local communities to prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. When Harvey was out at sea, accurate forecasts from the National Weather Service saved many lives. The National Flood Insurance Program shapes how communities develop, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies provide resources for those whose lives are upturned by natural disasters. President Trump should also appoint a science adviser, whose primary job traditionally has been to coordinate federal science agencies, facilitate budget requests and assess performance. There is no reason to go more than seven months without one.
Full post
5) Bret Stephens: Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset
The New York Times, 31 August 2017
Texans will find few consolations in the wake of a hurricane as terrifying as Harvey. But here, at least, is one: A biblical storm has hit them, and the death toll —38 as of this writing — is mercifully low, given its intensity.
This is not how it plays out in much of the world. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America and killed anywhere between 11,000 and 19,000 people, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua. Nearly a decade later Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar and a staggering 138,000 people perished.
Nature’s furies — hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, infectious diseases, you name it — may strike unpredictably. But their effects are not distributed at random.
Rich countries tend to experience, and measure, the costs of such disasters primarily in terms of money. Poor countries experience them primarily in terms of lives. Between 1940 and 2016, a total of 3,348 people died in the United States on account of hurricanes, according to government data, for an average of 43 victims a year. That’s a tragedy, but compare it to the nearly 140,000 lives lost when a cyclone hit Bangladesh in 1991.
Why do richer countries fare so much better than poorer ones when it comes to natural disasters? It isn’t just better regulation. I grew up in Mexico City, which adopted stringent building codes following a devastating earthquake in 1957. That didn’t save the city in the 1985 earthquake, when we learned that those codes had been flouted for years by lax or corrupt building inspectors, and thousands of people were buried under the rubble of shoddy construction. Regulation is only as good, or bad, as its enforcement.
Every child knows that houses of brick are safer than houses of wood or straw — and therefore cost more to build. Harvey will damage or ruin thousands of homes. But it won’t sweep away entire neighborhoods, as Typhoon Haiyan did in the Philippine city of Tacloban in 2013.
Harvey will also inflict billions in economic damage, most crushingly on uninsured homeowners. The numbers are likely to be staggering in absolute terms, but what’s more remarkable is how easily the American economy can absorb the blow. The storm will be a “speed bump” to Houston’s $503 billion economy, according to Moody’s Analytics’ Adam Kamins, who told The Wall Street Journal that he expects the storm to derail growth for about two months.
On a global level, the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. notes that disaster losses as a percentage of the world’s G.D.P., at just 0.3 percent, have remained constant since 1990. That’s despite the dollar cost of disasters having nearly doubled over the same time — at just about the same rate as the growth in the global economy. (Pielke is yet another victim of the climate lobby’s hyperactive smear machine, but that doesn’t make his data any less valid.)
Climate activists often claim that unchecked economic growth and the things that go with are principal causes of environmental destruction. In reality, growth is the great offset. It’s a big part of the reason why, despite our warming planet, mortality rates from storms have declined from .11 per 100,000 in the 1900s to .04 per 100,000 in the 2010s, according to data compiled by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser. Death rates from other natural disasters such as floods and droughts have fallen by even more staggering percentages over the last century.
Full post
6) Rupert Darwall & Fraser Nelson: Resilience, Not Devastation, Is The Real Story Of The Texas Floods
The Spectator, 31 August 2017
Houston’s response to Hurricane Harvey is a lesson for the world
Safe: Catherine Pham and her baby son are rescued in Houston
The numbers are awesome. In a matter of hours, Hurricane Harvey dumped nine trillion gallons of rainfall on Houston and southeast Texas: at one stage, 24 inches of rain fell in 24 hours. Like all American cities, Houston is prepared for hurricanes and floods — but Harvey was of a different magnitude. ‘We have not seen an event like this,’ the chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, William ‘Brock’ Long declared. It led rapidly to unprecedented flooding in one of the world’s richest cities.
The photos from Houston have been heartbreaking. Pensioners have been pictured sitting half-submerged in retirement homes, awaiting rescue. Some 30,000 may be forced into shelters, and officials are braced for almost half a million requiring federal assistance. We have seen parents walking knee-deep in water with their children in their arms, and belongings balanced in bags on their heads. Families wait on the rooftops of their homes, stranded by the flood.
Amid all this, another picture emerges: of the resilience of the city and its people, of the calm effectiveness of the emergency services and the orderliness of communities responding to an extreme set of circum-stances. The volunteers who took their boats to rescue those who had been stranded. There are people like Arthur Buchanan, who runs the C&D hardware store on 11th Street, who cycled to work through the floods. ‘We only close five days out of the year,’ he told reporters, who were amazed to find his shop open, ‘and this ain’t one of them.’ That’s Texans for you.
As early as 1937, local officials declared Houston to be a city ‘at the mercy of the relentless water’. Storms have battered the city several times over recent years: Hurricane Allison in 2001 and Rita in 2005 each had a significant death toll. Yet its population keeps growing, and the risk of hurricanes are factored into everyday life. As the storm approached, locals were telling journalists that they had filled the bath with water, had prepared plenty of food and were ready to stay put for a few days and sit the storm out.
Americans are less afraid of the weather than they used to be, and with reason. The pictures of Houston’s motorways turned into rivers look shocking, until you realise that this is their function. Houston has 2,500 miles of managed waterways, a network of drainage channels and sewers. They fill up when a hurricane strikes, but the idea is that the roads provide overrun and act as massive drains — saving neighbourhoods that might otherwise be underwater. More roads could, and should, have been upgraded in this way. Houston’s first ‘chief resilience officer’ said earlier this year that he needed about $3 billion to upgrade, but the city’s overall defences saved countless lives.
This is the story of human development: when a nation grows more prosperous, it is less at the mercy of the elements. When Superstorm Sandy struck New York five years ago, it took 74 lives — but if a similar storm had struck cities in the third world, the death toll could have run into the thousands. An MIT study of natural disasters between 1980 and 2002 found that America suffered an average of 17 deaths per windstorm, compared to almost 2,000 in Bangladesh. The average flood cost six lives in the US, but a couple of hundred in East Asia. It isn’t that the storms are more severe or more frequent — just that America has the money to cope better.
Outsmarting the weather is part of the basic story of human progress. Indur Goklany, a science analyst at the US Department of the Interior, once looked at all deaths from 8,500 droughts, wildfires, storms and floods over the last century. He found that in the 1920s there were nearly half a million deaths annually from extreme weather events. Although since 1900 the world’s population has more than tripled, global deaths from extreme weather have fallen by 93 per cent. (T he number of deaths from flooding has fallen by 99 per cent.)
And why? Not because the weather is any milder, but because developed countries can afford to protect people from it. Globally, mankind turned the corner after 1970, the year that deaths from storms, including hurricanes and typhoons, peaked.
Had Hurricane Harvey struck ten years ago, it might have been enlisted into the political battle about global warming. But the tone of debate is less hysterical now; only a few voices say that this is a taste of what we can all expect in the future. It’s not true to say that Harvey is ferocious by historical standards: some estimates rate its strength at 14th out of all the hurricanes that have made US landfall since 1851.
As our understanding of the science evolves, a new rationalism is supplanting the old climate hysteria. We might not be sure how much meaningful difference we can make to the trajectory of climate change, but we know that we can adapt to it — and that we can help the third world do the same. That’s why, as the Swedish author Johan Norberg has argued, it’s counterproductive to demand drastic and far-reaching efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions. The test for climate policies is that they should not impede the ability of poor nations to create more wealth and to bring power and shelter to those who need it. To force countries to adopt expensive energy policies risks keeping the world’s poor down.
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7) Brendan O’Neill: Shame On The Eco-Ghouls Exploiting Hurricane Harvey
The Spectator, 31 August 2017
Here they come, the eco-ghouls, feasting on another natural disaster. This time it’s the floods in Houston.
No sooner had Hurricane Harvey caused terrifying waters to consume entire streets and trailer parks than the eco-set was rushing in to try to make moral mileage out of it all. This is climate change in action, they decreed. This is man’s fault, they insist. Our hubris caused this watery horror, they claim, sounding positively Biblical, like Old Testament patriarchs warning the sinful populace that God will punish it with floods. There’s nothing like a natural disaster to remind us how backward environmentalist thinking is.
They do it all the time. Come heatwave or tsunami or volcano eruption, they cock their fingers and point them at greedy, destructive, climate-change-denying mankind, us alleged makers of these natural calamities. ‘Harvey is what climate change looks like’, says a writer for Politico. This weather is ‘political’, he says. This echoes the bizarre phrase ‘Weather of Mass Destruction’, promiscuously used by greens, which treats weather events almost as sentient, as seeking to teach us mortals a lesson about our wickedness. Indeed, a columnist for the Washington Post says we can only ‘save the planet’ if we ‘heed Harvey’s hard lesson’ — which is that nature has been too ‘dramatically altered by man’ and ‘we have to take responsibility for what we’ve done’. So man has been too modern, too cocky, too ambitious, and these floods are our comeuppance.
The moralisation of Harvey’s floods, the cynical imbuing of them with a lesson for mankind, is most clear in the snarky commentary about the industries Texas is most famous for: oil and gas. Texas should use this ‘devastating tragedy’ to transition from an ‘epicentre for oil and gas to a world capital of alternative energies’, says the Washington Post. Not a single link has been established between Texas’s production of oil and these floods; instead, all the supposedly scientific talk is mere hypothesising that while a hotter climate doesn’t cause hurricanes, it might — note the word might — make them more intense than they would otherwise be. And yet observers casually draw a moral line from oil-drilling to deadly floods, from Texan industry to this Texan calamity, because their aim is not to be scientific at all but to be hectoring, to use this disaster as an exclamation mark to their already existing prejudices about industry and growth.
They don’t want to understand the floods — they want to exploit them. Likewise, New York magazine points to the ‘tragic irony’ that many of those whose lives have been wrecked by the floods were workers for the ‘oil business, which has worked tirelessly to undermine public understanding of climate change’. And now they find themselves pummelled by the ‘toll of our emissions’. Hilarious, right? Politicosmirks at the ‘symbolism’ of this awful flood hitting the ‘capital city of America’s oil industry’. Lesson: such industries, and the climate-change denialism they allegedly promote, ‘have real consequences’.
To reiterate: no one, but no one, has come anywhere close to proving a connection between oil excavation and this hurricane, or any other hurricane. It’s just assumed, invented. This hectoring of oil-sinful Texas is a secular version of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, only where those cities were destroyed by fire for the old sins of sexual deviance, Texas is apparently being pounded with wind and water for the new sin of hunting for oil and gas.
The eco-lecturing has been relentless. Hurricane Harvey is ‘our fault’, experts speculate. ‘There’ll be more disasters like Houston if Trump continues to cut climate-change regulations’, says a headline in the Independent. This is eco-blackmail: heed ‘Harvey’s lesson’ and rearrange America’s industrial and business life accordingly or more people will die. Harvey is even being used to try to correct people’s thinking, to chastise so-called ‘deniers’. ‘Harvey’s flood of evidence against climate-change denial’, says one headline. Apparently this disaster has ‘punched the ideology of President Trump… right in the mouth’. This horror will deal a ‘fatal blow to climate-change scepticism’, hopes one observer. Many hope the floods will open Trump’s eyes, and by extension the eyes of everyone who isn’t convinced climate change is the biggest problem facing the world: it might at least ‘dent’ our denialism, says American Prospect.
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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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