> total damages claimed could reach $10 billion or more, especially if the big energy and oil companies—whose presence in one section of West Houston gave it the nickname the Energy Corridor—sue over their flooded headquarters.
the irony that the home neighborhood of many of the worlds largest oil companies would want to sue because the global warming they're at the core of causing contributed towards the damage of their own buildings.
Crazy. All those oil companies forcing you to buy stuff that gets transported by trucks that use oil. You’re blaming the drug dealers for people choosing to shoot heroin.
Feel free to stop consuming oil. Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil and uses power generated using oil. If you buy a single thing made in China, you are buying products generally made using coal-fired electricity. Unless you live in a grass hut, you are part of the “problem.”
"Chemical plants produce olefins by steam cracking of natural gas liquids like ethane and propane. Olefins are the basis for polymers and oligomers used in plastics, resins, fibers, elastomers, lubricants, and gels."
> You’re blaming the drug dealers for people choosing to shoot heroin.
Grade-school libertarianism doesn't apply here. I'm blaming them for using their billions of dollars to pack my government with people like James Inhofe who willingly spread lies and misinformation about a regulatory subject they know nothing about:
> Take a look at Inhofe's campaign funding. The major source, contributing half a million dollars over the past five years, has been the oil and gas industry... If Inhofe were to change his position on man-made global warming, is it credible that he would retain all this funding? No. He receives money from fossil fuel companies because he articulates the views to which these funders subscribe, and because he advances their interests in the Senate. Given that keeping your seat means spending a fortune on television advertising and other forms of campaigning, changing your views on a matter of great interest to your sponsors is likely to be political suicide.
I can't tell if this is a genuine expression of sympathy for people who, while perhaps wealthy, have suffered significant loss of their time, homes, and heirlooms.
Or if it's a sarcastic jab at these same people who, when other, less wealthy people are suffering, send "thoughts and prayers" via Facebook chain messages instead of sending actions and dollars.
Why? Houston was been flooded several times before. Particularly in 1929 and 1935 when the county finally decided to form a flood control agency. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_County_Flood_Control_... Climate change is real, but if every time we get bad weather you call it that it’s a little like crying wolf.
Even in its natural state the Gulf is an extremely warm body of water. A storm that enters it immediately Hulks up. We’ve normally relied on the Gulfstream (goes North) and Jetstream (goes East) to push these storms back out to sea.
Except the argument isn't about the frequency of storms nor the occurrence of a severe storm, but the increase in frequency of severe storms. Essentially, if we put more energy into the system, then we shouldn't be surprised if more energy is outputted as a result of the same system.
> A sustained upward trend is found between the global proportion of Cat 4–5 hurricanes and ACCI (Fig. 4), balanced by a similar decrease in Cat 1–2 hurricanes. The results are independent of the choice of models to calculate the ACCI as can be seen by comparing Fig. 4a and b. In both cases the ACCI explains 80–85 % of the variance in the smoothed annual hurricane proportions with p < 0.01 (using unsmoothed data). This finding is consistent with the SST-related increases in Cat 4–5 and decreases in Cat 1–2 found by Kishtawal et al. (2012), the relationship of intense hurricanes with SST found by Hoyos et al. (2010), and the Atlantic landfall hurricane changes noted by Grinsted et al. (2012).
And that's pretty pointless, because it is clear that while there is seasonable variation in the frequency of occurrence of storms; the shift in the frequency of intensity is a phenomena that's a global event happening at scale. The global weather system goes through a series of cold and warm cycles, but the mean has been shifting for a while that has had a global shift in the frequencies of different storm strengths being seen around the world;
> However, storm frequencies during the current warm phase (since 1995) have also been much higher than during the previous warm phases in the middle of the last century. The difference can no longer be explained by natural fluctuation; rather, this difference must be attributed to global warming.
After making this rather thorough argument (reproduced here in its entirety because it is important to pay attention to the nuances of the science);
> In addition, for climate variables, recent studies (e.g. Lehmiller et al. 1997; Bove et al. 1998; Maloney and Hartmann 2000; Elsner, Jagger, and Niu 2000; Goldenberg et al. 2001; Landsea 2005; Sutton and Hodson 2005) have attributed Atlantic hurricane activity increases to a natural climate cycle, termed the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In recent decades, Geo Risks Research has undertaken hurricane frequency analyses that account for the AMO. The AMO index is a detrended (anomaly) measure of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) (e.g. Knight et al. 2005) and is believed to be capable of explaining the recently elevated levels of hurricane activity. Because it is a measure of SST anomalies, which are correlated with hurricane activity, the AMO index has been used to predict near-term hurricane activity. Therefore, warm phases in the AMO (positive AMO index) are theorized to lead to higher SSTs and above long-term average hurricane activity in the Atlantic. Conversely, cool phases in the AMO (negative AMO index) are theorized to lead to lower SSTs and below long-term average hurricane activity.
> One of the most important recent papers on this topic is the article by Elsner et al. (2008), who consider a time-series model to forecast the average hurricane-season Atlantic SST and then use a linear Poisson regression model to forecast North Atlantic hurricane intensity given the predicted coefficients of the Atlantic SST model.
> However, some studies (Knutson and Tuleya 2004; Barnett et al. 2005; Emanuel 2005; Webster et al. 2005, 2006) indicate that global climate change (rather than natural climate cycles) may play the dominant role. In addition, the fourth status report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007) highlights the significant link between human-induced global warming and the greater frequency and intensity of unanticipated tropical cyclone events.
> Figure 1 clearly shows that the average number of destructive major hurricanes is significantly higher in the warm phases of the AMO than in the cold phases. This finding supports the theory that hurricanes form over warm sea surfaces. However, storm frequencies during the current warm phase (since 1995) have also been much higher than during the previous warm phases in the middle of the last century. The difference can no longer be explained by natural fluctuation; rather, this difference must be attributed to global warming. Based on these...
At the beginning of your post, you mention the 12 year gap as a result of seasonal variation between cold and warm cycles. Then your source points out that the current warm phase has been going on since 1995.
I don't understand the point you're making. Also to be clear, your statement;
> Harvey was the first cat3+ hurricane to hit the US in 12 years.
is patently false, because in that time period we've had (and I'm including 2005);
Katrina Cat. 5 (2005)
Rita (2005)
Wilma (2005)
Ike Cat. 4 (2008)
Sandy Cat. 3 at peak (2012)
I didn't bother to correct you earlier, because Cat. 3+ hurricanes hitting the US are more or less a very narrow set of data points. When you view the system globally and at sea, start counting the total number of hurricanes, and add up the data, then the trend becomes quite clear.
I feel that such cherry picking doesn't befit our discussion. Because we can argue passionately over this and one of us might convince someone else that we're right, but at the end of the day - either way - nature can't be fooled. Nature can't be lobbied against. Nature doesn't care about PR firms. Nature can't be reasoned against. Nor can the law of thermodynamics.
We have put a large amount of energy into the global system. We can now argue with the laws of man whether this is reasonable or not, but we can't argue against the laws of thermodynamics.
The data is clear. There's something going on and the mean frequency of intensity has increased. And we have a relatively solid understanding of why this has happened - which can be wrong, but the balance of probabilities right now is that our theory is correct. You can call BS all you want, but that doesn't change the science. That doesn't change the facts at hand.
He specifically mentioned hitting the US. Ike hit Texas as a Cat 2 storm, Sandy hit the east coast as a Cat 2 storm. Their peaks (4, 3) were out in ocean/sea waters near the island nations. Of course, you don't have listen to me or the weather people who repeatedly say that storms have not increased in frequency or intensity (beyond their normal cycles) [0].
Have I made the claim that it increases the frequency of occurrence? I feel that link is a red herring and obfuscates reality. What I, and all of the papers above, have been referring to is the frequency of intensity of storms. NOT the frequency of storms.
Other than the graphs I've already pasted, the phenomena shows up over and over again in the power dissipation index;
> Of course, you don't have listen to me or the weather people who repeatedly say that storms have not increased in frequency or intensity (beyond their normal cycles) [0].
First of all, the graph you linked to only mentions the frequency of occurrence. It does not include intensity. Second, I trust well sourced papers featuring replicable research by scientists published in notable peer-reviewed journals over random people on Twitter.
b) Parts of Houston are sinking due to subsidence: water is being removed and the land above sinks. 3-10 feet doesn't seem to be a lot until the wave hits your front door:
c) Private developers have very short-term goals: they buy cheap lowland, build homes on it, and sell them in good weather at high prices. Once they're sold out, the developers' obligations cease and the problem passes to local authorities and FEMA.
FEMA should not sell insurance for areas likely to flood. [well, they don't, but they need to extend the no-sell areas even further] The cities, counties and state have power to ban development in low-lying regions but are susceptible to fraud and bribery. Developers are very wealthy men who are politically connected. Homebuyers are like sheep: naive and herd-like. They aren't very wise politically.
I know someone in Houston whose house has been flooded seven times. Last year he bought no flood insurance. He's out of a house but expects some governmental entity to buy him out. For him its a way of life; for me, a flood is "nature's way of telling you something's wrong":
Before flood mitigation was installed Houston rarely flooded. After flood mitigation was installed Houston flooded even less. Now Houston, even with flood mitigation, is flooding. So what has changed?
A lot of what has changed is more development happening. Pavement doesn't absorb water all that well. When the flood mitigation talked about in this article was put in place the area they chose to flood to handle overflow was undeveloped and so was all of the surrounding area.
"Pervious concrete was first used in the 1800s in Europe as pavement surfacing and load bearing walls.[3] Cost efficiency was the main motive due to a decreased amount of cement.[3] It became popular again in the 1920s for two storey homes in Scotland and England. It became increasingly viable in Europe after WWII due to the scarcity of cement. It did not become as popular in the US until the 1970s"
Was this flood caused by climate change? There were massive floods in Houston long before there was even a city: the town was built on a swamp. The difference now is that there is more concrete and also more places to flood.
200 years ago, where massive floods caused by climate change? Possibly. But was human-created CO2 to blame? Not at all.
Attributing everything to climate change is getting silly. It’s not different that highly religious people attributing everything that happens as “God’s will.”
If there are no big storms for 10 years it’s because of climate change. If there are lots of big storms, that too is climate change.
Climate change acolytes seem to ignore the effects of El Niño and other cyclical changes that have far more impact that temperature rising a degree.
Climate change risk has been overestimated — at least for the near term. The catastophists promised fully melted ice caps by 2016. Islands were supposed to be underwater by now, but what has the actual sea level rise been?
Climate change people aren’t actually concerned about climate — they don’t like the means of production being controlled by old-guard capitalist oil interests. It’s no coincidence that climate change people are almost universally leftists — redistributing the means of production is their obsession; climate change hysteria is just a means to achieve that end.
Do people on the right actually want weather catastrophes? We live on this planet too you know. Is every single one of us who are skeptical of human caused warming actually stupid? Are we all secretly suicidal? Or is it possible that skepticism is based on a long history of pop-science actually having unintended consequences? Eugenics, for example, was widely supported by the most progressive minds in early 20th century history. It was “settled science” and we were warned of catastrophic human consequences if we denied the benefits of eugenics. Read newspapers and writings from that era.
Climate change skeptics aren’t stupid; we just choose to consider unintended consequences when it comes to making policy for the planet. We are also skeptical of organizations with an awowed goal of Marxist redistribution who, as an aside are magically concerned about climate change which, the solution of which requires destruction of capitalism.
The coincidence of global warming hysteria beginning right as the Soviet Union began to collapse is too vivid to ignore. It’s almost as if the failures of communism were attributed to people not having an Eastasia (or was it Eurasia) as a common enemy. Climate calamity is a convinient common enemy to distract is from the goings on at the Ministry of Love.
The problem is that the public discourse cannot handle risk. If climate change makes big weather-related disasters X% more likely, even for large X it remains impossible to state whether climate change 'caused' any particular disaster.
>It’s no coincidence that climate change people are almost universally leftists — redistributing the means of production is their obsession; climate change hysteria is just a means to achieve that end.
I used to think this was some Limbaugh conspiracy theory and then I read Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
That's really unfortunate. You likely know none of these people, have no idea what kind of lives they live or beliefs they hold, and yet smile at their misfortune? Even if they didn't believe in climate change or disagreed with you generally politically so what? They deserve to suffer and be punished? It really irks me that in the age of the internet where we have an unprecedented ability to come together as people many folks are instead acting like 1 mistake or 1 misstep damns you forever with no chance for redemption. What a strangely puritanical view to hold. I hope you gain more empathy.
While this discussion is arguably (cough) pointless, it could be argued that just about any human being on this planet actively contributes to global warming.
Heck, even if you live in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, you're probably torching some wood/shrubs every now and then.
So - if we all contribute, it comes down to how much one can contribute before your actions become indefensible.
Chances are the bulk of the world's population will suggest that limit is below your contribution.
Thats why you draw the line somewhere. I draw it at oil execs who spread disinformation and drill wherever they can no matter the consequences. Also I want to thank you for taking the time to contribute to a discussion that you consider "pointless." Awesome!
I don’t know these people personally but I do know people that work in energy. They believe climate change is real. Their companies are actively researching and planning for it. Their bosses believe climate change is real as well. But their bosses pay think tanks and politicians to deny climate change is even happening.
This happened to us too (different country). They intentionally held up water using the dams and caused flooding in places that haven't seen a flood in 50 years to prevent downstream flooding. It really sucks.
Sorry that happened to you but I believe the corps made the right call. The choices were release into a high density downtown or low density suburbs. I do believe this happening in a rich suburb with the means to rebuild makes the victims less sympathetic than if they were lower middle class and had to bootstrap from measly FEMA checks.
Something like this happened a few years ago where I live.[0]
Basically, the Army blew the levee to save a town, Cairo, IL, at the expense of (a few) homes and (lots of) farmland on the MO side. Maciej (HN user idlewords) mentioned it in one of his interesting blog posts[1].
The blog post asserts:
> The farmers downriver got their fields fertilized with rich river silt and are wealthier and more resentful than ever. Like so many beneficiaries of big government, they remain its implacable foes.
which I've never been able to source, though I've been curious about it. AFAICT most of the farmers left and never returned to the area.
I lived in the middle of Missouri from 1994 through 2014 and never once heard a voice say Missour-ah that wasn't coming from a candidate for office on TV.
(To be fair, there might have been some people in rural parts of the state who did talk like that. But usually it's coming from people who probably shouldn't.)
I didn't say that people should pronounce Missouri only as "Missour-ee" and that other pronunciations are incorrect.
I offered my observation (intended with good humor) that it's not really true that Missourians by and large say "Missour-ah" -- or "Missour-ih" if you like -- but rather it's pretty much only politicians trying hard to sound folksy, and maybe a few older people in the most rural parts.
Yeah there's a lot left out of that blog post. The assumption seems to be that flooding fields is always a good thing. That's goofy on its face; destroying all the crops in the field is at least a short-term harm to the farmer. Even if crop insurance covers most of the crop destruction, the field will also require regrading of some sort. If the field is inundated so that there is a current flowing over it rather than just still water backing up, which is very common around structures such as partially destroyed levees, topsoil is removed rather than deposited.
The weird thing about this point of view is that the US Army Corps of Engineers are lionized for their continued mismanagement of the War on Flowing Water (like all Wars the army fights, it loses this one too!) while private entities like Little River who have done a better job for a longer time are sneered at for their presumed lack of earthquake preparedness. (Why worry about excess rain it only comes once every couple of years; the earthquake that happens once a millennium should be the big worry!)
Blog post says more about the philosophy of blogger than about reality.
> Basically, the Army blew the levee to save a town, Cairo, IL, at the expense of (a few) homes and (lots of) farmland on the MO side.
Are you sure about the "homes" part?
20 years ago, I was a professor at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. As part of new faculty orientation, we took a bus tour of the area. During the trip, we passed through the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. We were told that no one was allowed to live there, so that it could be flooded on short notice without endangering people or their homes.
When a proper developer builds a home or sub-division in Houston, they bring in fill dirt and do compactions until the houses rest on small hills. You get frequent flooding (about once a year) but it rarely reaches the house before the flood prevention systems have a chance to divert and control it. The problem here is two-fold, as discussed in the article, these people built there homes INSIDE the flood diversion systems and never did due diligence on their home purchase to find out that they were in homes literally designed to be flooded and unscrupulous developers who improperly built or ignored the creation of new flood control when up-building developments that made previously safe areas at risk like the HP plant that flooded. Of course this implies that the city code/design/inspectors/etc. were not doing their jobs as well.
As others were saying, the developers actively wanted to exclude disclosure the flood status of these plots to potential buyers. Eventually the city "compromised" with them to hide a one-sentence warning deep in the paperwork.
Now granted, this did not prevent the homeowners from doing their own due-diligence, but I really think that the city officials that agreed to this, and the developers that lobbied for it should all be taken to task for their actions (and I think this regardless of what happened during the hurricane).
When I worked in London near London bridge years ago one of the reasons we had two datacentres (with a whopping 10Mbs link) was they where worried about the Thames flooding our building - that was before the barrier was finished.
With an interesting twist to it. Is it more or less immoral to switch tracks if they’ve already been run over by another trolley? Do we try to minimize the total amount of suffering or maximize the number of people with no suffering? Do you reflood a neighborhood to spare another that hasn’t flooded yet?
People are cheering at this, but what if we raise the stakes a little: The government lined up 50 random people and executed them, to appease a foreign government that was holding 500x people captive. We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? Scape goat. Since it is property, the engineers probably assumed they'd be sued, and I bet they knew exactly what they were doing, and it was still cheaper than the alternative.
If you like this, then you should also support eminent domain, where the government can take whatever it wants to make the neighborhood better.
It definitely irks me when people say "oh they're just energy sector republicans", as if political disagreements makes anyone less deserving of rights under the law. Equality, people, is something you must enforce ESPECIALLY when you don't like the person receiving equality. This was a true thing to say to racists in the past, and to republican haters of the present.
To really get side-tracked: Is it okay to hate haters? Are you justified to do to them what they do? No, I would say love your enemy, if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. Your gifts will be like hot coals on his head.
> We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different?
If we'd be talking paperclips vs paperclips would that be morally similar? Or is the monetary value of houses somehow large enough to justify a similarity to human lives?
Lets say you lose 10000 dollars worth of paper clips. Big deal, buy more. But if you lose 10000 dollars worth of photos, computers, files, etc, it is a big deal because they are harder to replace.
There are more people born each day (400,000 a day) than there are houses built each day (4,657 a day). So I'd say no, houses are harder to replace than people.
You can replace a house to the extent that the old residents are happy with the new house. You can't really replace a deceased family member with someone else.
If you count "dwellings" or "housing units" then surely yes. Many/most of those will be apartments and multi-tenant buildings rather than houses per se.
And then there are all the "houses" built from salvaged materials in poor countries. Not sure if you'd want to count those. A person living in such a structure would still be considered homeless in many places.
You could say it serves them right (rich people) for building in a flood plain - it's normally the newer less nice areas that get flooded in the UK - as in the past they where considered to risky
Seriously. I know one generally shouldn't blame victims, but it is their fault in this case. Humanity's hubris needs to be checked every once in a while. I hope the federal government prevails (though admittedly it doesn't look good for them).
One thing not mentioned in this article is that there has been a lot of new housing development inside of the reservoir (upstream). So they had to start releasing water earlier because they couldn’t let it fill up as much as originally planned when the reservoir was built.
> The government lined up 50 random people and executed them, to appease a foreign government that was holding 500x people captive. We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? Scape goat. Since it is property, the engineers probably assumed they'd be sued, and I bet they knew exactly what they were doing, and it was still cheaper than the alternative.
I feel that the central thesis of your comment that the government is this faceless entity that has decided through force to violate lives and is thereby reprehensible to be something that's counter to the facts of the matter and the case at hand.
From the article, it quickly becomes clear that they were trying to avoid catastrophic failure by diverting water to a historic food plain;
> “If we don’t begin releasing now, the volume of uncontrolled water around the dams will be higher,” Colonel Lars Zetterstrom, the Corps’ Galveston district commander, was quoted as saying. “It’s going to be better to release the water through the gates directly into Buffalo Bayou.” The danger was that the water would flow uncontrolled into homes located upstream from the reservoir, crest the reservoir walls downstream, or crack a section of the Barker dam that was under repair. Had either dam failed, the Houston Chronicle later wrote, West Houston would have been left with “a week of corpses by the mile.”
In one cases, the failure would have been sudden and would have killed an unforeseeably large number of people. In another, they could act to preserve lives, but damage property that can be later rebuilt. They chose the latter, and I believe this was the most moral and correct response to the situation at hand.
Why aren't these people heroes for making this call? The Government in this case acted exactly as it should; as an entity that is meant to be representative of and beholden to its citizens and chose an action that preserved the lives of citizens over arbitrary property value that can be repaid through other means.
There is no version of this scenario that plays out well for anyone at all, but the fact that they minimized harm while reducing the risk of catastrophic failure shows that the system does work as intended. After all, homes can be rebuilt, but as far as I can tell, people can't be brought back from the dead.
Zeeland (and other parts of the Netherlands) now have a similar strategy in place - they've spent billions over the years on sea defences, which are absolutely stunning to behold, but have now done the sums and realised they've entered diminishing returns. It's cheaper to let certain areas flood and compensate than it is to build ever more expensive defences.
There was an interesting story a few months back about how the city of Nashville has a process where they buy homes in flood-prone areas at a "fair market price", then demolish the homes and convert the property to "green space" (preventing new buildings from being constructed). The main idea was that this is cheaper in the long run than the continuing cost of disaster recovery, emergency services, etc. for people in these areas. I don't think Nashville is the only city doing this sort of thing, but it was news to me when I heard about it.
Austin has done that to homes along Onion Creek. Like you said - it's cheaper in the long run to buy the property so that people's homes don't get flooded, with all the knock-on effects afterwards.
I have a feeling that at _some_ point, a politician is going to see all of this land that the city owns and get dollar signs in their eyes, and it will eventually be privately-owned and built-up again.
I had a friend in Houston who knew well in advance that his street was in the splash zone, so to speak. He got out way before it became bad but his building was later completely destroyed (he was a renter so it couldve been much worse.
>> The only real problem is that this was a decision made ad hoc.
>> People whose neighborhoods are likely to be flooded by such a decision should know years in advance that they are designated for it.
From the Article:
"This land and many of the homes to the north and west of the dams are located in what’s known as the flood pool — the upstream portion of the reservoirs. [...] Many homeowners west of the Barker dam claim they didn’t know they were in a flood pool, that they hadn’t spotted the fine print on the bottom of some of their subdivision maps. (“Who looks at a subdivision map?” one resident asks.) The text of one such map reads, “This subdivision is adjacent to Barker Reservoir and is subject to extended controlled inundation under the management of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.” "
Sounds like they were told, but didn't care enough. Other parts of the article state that many lawyers are refusing to take a lot of these lawsuits b/c they were in regions that are marked for exactly this scenario.
"[...] many of the lawyers involved in the litigation asked [...] to separate claims from the north and west areas—the upstream ones—from downstream ones, to the south and east. [...] Most lawyers agree that the downstream cases stand the best chance of winning"
So when you say "they were told", you only mean some and not even the primary litigants they were talking with and the lawyer-of-interest was focused on. So it's not a case of "didn't care enough" and saying that confuses an already confusing issue.
Flood zones are meticulously mapped, and owning a property in them usually requires Federally mandated flood insurance. [ http://www.harriscountyfemt.org/ ]
The gist of it is that people don't want their properties classified as being in a flood zone (flood insurance in a high risk area is necessarily expensive) and this does influence the maps.
Also, those neighborhoods are/were among the most expensive in Houston. Being reclassified as a flood zone would change that (it's one of the standard things a Houstonian looks at when buying land).
I wonder, is your comment intentional or is it just a failure of critical reasoning?
It's become a common tactic in public discourse to pretend as if issues are cleanly split between two coherent sides, with all action and words associated with the issue fully ascribable to one side or the other. But of course this is ridiculous, yahoos should get full credit for their yahoo ideas without it being necessary for anyone with even a vaguely similar position to denounce them.
It seems to me that flooding the neighbourhood to save the city was a perfectly justifiable decision, but it also seems perfectly reasonable to compensate those whose homes were thereby destroyed.
That's what flood insurance is for. In a socialist democracy you'd be right, but in case of the USA, it seems more appropriate to require that homeowners get insurance.
I think in this case, you would actually require federal-government-decision insurance. The downstream residents very well might not have flooded had the federal government done nothing (of course we can agree that what they did was probably best). We should not pretend that another entity directly causing this shouldn't be held responsible, even if it was the right decision.
I would agree, assuming it wasn't clear that they were in a flood plain. The fact that they were makes this pretty easy to resolve: you should have had flood insurance. If you didn't, that's you're problem (since these areas were listed on maps as flood plains).
I'm sorry these people lost their homes, but it does seem pretty straightforward that if you build in a flood plane your home might flood. If there is any failure here it's that they weren't given adequate warning before they flooded the neighborhoods. It sounds like they announced it for the next morning but because of the pace of the water rising they had to blow it over night instead. That's something you start announcing over loudspeakers if you have to at that point.
The other issue I see is that for some reason Houston didn't require all of these people to have flood insurance. I feel like if you live in an area that gets hit with Hurricanes flood insurance should be a requirement period. This would all be a moot point if these people were adequately covered by insurance
According to the article, it sounds pretty bad. The city and county knew where the flood reservoirs were. The developers knew, there were "small notices on the plats" for these properties (which developers fought). Homewoner's never saw these plats and had no idea they were in a flood zone.
"In the end, over significant opposition from developers, the county agreed to put a one-sentence disclosure of possible “controlled inundation” for plots of land in neighborhoods inside Barker. But the sentence was buried in the plat documents, which are not typically shown to homebuyers."
It sounds like the city or county (it was unclear to me from the article) also holds some responsibility. They agreed to this "compromise" with the developers.
> The other issue I see is that for some reason Houston didn't require all of these people to have flood insurance.
They do for 100-year plains, just not 500-year. Are these requirements common elsewhere for 500-year? I am not sure, but I assume so since there is surprise that "for some reason Houston didn't require" it.
I didn't understand this comment until I started to check out the FEMA maps myself. Indeed, almost all of Houston is in the "0.2% annual chance of flooding" zone (once every 500 years). To help put that in perspective, you can zoom into almost any area in the US and there will be a 20-30' zone on either side of almost any waterway (I'm talking very small rivers / creeks in my area) that has the same risk of flooding and I'd bet good money no one would criticize someone for not buying flood insurance in these zones.
I agree, for the folks that built in a 'flood pool' plain, even if they feel that wasn't adequately communicated to them when they purchased.
The folks outside of that pool, however, whose homes were only flooded because the Corp of Engineers decided to open the reservoir floodgates, have a reasonable claim for damages.
Their attorney is basing this claim on a violation of the 5th amendment, specifically relating to the state 'purposing private property for public use'.
Houston is proud of their low regulation and unrestrictive zoning. Requiring flooding insurance would be at odds with their philosophy.
However you can't have your cake and eat it too. Other regions have come up with regulations specifically because of the belief that a majority of the population benefits from them. The downside of regulation is cost and inconvenience—and a potential for corruption.
If a region decides against regulation then so be it. But then it incombs to its residents to plan their own contingencies (whether in the form of savings or insurance). The article's title is definitely on the click-bait side of the spectrum to cater to a narrative that the rich are overly bearing the burden of everyone else.
"The other issue I see is that for some reason Houston didn't require all of these people to have flood insurance."
Banks require homeowners in flood plains with mortgages to maintain flood insurance. The problem is if you don't have a mortgage, you don't necessarily need insurance. However, perpetual Federal Government bailouts of homeowners creates moral hazard, and the expectation that Government will make you whole regardless of insurance, and thus bigger risks for all.
I don't understand what's there to litigate. If they wouldn't have done the controlled release, the dams would have broken, and the very same homes wouldn't not only have been flooded even more, most of them would have been gone. Nada. Plus 10x more homes. Plus broken dams, without protection for the next storm.
When there is a storm in Houston, streets do flood for 30 minutes and traffic has to wait. Without the canals and the dams the city would stand still much longer, the damage would be intolerable.
Government did the right thing, but they should have warned them more timely. At 10pm, not 1am. With some acoustic alarm.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadthe irony that the home neighborhood of many of the worlds largest oil companies would want to sue because the global warming they're at the core of causing contributed towards the damage of their own buildings.
Feel free to stop consuming oil. Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil and uses power generated using oil. If you buy a single thing made in China, you are buying products generally made using coal-fired electricity. Unless you live in a grass hut, you are part of the “problem.”
> Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil
I think nearly all plastics are made out of natural gas, not oil.
Fracking monster
"Chemical plants produce olefins by steam cracking of natural gas liquids like ethane and propane. Olefins are the basis for polymers and oligomers used in plastics, resins, fibers, elastomers, lubricants, and gels."
Grade-school libertarianism doesn't apply here. I'm blaming them for using their billions of dollars to pack my government with people like James Inhofe who willingly spread lies and misinformation about a regulatory subject they know nothing about:
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/234026-sen-inho...
> Take a look at Inhofe's campaign funding. The major source, contributing half a million dollars over the past five years, has been the oil and gas industry... If Inhofe were to change his position on man-made global warming, is it credible that he would retain all this funding? No. He receives money from fossil fuel companies because he articulates the views to which these funders subscribe, and because he advances their interests in the Senate. Given that keeping your seat means spending a fortune on television advertising and other forms of campaigning, changing your views on a matter of great interest to your sponsors is likely to be political suicide.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/a...
Thoughts and prayers to the homeowners
I can't tell if this is a genuine expression of sympathy for people who, while perhaps wealthy, have suffered significant loss of their time, homes, and heirlooms.
Or if it's a sarcastic jab at these same people who, when other, less wealthy people are suffering, send "thoughts and prayers" via Facebook chain messages instead of sending actions and dollars.
If anything, that sort of comment actively hurts the cause.
> A sustained upward trend is found between the global proportion of Cat 4–5 hurricanes and ACCI (Fig. 4), balanced by a similar decrease in Cat 1–2 hurricanes. The results are independent of the choice of models to calculate the ACCI as can be seen by comparing Fig. 4a and b. In both cases the ACCI explains 80–85 % of the variance in the smoothed annual hurricane proportions with p < 0.01 (using unsmoothed data). This finding is consistent with the SST-related increases in Cat 4–5 and decreases in Cat 1–2 found by Kishtawal et al. (2012), the relationship of intense hurricanes with SST found by Hoyos et al. (2010), and the Atlantic landfall hurricane changes noted by Grinsted et al. (2012).
Diagram: https://static-content.springer.com/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs0...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/S00382-013-1713-0
Your comment is already grey, I just wanted you to know why.
EDIT: Could I not get downvoted for stating a fact. That'd be great. I guess it was actually only 11 years and 10 months, is that the problem here?
Here's a graph demonstrating this phenomena; https://imgur.com/a/97x7d
I've taken this from this study; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chih_Yuan_Yang/publicat...
That arrives at this conclusion,
> However, storm frequencies during the current warm phase (since 1995) have also been much higher than during the previous warm phases in the middle of the last century. The difference can no longer be explained by natural fluctuation; rather, this difference must be attributed to global warming.
After making this rather thorough argument (reproduced here in its entirety because it is important to pay attention to the nuances of the science);
> In addition, for climate variables, recent studies (e.g. Lehmiller et al. 1997; Bove et al. 1998; Maloney and Hartmann 2000; Elsner, Jagger, and Niu 2000; Goldenberg et al. 2001; Landsea 2005; Sutton and Hodson 2005) have attributed Atlantic hurricane activity increases to a natural climate cycle, termed the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In recent decades, Geo Risks Research has undertaken hurricane frequency analyses that account for the AMO. The AMO index is a detrended (anomaly) measure of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) (e.g. Knight et al. 2005) and is believed to be capable of explaining the recently elevated levels of hurricane activity. Because it is a measure of SST anomalies, which are correlated with hurricane activity, the AMO index has been used to predict near-term hurricane activity. Therefore, warm phases in the AMO (positive AMO index) are theorized to lead to higher SSTs and above long-term average hurricane activity in the Atlantic. Conversely, cool phases in the AMO (negative AMO index) are theorized to lead to lower SSTs and below long-term average hurricane activity.
> One of the most important recent papers on this topic is the article by Elsner et al. (2008), who consider a time-series model to forecast the average hurricane-season Atlantic SST and then use a linear Poisson regression model to forecast North Atlantic hurricane intensity given the predicted coefficients of the Atlantic SST model.
> However, some studies (Knutson and Tuleya 2004; Barnett et al. 2005; Emanuel 2005; Webster et al. 2005, 2006) indicate that global climate change (rather than natural climate cycles) may play the dominant role. In addition, the fourth status report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007) highlights the significant link between human-induced global warming and the greater frequency and intensity of unanticipated tropical cyclone events.
> Figure 1 clearly shows that the average number of destructive major hurricanes is significantly higher in the warm phases of the AMO than in the cold phases. This finding supports the theory that hurricanes form over warm sea surfaces. However, storm frequencies during the current warm phase (since 1995) have also been much higher than during the previous warm phases in the middle of the last century. The difference can no longer be explained by natural fluctuation; rather, this difference must be attributed to global warming. Based on these...
This is a waste of time.
> Harvey was the first cat3+ hurricane to hit the US in 12 years.
is patently false, because in that time period we've had (and I'm including 2005);
Katrina Cat. 5 (2005)
Rita (2005)
Wilma (2005)
Ike Cat. 4 (2008)
Sandy Cat. 3 at peak (2012)
I didn't bother to correct you earlier, because Cat. 3+ hurricanes hitting the US are more or less a very narrow set of data points. When you view the system globally and at sea, start counting the total number of hurricanes, and add up the data, then the trend becomes quite clear.
I feel that such cherry picking doesn't befit our discussion. Because we can argue passionately over this and one of us might convince someone else that we're right, but at the end of the day - either way - nature can't be fooled. Nature can't be lobbied against. Nature doesn't care about PR firms. Nature can't be reasoned against. Nor can the law of thermodynamics.
We have put a large amount of energy into the global system. We can now argue with the laws of man whether this is reasonable or not, but we can't argue against the laws of thermodynamics.
The data is clear. There's something going on and the mean frequency of intensity has increased. And we have a relatively solid understanding of why this has happened - which can be wrong, but the balance of probabilities right now is that our theory is correct. You can call BS all you want, but that doesn't change the science. That doesn't change the facts at hand.
[0] - https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/908030951975989261
Other than the graphs I've already pasted, the phenomena shows up over and over again in the power dissipation index;
http://images.nature.com/m685/nature-assets/ngeo/journal/v3/...
Here's yet another paper on the topic and its graphs;
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/365/18...
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1860/2695
> Of course, you don't have listen to me or the weather people who repeatedly say that storms have not increased in frequency or intensity (beyond their normal cycles) [0].
First of all, the graph you linked to only mentions the frequency of occurrence. It does not include intensity. Second, I trust well sourced papers featuring replicable research by scientists published in notable peer-reviewed journals over random people on Twitter.
a) Houston was built on a mosquito- and disease-ridden swamp that settlers drained:
http://news.tfionline.com/post/164819904697/the-trouble-with...
b) Parts of Houston are sinking due to subsidence: water is being removed and the land above sinks. 3-10 feet doesn't seem to be a lot until the wave hits your front door:
http://blogs.nbc12.com/weather/2017/08/houstons-flooding-its...
c) Private developers have very short-term goals: they buy cheap lowland, build homes on it, and sell them in good weather at high prices. Once they're sold out, the developers' obligations cease and the problem passes to local authorities and FEMA.
FEMA should not sell insurance for areas likely to flood. [well, they don't, but they need to extend the no-sell areas even further] The cities, counties and state have power to ban development in low-lying regions but are susceptible to fraud and bribery. Developers are very wealthy men who are politically connected. Homebuyers are like sheep: naive and herd-like. They aren't very wise politically.
I know someone in Houston whose house has been flooded seven times. Last year he bought no flood insurance. He's out of a house but expects some governmental entity to buy him out. For him its a way of life; for me, a flood is "nature's way of telling you something's wrong":
"Nature's Way" - Spirit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V0Vu_utUZY
"Pervious concrete was first used in the 1800s in Europe as pavement surfacing and load bearing walls.[3] Cost efficiency was the main motive due to a decreased amount of cement.[3] It became popular again in the 1920s for two storey homes in Scotland and England. It became increasingly viable in Europe after WWII due to the scarcity of cement. It did not become as popular in the US until the 1970s"
200 years ago, where massive floods caused by climate change? Possibly. But was human-created CO2 to blame? Not at all.
Attributing everything to climate change is getting silly. It’s not different that highly religious people attributing everything that happens as “God’s will.”
If there are no big storms for 10 years it’s because of climate change. If there are lots of big storms, that too is climate change.
Climate change acolytes seem to ignore the effects of El Niño and other cyclical changes that have far more impact that temperature rising a degree.
Climate change risk has been overestimated — at least for the near term. The catastophists promised fully melted ice caps by 2016. Islands were supposed to be underwater by now, but what has the actual sea level rise been?
Climate change people aren’t actually concerned about climate — they don’t like the means of production being controlled by old-guard capitalist oil interests. It’s no coincidence that climate change people are almost universally leftists — redistributing the means of production is their obsession; climate change hysteria is just a means to achieve that end.
Do people on the right actually want weather catastrophes? We live on this planet too you know. Is every single one of us who are skeptical of human caused warming actually stupid? Are we all secretly suicidal? Or is it possible that skepticism is based on a long history of pop-science actually having unintended consequences? Eugenics, for example, was widely supported by the most progressive minds in early 20th century history. It was “settled science” and we were warned of catastrophic human consequences if we denied the benefits of eugenics. Read newspapers and writings from that era.
Climate change skeptics aren’t stupid; we just choose to consider unintended consequences when it comes to making policy for the planet. We are also skeptical of organizations with an awowed goal of Marxist redistribution who, as an aside are magically concerned about climate change which, the solution of which requires destruction of capitalism.
The coincidence of global warming hysteria beginning right as the Soviet Union began to collapse is too vivid to ignore. It’s almost as if the failures of communism were attributed to people not having an Eastasia (or was it Eurasia) as a common enemy. Climate calamity is a convinient common enemy to distract is from the goings on at the Ministry of Love.
(I consider the rest of your post FUD).
I used to think this was some Limbaugh conspiracy theory and then I read Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Changes_Everything
Heck, even if you live in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, you're probably torching some wood/shrubs every now and then.
So - if we all contribute, it comes down to how much one can contribute before your actions become indefensible.
Chances are the bulk of the world's population will suggest that limit is below your contribution.
Why is that?
Basically, the Army blew the levee to save a town, Cairo, IL, at the expense of (a few) homes and (lots of) farmland on the MO side. Maciej (HN user idlewords) mentioned it in one of his interesting blog posts[1].
The blog post asserts:
> The farmers downriver got their fields fertilized with rich river silt and are wealthier and more resentful than ever. Like so many beneficiaries of big government, they remain its implacable foes.
which I've never been able to source, though I've been curious about it. AFAICT most of the farmers left and never returned to the area.
[0]http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/pat-gauen/saving-...
[1] http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid_part_2.h...
Many locals pronounce Johnny Carson's teenage hometown Norfolk, Nebraska as "Norfork."
I don't think it comes from ignorance though (and I'm not saying you're saying it does) but instead just a way of taking local ownership.
(To be fair, there might have been some people in rural parts of the state who did talk like that. But usually it's coming from people who probably shouldn't.)
I offered my observation (intended with good humor) that it's not really true that Missourians by and large say "Missour-ah" -- or "Missour-ih" if you like -- but rather it's pretty much only politicians trying hard to sound folksy, and maybe a few older people in the most rural parts.
The weird thing about this point of view is that the US Army Corps of Engineers are lionized for their continued mismanagement of the War on Flowing Water (like all Wars the army fights, it loses this one too!) while private entities like Little River who have done a better job for a longer time are sneered at for their presumed lack of earthquake preparedness. (Why worry about excess rain it only comes once every couple of years; the earthquake that happens once a millennium should be the big worry!)
Blog post says more about the philosophy of blogger than about reality.
Are you sure about the "homes" part?
20 years ago, I was a professor at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. As part of new faculty orientation, we took a bus tour of the area. During the trip, we passed through the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. We were told that no one was allowed to live there, so that it could be flooded on short notice without endangering people or their homes.
Lesson learned: live on a hill.
Now granted, this did not prevent the homeowners from doing their own due-diligence, but I really think that the city officials that agreed to this, and the developers that lobbied for it should all be taken to task for their actions (and I think this regardless of what happened during the hurricane).
The good thing about Houston is that everyone is there in together, the rich and the super rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
If you like this, then you should also support eminent domain, where the government can take whatever it wants to make the neighborhood better.
It definitely irks me when people say "oh they're just energy sector republicans", as if political disagreements makes anyone less deserving of rights under the law. Equality, people, is something you must enforce ESPECIALLY when you don't like the person receiving equality. This was a true thing to say to racists in the past, and to republican haters of the present.
To really get side-tracked: Is it okay to hate haters? Are you justified to do to them what they do? No, I would say love your enemy, if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. Your gifts will be like hot coals on his head.
If we'd be talking paperclips vs paperclips would that be morally similar? Or is the monetary value of houses somehow large enough to justify a similarity to human lives?
And then there are all the "houses" built from salvaged materials in poor countries. Not sure if you'd want to count those. A person living in such a structure would still be considered homeless in many places.
It would be more accurate to say 'People are more emotionally attached to people than houses'.
Even so, none of those things matter (photos, computer files, etc) when you balance them with a human life.
Maybe only to the people involved, but it's likely that a fairly accurate dollar value could still be assigned to the loss.
What makes you think that any kind of property is worth as much as a human life?
I feel that the central thesis of your comment that the government is this faceless entity that has decided through force to violate lives and is thereby reprehensible to be something that's counter to the facts of the matter and the case at hand.
From the article, it quickly becomes clear that they were trying to avoid catastrophic failure by diverting water to a historic food plain;
> “If we don’t begin releasing now, the volume of uncontrolled water around the dams will be higher,” Colonel Lars Zetterstrom, the Corps’ Galveston district commander, was quoted as saying. “It’s going to be better to release the water through the gates directly into Buffalo Bayou.” The danger was that the water would flow uncontrolled into homes located upstream from the reservoir, crest the reservoir walls downstream, or crack a section of the Barker dam that was under repair. Had either dam failed, the Houston Chronicle later wrote, West Houston would have been left with “a week of corpses by the mile.”
In one cases, the failure would have been sudden and would have killed an unforeseeably large number of people. In another, they could act to preserve lives, but damage property that can be later rebuilt. They chose the latter, and I believe this was the most moral and correct response to the situation at hand.
Why aren't these people heroes for making this call? The Government in this case acted exactly as it should; as an entity that is meant to be representative of and beholden to its citizens and chose an action that preserved the lives of citizens over arbitrary property value that can be repaid through other means.
There is no version of this scenario that plays out well for anyone at all, but the fact that they minimized harm while reducing the risk of catastrophic failure shows that the system does work as intended. After all, homes can be rebuilt, but as far as I can tell, people can't be brought back from the dead.
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/09/08/nashville-ma...
People whose neighborhoods are likely to be flooded by such a decision should know years in advance that they are designated for it.
>> People whose neighborhoods are likely to be flooded by such a decision should know years in advance that they are designated for it.
From the Article: "This land and many of the homes to the north and west of the dams are located in what’s known as the flood pool — the upstream portion of the reservoirs. [...] Many homeowners west of the Barker dam claim they didn’t know they were in a flood pool, that they hadn’t spotted the fine print on the bottom of some of their subdivision maps. (“Who looks at a subdivision map?” one resident asks.) The text of one such map reads, “This subdivision is adjacent to Barker Reservoir and is subject to extended controlled inundation under the management of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.” "
Sounds like they were told, but didn't care enough. Other parts of the article state that many lawyers are refusing to take a lot of these lawsuits b/c they were in regions that are marked for exactly this scenario.
Read further:
"[...] many of the lawyers involved in the litigation asked [...] to separate claims from the north and west areas—the upstream ones—from downstream ones, to the south and east. [...] Most lawyers agree that the downstream cases stand the best chance of winning"
So when you say "they were told", you only mean some and not even the primary litigants they were talking with and the lawyer-of-interest was focused on. So it's not a case of "didn't care enough" and saying that confuses an already confusing issue.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/09/0...
The gist of it is that people don't want their properties classified as being in a flood zone (flood insurance in a high risk area is necessarily expensive) and this does influence the maps.
And it's not so much the insurance as you having to build for the flood when you ask for a building permit.
If hate is a necessary part of believing in climate change I'm not surprised people want nothing to do with that.
It's become a common tactic in public discourse to pretend as if issues are cleanly split between two coherent sides, with all action and words associated with the issue fully ascribable to one side or the other. But of course this is ridiculous, yahoos should get full credit for their yahoo ideas without it being necessary for anyone with even a vaguely similar position to denounce them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
The other issue I see is that for some reason Houston didn't require all of these people to have flood insurance. I feel like if you live in an area that gets hit with Hurricanes flood insurance should be a requirement period. This would all be a moot point if these people were adequately covered by insurance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472082
According to the article, it sounds pretty bad. The city and county knew where the flood reservoirs were. The developers knew, there were "small notices on the plats" for these properties (which developers fought). Homewoner's never saw these plats and had no idea they were in a flood zone.
"In the end, over significant opposition from developers, the county agreed to put a one-sentence disclosure of possible “controlled inundation” for plots of land in neighborhoods inside Barker. But the sentence was buried in the plat documents, which are not typically shown to homebuyers."
Sounds like the developers withheld material information from the homeowners. If so, it seems clear who is liable.
They do for 100-year plains, just not 500-year. Are these requirements common elsewhere for 500-year? I am not sure, but I assume so since there is surprise that "for some reason Houston didn't require" it.
Really nails home how overly critical we can be.
The folks outside of that pool, however, whose homes were only flooded because the Corp of Engineers decided to open the reservoir floodgates, have a reasonable claim for damages.
Their attorney is basing this claim on a violation of the 5th amendment, specifically relating to the state 'purposing private property for public use'.
However you can't have your cake and eat it too. Other regions have come up with regulations specifically because of the belief that a majority of the population benefits from them. The downside of regulation is cost and inconvenience—and a potential for corruption.
If a region decides against regulation then so be it. But then it incombs to its residents to plan their own contingencies (whether in the form of savings or insurance). The article's title is definitely on the click-bait side of the spectrum to cater to a narrative that the rich are overly bearing the burden of everyone else.
Banks require homeowners in flood plains with mortgages to maintain flood insurance. The problem is if you don't have a mortgage, you don't necessarily need insurance. However, perpetual Federal Government bailouts of homeowners creates moral hazard, and the expectation that Government will make you whole regardless of insurance, and thus bigger risks for all.
Not necessarily Houston. FEMA gets involved... if you're in a flood zone, FEMA mandates flood insurance (and so do the mortgage companies.)
When there is a storm in Houston, streets do flood for 30 minutes and traffic has to wait. Without the canals and the dams the city would stand still much longer, the damage would be intolerable.
Government did the right thing, but they should have warned them more timely. At 10pm, not 1am. With some acoustic alarm.