Climate change is happening, and every model says that more extreme weather events are coming. It’s occurred to me that if I was a bank, I’d start radically revising the degree of risk involved in giving someone a 25 year mortgage backed by land that really wants to be underwater.
Well, of all the commonplace kinds of human denial, levee construction is high on the list relative to the potential and now realized tragedy, weather change or no.
I have always thought that Galveston and New Orleans were sorta impractical, but I wonder if it will turn out that the levees there in NO were not state-of-the-art design.
In California, we have a series of islands in our delta that the State has finally gotten serious about re-doing, using concrete and compacted gravel rather than earth. This after some major floodouts and millions of dollars of damage. The dang things were undermined by ground squirrels and gophers!!
It’s likely too late now, but if I had speculation money, I would consider the money to be made in carpet, sheetrock, plywood, metal framing, etc etc in the next few years. I have heard that ply was already up because of Florida’s last blow…
I don’t know whether banks have been paying much attention to the issue of climate change, but insurance and reinsurance companies definitely have. Munich Re, one of the largest reinsurance companies in the world (reinsurance companies insure insurance companies) has been very active for more than a decade now in trying to assess the risks of climate change to insurers. They take it very seriously.
It’s true that climate change is likely to lead to an increase in extreme weather events, but the link to hurricane activity is still very tenuous. Intuitively it all makes perfect sense: you need warm water to start a hurricane, so with a warmer climate you should get more hurricanes and they should be stronger. But once you get into the details it becomes much more complicated and the official consensus by climate scientists is still that there is no clear evidence that climate change has or will affect the frequency and severity of hurricanes.
There was a review article in Science a few weeks ago by Trenberth et al that claimed to see some evidence that climate change will affect hurricane intensity and rainfall, although there’s still no scientific basis for determining whether climate change would affect the number of hurricanes.
And a forthcoming paper by Pielke et al. to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society concludes:
“claims of linkages between global warming and hurricanes are misguided for three reasons. First, no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes (IPCC 2001; Walsh 2004). Yet such a connection may be made in the future as metrics of tropical cyclone intensity and duration remain to be closely examined. Second, a scientific consensus exists that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small in the context of observed variability (Knutson and Tuleya 2004, Henderson-Sellers et al 1998), while the scientific problem of tropical cyclogenesis is so far from being solved that little can be said about possible changes in frequency.”
So there’s still a lot of uncertainty about hurricanes, even if researchers are pretty confident that there will be an overall increase in extreme weather events around the globe in the years to come.
One other point on this: Pielke’s argument is that efforts to mitigate climate change and efforts to improve disaster preparedness need to happen in parallel…we can’t view reducing greenhouse gas emissions as a risk reduction policy for hurricane-prone areas, the time-lags are way too long.
Reducing risk to lives and property from hurricanes is a problem that needs to be dealt with on its own, perhaps now more urgently and more comprehensively given the potential additional risks from climate change. This goes back to Simon’s point: if banks and insurers start discouraging people from living in flood-prone and other disaster-prone areas because the risks are too high, that’ll save a lot more lives than reducing emissions will, at least in the short term. But we still have to reduce emissions at the same time, in order to reduce the risks to future generations.
The future of the area might also depend on what the Bush Administration feels it can spare in helping to prepare for such events. It’s possible that the flooding, or at least some of it, might have been preventable had desperately needed revenue already earmarked for the levee improvement projects hadn’t been redirected to their invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The following was on Democracy Now this morning:
- “In 1995 Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Over the past decade the Army Corps of Engineers has spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations. But another $250 million in work remained. According to press accounts, the federal funding largely froze up in 2003. Over the past two years the Times-Picayune paper has run at least nine articles that cite the cost of the Iraq invasion as a reason for the lack of hurricane and flood control funding. Earlier this year President Bush proposed significantly reducing the amount of federal money for the project. He proposed spending $10 million. Local officials said six times as much money was needed.”
I don’t disagree with this, but by extension, what can we say of people who build on top of active earthquake zones? 
djm
Gawd, I love irony!
Hey, we got yer levees, we got yer earthquakes, we got yer oak trees with the heavy limbs, yer mudslides, mebbe even a tsunami or two… but boy, I would never live below sea level.. 
Heh. Around here, we’re living over an active earthquake zone and next to an active volcano or two. I’ll take that risk over the regular southeast hurricanes and midwest tornados, though.
Well, I suppose we both did.
In the case of New Orleans, however, the climate change models do clearly predict changes to the sea level in the ocean, and even a modest change here will have a substantial impact.
“claims of linkages between global warming and hurricanes are misguided for three reasons. First, no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes (IPCC 2001; Walsh 2004). Yet such a connection may be made in the future as metrics of tropical cyclone intensity and duration remain to be closely examined. Second, a scientific consensus exists that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small in the context of observed variability (Knutson and Tuleya 2004, Henderson-Sellers et al 1998), while the scientific problem of tropical cyclogenesis is so far from being solved that little can be said about possible changes in frequency.”
“Climate Change” doesn’t necessarily specify changes due to greenhouse gas emissions, at least the way I attempted to use it in this post. Even the anti-global warming camp, however, explains the measurable changes in the climate that we’re seeing as being the result of ordinary very-long-term cyclical variance. Either way, it’s still getting hotter.
That is indeed ironic.
Very true, and in fact Louisiana is already losing something like 25 square miles of coastline every year due to sea level rise, even without any hurricanes.
The problem is magnified in Louisiana because the land is subsiding at the same time that the sea is rising, plus the topography is quite flat. The relative rate of sea level rise in Louisiana is the highest in the country, currently around 3 feet per century.
A storm like Katrina 20 years from now would have an even larger impact on the region in terms of flooding, even if the hurricane itself is no stronger, because the sea will be that much higher.
See my post “Eerie and spine tingling” up the board for an article from National Geographic addressing exactly what Brad is talking about. Jsluder has post the actual article link full text on line.
MarkB
Call me optimistic, but I think we have the technology to keep NO in place safely.
Building levees that won’t be breached by a CAT 5 hurricane and worse is a daunting task, but certainly not beyond the capabilities of our present technology. It’s just a matter of spending the money. The problem is that those levees were old and inadequate, and the pumps too, and no real effort was made in recent times to prepare for the big one.
With hope, the new New Orleans will not only have better flood protection, including not only levees but also a project to regenerate the outlying delta; but also a system in place to evacuate the poor people.
It sickened me that our evacuation plan was (1) everyone with a car or suffficient cash gets out of town, and (2) everyone else dies while being ridiculed by TV pundits for not having the “good sense” to get out.
This was a sad display of the fact that a lot of us just don’t comprehend poverty at all.
Caj