Greenland: How rapid climate change on world’s largest island will affect us all The ice sheet is melting and permafrost is thawing. What’s happening in Greenland will speed up climate change across the world, The Independent, 7 Sept 17, Kathryn Adamson
The largest wildfire ever recorded in Greenland was recently spotted close to the west coast town of Sisimiut, not far from Disko Island where I research retreating glaciers. The fire has captured public and scientific interest not just because its size and location came as a surprise, but because it is yet another sign of deep environmental change in the Arctic.
Greenland is an important cog in the global climate system. The ice sheet, which covers 80 per cent of the island, reflects so much of the sun’s energy back into space that it moderates temperatures through what is known as the “albedo effect”. And since it occupies a strategic position in the North Atlantic, its meltwater tempers ocean circulation patterns.
But Greenland is especially vulnerable to climate change, as Arctic air temperatures are currently rising at twice the global average rate. Environmental conditions are frequently setting new records: “the warmest”, “the wettest”, “the driest”.
Despite its size, the fire itself represents only a snapshot of Greenland’s fire history. It alone cannot tell us about wider Arctic climate change.
But when we superimpose these extraordinary events onto longer-term environmental records, we can see important trends emerging.
The ice sheet is melting
Between 2002 and 2016 the ice sheet lost mass at a rate of around 269 gigatonnes per year. One gigatonne is one billion tonnes. One tonne is about the weight of a walrus.
During the same period, the ice sheet also showed some unusual short-term behaviour. The 2012 melt season was especially intense – 97 per cent of the ice sheet experienced surface melt at some point during the year. Snow even melted at its summit, the highest point in the centre of the island where the ice is piled up more than 3km above sea level………
In Greenland, like much of the Arctic, rising temperatures are thawing the permafrost. This means the active layer is growing by up to 1.5cm per year. This trend is expected to continue, seeing as under current IPCC predictions, Arctic air temperatures will rise by between 2.0°C and 7.5°C this century.
Arctic permafrost contains more than 1,500 billion tonnes of dead plants and animals (around 1,500 billion walrus equivalent) which we call “organic matter”. Right now, this stuff has been frozen for thousands of years. But when the permafrost thaws this organic matter will decay, releasing carbon and methane (another greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere.
LA Times, Sep 6, 2017 at 7:40 PM EDT: [T]he Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was getting ready to shut down two Florida nuclear plants…Miami Herald, Sept 6, 2017 at 2:00 PM EDT (emphasis added): Two South Florida nuclear power plants lie in Irma’s path… projections on Wednesday showed [Irma] headed straight for South Florida… But neither Turkey Point nor the St. Lucie plant farther up the coast had made the call yet to shutting down the plants… “If we anticipate there will be direct impacts on either facility we’ll shut down the units,” [spokesman Peter Robbins] said.
Bloomberg, Sep 6, 2017 at 1:10 PM EDT: Nuclear Plants in Irma’s Path Plan Shutdowns Ahead of Storm… Two of the Sunshine State’s nuclear facilities are in the Category 5 storm’s path… NextEra Energy Inc. will shut the plants “long before” the onset of hurricane force winds, spokesman Peter Robbins told Bloomberg…
Washington Post, Sep 6, 2017 at 7:50 PM EDT: This could be The Big One, again, and everyone knows it… Hurricane Irma is about as big as a tropical cyclone can possibly get, and the latest computer models show it aimed at South Florida as if following directions by GPS… This hurricane’s 185-mph maximum sustained winds are the strongest recorded for a landfalling hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean… Storm preparations also were underway at two nuclear sites in Florida… NextEra said that it will shut down its four nuclear reactors before Irma makes landfall… NextEra also said that its reactors could weather a loss of electricity of the sort that caused a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi reactors…
PBS, Sep 6, 2017 at 6:50 PM EDT: Sustained winds are still blowing at a record 185 miles an hour, with gusts up to 225 miles an hour. One forecaster watching the assault today said this thing is a buzz saw…
The Times, Sep 7, 2017: Caribbean islands devastated by ferocity of Hurricane Irma, the worst Atlantic storm on record… The storm, at 480 miles wide and with gusts up to 225mph, is the most powerful recorded in the Atlantic — Hurricane Irma… left “apocalyptic” damage across Caribbean islands yesterday, inundating coastal areas and devastating buildings with 185mph winds… Officials on Barbuda said more than 90 per cent of the island had been destroyed. “Barbuda is literally rubble,” Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said after visiting the island. “The entire housing stock was damaged. It is just total devastation,” he said…
Denying Hurricane Harvey’s climate links only worsens future suffering, The variables in the climate change formula are mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. Denying the problem loads up on the suffering. Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli, 5 Sept 17, Human-caused climate change amplified the damages and suffering associated with Hurricane Harvey in several different ways. First, sea level rise caused by global warming increased the storm surge and therefore the coastal inundation and flooding from the storm. Second, the warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, which intensifies extreme precipitation events like the record-shattering rainfall associated with Harvey. Third, warmer ocean waters essentially act as hurricane fuel, which may have made Harvey more intense than it would otherwise have been.
There are other possible human factors at play about which we have less certainty. ……
Other human activities also worsened Harvey’s impacts. For example, Houston suffers from urban sprawl, covering a larger area (nearly 600 square miles) than the cities of Chicago, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, Manhattan, and Santa Barbara combined. With urban sprawl and poor planning came expansive impervious surfaces – absorbent soil covered instead by concrete and asphalt, increasing flood risks. Houston’s lack of zoning laws combined with the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) also encouraged development in flood prone areas.
We’re subsidizing risky behavior
Private insurance companies don’t want to insure homes that face a significant risk of flooding, but with a lack of regulation and/or government insurance offered by NFIP, development in relatively high-risk flood areas can be profitable. That is, until a flood strikes. 85% of Houston homeowners don’t have flood insurance and will be unable to recover most of their losses from Hurricane Harvey. Others are covered by NFIP, which was already $24 billion in debt before Harvey. That’s because NFIP hasn’t been charging sufficiently high premiums, in large part because it has underestimated flood risks based on maps and projections that are sometimes decades out of date. And climate change is amplifying those flood risks…….
the government is effectively subsidizing the costs associated with living in high-risk flood areas. Between 1978 and 2005, NFIP paid out $5.5 billion (9.6% of paid claims) to just 30,000 properties (0.6% of the total covered by flood insurance) that each flooded an average of five times. Because the NFIP premiums are too low, taxpayers end up footing billions of dollars of those payouts.
The situation is analogous to climate change. Without a price on carbon pollution, industries and individuals can dump carbon in the atmosphere for free. But that carbon pollution has costs that we eventually pay, in the form of increased property damage due to amplified storms like Hurricane Harvey, for example. Or from higher food prices when farmers are struck by an intensified drought, or decreased worker productivity in heat waves, or valuable coastal property lost to encroaching sea levels, or homes lost to bigger wildfires and increased costs to fight them – the list of climate costs goes on and on.
Those costs are eventually paid by taxpayers, but we’re picking up the tab for the polluters. It’s effectively a subsidy for the fossil fuel industry to the tune of trillions of dollars every year, and as with artificially cheap flood insurance premiums, we’re subsidizing risky behavior that ultimately causes severe damages.
The Trump administration is in denial
Ten days before Hurricane Harvey hit, the Trump administration rolled back the Federal Flood Risk Mitigation Standard. The policy was implemented by the Obama administration, and required taxpayer-funded public infrastructure projects to plan for future flooding risks. Much infrastructure within and around Houston is now underwater, and accounting for future flooding risks when replacing it would be smart. But the Trump administration considered this policy a burdensome regulation, claiming that the infrastructure permitting process has too many “inefficiencies.” Apparently those “inefficiencies” include saving taxpayer money by reducing future flood losses.
Florida officials begin ordering evacuations as Hurricane Irma intensifies to a Category 5 storm, WP
By Francisco Alvarado, Mark Berman and Sandhya Somashekhar September 5 KEY WEST, Fla. — Another monster storm is hurtling closer to the United States, this time threatening Florida, where officials announced mandatory evacuations Tuesday in advance of what forecasters say could be the most powerful hurricane to strike the Atlantic coast in more than a decade.
Even as millions across Texas picked up the pieces after Hurricane Harvey, which battered that region with record-setting rain last week and was blamed for at least 60 deaths, Hurricane Irma gathered strength in the ocean, registering as a Category 5 with winds in excess of 180 miles per hour.
Concern centered particularly on the Florida Keys, a chain of islands at the southern tip of the state that is a tourist hot spot and home to more than 80,000 residents. It is in the direct path of the storm as currently forecast, leading local officials there to announce that the area would be under mandatory evacuation orders beginning Wednesday.
But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics have suggested that the authors of studies indicating that climate change is not real, not harmful, or not man-made are bravely standing up for the truth, like maverick thinkers of the past. (Galileo is often invoked, though his fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions—it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.)
Not so, according to a review published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology. The researchers tried to replicate the results of those 3% of papers—a common way to test scientific studies—and found biased, faulty results.
Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, worked with a team of researchers to look at the 38 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last decade that denied anthropogenic global warming.
“Every single one of those analyses had an error—in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis—that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus,” Hayhoe wrote in a Facebook post.
One of Hayhoe’s co-authors, Rasmus Benestad, an atmospheric scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, built the program using the computer language R—which conveniently works on all computer platforms—to replicate each of the papers’ results and to try to understand how they reached their conclusions. Benestad’s program found that none of the papers had results that were replicable, at least not with generally accepted science.
Broadly, there were three main errors in the papers denying climate change. Many had cherry-picked the results that conveniently supported their conclusion, while ignoring other context or records. Then there were some that applied inappropriate “curve-fitting”—in which they would step farther and farther away from data until the points matched the curve of their choosing.
And of course, sometimes the papers just ignored physics altogether. “In many cases, shortcomings are due to insufficient model evaluation, leading to results that are not universally valid but rather are an artifact of a particular experimental setup,” the authors write.
Those who assert that these papers are correct while the other 97% are wrong are holding up science where the researchers had already decided what results they sought, the authors of the review say. Good science is objective—it doesn’t care what anyone wants the answers to be.
The review serves as an answer to the charge that the minority view on climate change has been consistently suppressed, wrote Hayhoe. “It’s a lot easier for someone to claim they’ve been suppressed than to admit that maybe they can’t find the scientific evidence to support their political ideology… They weren’t suppressed. They’re out there, where anyone can find them.” Indeed, the review raises the question of how these papers came to be published in the first place, when they used flawed methodology, which the rigorous peer-review process is designed to weed out.
In an article for the Guardian, one of the researchers, Dana Nuccitelli points out another red flag with the climate-change-denying papers: “There is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming,” he writes. “Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that’s overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other.”
The Galileo example is also instructive, Nuccitelli points out. The “father of observational science,” championed the astronomical model that the earth and other planets in our solar system revolve around the sun—a view that was eventually accepted almost universally as the truth. “If any of the contrarians were a modern-day Galileo, he would present a theory that’s supported by the scientific evidence and that’s not based on methodological errors,” he writes. “Such a sound theory would convince scientific experts, and a consensus would begin to form.”
WP. By Ben GuarinoSeptember 5 President Trump recently announced his pick for NASA administrator: Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a former pilot whose goals for our solar system include installing humans on the moon and cleaning up space junk. He also has expressed skepticism about human-caused climate change.
NASA has lacked a permanent administrator since January. The previous one, former astronaut and retired Marine Corps aviator Charles Bolden, resigned the day that Trump took office. NASA’s associate administrator, Robert Lightfoot Jr., stepped in as the temporary head of the agency. Lightfoot holds the record for longest tenure as an acting NASA administrator.
The announcement, on Friday evening before Labor Day weekend, came after months of speculation that the 42-year-old representative from Oklahoma would get the nod. Last year, Bridenstine — a strong supporter of Trump during the presidential race — informally told the Trump campaign he was interested in a leadership role at NASA or the Air Force, The Washington Post reported three days after the November election…….
a bigger question is his stance on earth and climate science. From the House floor in 2013, Bridenstine said that “global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago,” which is incorrect. In a 2016 interview with Aerospace America, he said that the climate “has always changed,” though remained open to “studying it.”……
Before his election to the House of Representatives, Bridenstine served as a Navy pilot and directed the Tulsa Air and Space Museum. He has not worked as a scientist or engineer, though he was involved with a rocket-powered aircraft league. (The Rocket Racing League — think NASCAR, but with rocket planes — failed to hold any races. “It was before its time,” Bridenstine said to Space News in 2013.)
If confirmed, Bridenstine would be the first politician to serve as NASA administrator. He is a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has frequently come into conflict with Republican leaders. Those opposed to his nomination, particularly Sens. Marco Rubio (R) and Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, have pointed to his political career as a critical flaw.
Catherine McKenna Criticizes ‘Ridiculous’ Tory Climate Change Language”The conservatives are still saying that the environment and the economy can be separated!” Huff Post 09/04/2017 OTTAWA — Canada’s push to get climate change action included in a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement is turning into a heated domestic dispute just as it makes its debut at the official negotiating table.
The NAFTA schedule obtained by The Canadian Press showed the environment was on the schedule for seven hours of NAFTA talks in Mexico City Monday, and another seven hours on Tuesday.
It could be one of the more contentious chapters, as significant differences of opinion about the environment exist between the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Those differences largely exist domestically as well and were being played out in social media over the Labour Day weekend. Environment Minister Catherine McKenna launched an angry missive at Conservative Foreign Affairs critic Erin O’Toole on Sunday, for suggesting the environment was a mere “trinket” better left to the sidelines in order to protect Canada’s economic well-being…….
“We are currently witnessing the largest forest fire in British Columbia’s history, the Atlantic Ocean recording record temperatures, and the second flood of the century in 12 months in Windsor,” McKenna wrote. “And the conservatives are still saying that the environment and the economy can be separated! Climate change is real and environmental protection is essential. It is time for the conservatives to understand the message.”…….
Canada would like a new NAFTA to specifically reference climate change and prioritize measures to help combat it…..That the environment is a Canadian priority for NAFTA was underscored last week when McKenna created a NAFTA advisory council on the environment made up of two former premiers, a former provincial finance minister and representatives from environment and industry associations. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/09/04/catherine-mckenna-erin-otoole-environment_a_23196523/
This is a long article , but very good, and well worth reading in its entirety
‘It’s Not Going To Be All Right’ In flood-prone coastal Louisiana, towns have started to ask a question Texans may face soon: When should we all just leave? Politico By ANNIE SNIDER, September 01, 2017 HOUMA, La. — If Houston gets serious about preventing massive damage the next time it floods, it may need to learn a lesson from its neighbors in this oil and gas town, just 15 miles up the road from Louisiana’s historic bayou communities.
This town’s residents—roughnecks, shrimpers, shipbuilders and small-business owners—aren’t typically the joining type. And yet dozens have recently begun showing up for an unusual discussion group underwritten by the state and federal government, and dedicated to a question very difficult to grapple with: What happens when the next hurricane hits, sending bayous rising and inundatingthe most flood-prone homes, and people start moving here?
Permanently relocating people is the third rail of disaster planning, the aspect no one—especially politicians—wants to talk about. Local zoning and development decisions have encouraged millions of people to move into floodplains, and federal insurance policies and disaster aid have bailed them out time and again. But as these storms become increasingly costly, and climate change promises to make them more so, it becomes harder to avoid the bigger topic: There are places where people simply shouldn’t live anymore.
Relocation is politically toxic; handled centrally, it is disruptive and interventionist, the kind of move that foments revolutions. But as the state of Louisiana mounts a massive battle against the rising tide, planning and funding ambitious efforts to restore buffering wetlands and build levees and floodgates, it is also beginning to acknowledge to residents that even their best efforts will not be enough—and is asking them to think about what comes next.
With the help of $92.6 million in federal grant money, Louisiana’s Office of Community Development has launched a first-of-its-kind effort to help communities across the state prepare for the tumult to come. Rising waters and escalating flood insurance rates will drive thousands of families farther inland, the state predicts, leaving behind homes they’ve known for generations and places that have fundamentally shaped their identities. But those refugees aren’t the only ones who will experience change. Communities like Houma will experience their own jarring transition as they receive an influx of waterlogged neighbors. Houma sits high enough that it’s less likely to drown in a hurricane, and thanks to its industrial base, could more easily win additional levees and flood protection.
Top: The old Boudreaux Canal School, which has closed since the population of Chauvin has steadily dropped. Bottom: The cemetery at St Joseph Catholic Church, north of Chauvin along Bayou Petit Caillou. | William Widmer for Politico Magazine
“This is the first time that I can remember that a group came in and said it’s not going to be all right,” said Jonathan Foret………
The goal of the new planning effort, dubbed Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments, or LA Safe,is to head off the worst-case scenario in which people move out of flood-prone areas only once they’ve lost everything, and arrive en masse in communities that aren’t ready to absorb them. It’s a scenario with precedent: After Hurricane Katrina, entire neighborhoods from south and east of New Orleans relocated to the affluent bedroom communities of Covington and Mandeville, north of Lake Pontchartrain, straining schools, clogging roads and leading to resentment among some longtime residents. As far away as Houston, residents complained about “Katrina refugees” sapping local resources…….. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/01/harvey-texas-louisiana-floods-relocation-215565?lo=ap_a1
Irma Turning Into Monster Hurricane: “Highest Windspeed Forecasts I’ve Ever Seen” NWO Report, September 1, 2017
Hurricane Irma continues to strengthen much faster than pretty much any computer model predicted as of yesterday or even this morning. Per the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) latest update, Irma is currently a Cat-3 storm with sustained winds of 115 mph but is expected to strengthen to a devastating Cat-5 with winds that could top out at 180 mph or more. Here is the latest from the NHC as of 5PM EST:
Irma has become an impressive hurricane with intense eyewall convection surrounding a small eye. Satellite estimates continue to rapidly rise, and the Dvorak classifications from both TAFB & SAB support an initial wind speed of 100 kt. This is a remarkable 50-kt increase from yesterday at this time.
Irma continues moving west-northwestward, now at about 10 kt. There has been no change to the forecast philosophy, with the hurricane likely to turn westward and west-southwestward over the next few days due to a building ridge over the central Atlantic. At long range, however, model guidance is not in good agreement on the strength of the ridge, resulting in some significant north-south differences in the global models……..
As of now, Irma remains in the far eastern Atlantic ocean and is moving west at roughly 11.5 mph. Based on current projections, the storm will make its first landfall in the eastern Caribbean sometime toward the middle of next week.
Longer term computer models still vary widely but suggest that Irma will make landfall in the U.S. either in the Gulf of Mexico or Florida. Meteorological Scientist Michael Ventrice of the Weather Channel is forecasting windspeeds of up to 180 mph, which he described as the “highest windspeed forecasts I’ve ever seen in my 10 yrs of Atlantic hurricane forecasting.
FORECAST POSITIONS AND MAX WINDS……..
Longer term computer models still vary widely but suggest that Irma will make landfall in the U.S. either in the Gulf of Mexico or Florida. Meteorological Scientist Michael Ventrice of the Weather Channel is forecasting windspeeds of up to 180 mph, which he described as the “highest windspeed forecasts I’ve ever seen in my 10 yrs of Atlantic hurricane forecasting.”….
Increased temperatures from climate change will reduce yields of the four crops humans depend on most—wheat, rice, corn and soybeans—and the losses have already begun, according to a new meta-study by an international team of researchers.
Humans depend for two thirds of their calories on these four staple crops, but yields of wheat are expected to decrease by 6%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.
“By combining four different methods, our comprehensive assessment of the impacts of increasing temperatures on major global crops shows substantial risks for agricultural production, already stagnating in some parts of the world,” the scientists say in the study, which appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Yield increase has slowed down or even stagnated during the last years in some parts of the world, and further increases in temperature will continue to suppress yields, despite farmers’ adaptation efforts.” The study, led by Chuang Zhao of Peking University, cites three other studies documenting declines in crop yields in Europe, Africa, India, China, Central and South America and other regions.
The study of studies was conducted by scientists in China, Germany, Belgium, Italy, France, Spain, The Philippines, and the United States, including the University of Florida, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University in New York. They hoped to settle a question that seemed to have produced conflicting results in the many studies they reviewed: what are the effects on crop yields of temperature increases from anthropogenic climate change?
The study rebuts an argument made by those who argue against mitigating climate change because they say higher CO2 concentrations will increase crop yields. That argument, the scientists say, fails to account for higher temperatures:
“While elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration can stimulate growth when nutrients are not limited, it will also increase canopy temperature from more closed stomata,” the scientists say. The stomata are the pores plants use to exchange gases and moisture with the atmosphere. When plants close stomata because of higher temperatures they may conserve water but lose the ability to absorb CO2.
Higher temperatures can also increase atmospheric absorption of water in the plants and in the soil, provoke heat waves and stimulate pests and weeds.
The study anticipates that crop yields will improve in some areas because higher temperatures will lengthen the growing season, but it finds net losses worldwide.
The scientists acknowledge uncertainty about the interactions between temperature, rainfall and increased CO2 concentrations in different regions. They note that different crops respond differently in different regions and under different conditions, so they call for increased local analysis and local strategies:
“Differences in temperature responses of crops around the world suggest that some mitigation could be possible to substantially affect the magnitude (or even direction) of climate change impacts on agriculture. These impacts will also vary substantially for crops and regions, and may interact with changes in precipitation and atmospheric CO2, so a reinvigoration of national research and extension programs is urgently needed to offset future impacts of climate change, including temperature increase on agriculture by using crop- and region-specific adaptation strategies.”
Preparing for the next Hurricane Harvey,Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,Dan Drollette Jr , Sept 17, Alice C. Hill is in the business of finding better ways to cope with the catastrophic risks posed by climate change—risks so bad, she says, that “most of us avoid talking about them at the dinner table.” A short list includes ocean acidification, out of control wildfires, long-lasting droughts, record-breaking heat waves that kill crops and humans, the spread of tropical diseases to temperate countries such as the United States, and massive, global-warming assisted hurricanes that cause extensive flooding—which she terms “rain bombs.”
In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, her skills have been in great demand.
A former member of the National Security Council and a former Special Assistant to the President, she led the development of a national policy to deal with the effects of climate change on national security—effects that institutions such as the Department of Defense call a “threat multiplier.” Since leaving the White House, Hill has been a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
In this interview, Hill describes the impacts of Hurricane Harvey, its connections to climate change, and how coastal cities could make themselves more resilient to the increased-intensity storms that climate change is likely to produce.
She addresses what coastal cities could do that is relatively cheap and independent of the federal government; and what the federal government could do that climate change-denying politicians could get on board with. Most importantly, Hill describes how to rebuild after the devastating storm in Texas and Louisiana, so that we do not repeat the same mistakes.
The Bulletin’s Dan Drollette caught up with Hill by phone in this interview. (Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
“………….Trump called Harvey’s aftermath a “500-year flood.” But that term is not really true any more, because we’ll be seeing more of these epic storms, and they certainly will return more frequently than that phrase would suggest……
I have not yet read an immediate study that says this particular storm is climate-caused. But certainly it is consistent with what we have said we can expect. They’ve got a one-foot sea level rise, which increased the storm surge. And this storm also had the expected extreme precipitation—a “rain bomb”—because so much rain fell at once. And there’s no place for it to go.
And that is all consistent with what we thought would occur with climate change. The storms come more quickly, because warmer water temperatures cause storms to form quickly and be more intense…….
in the course of my work at the National Security Council, I did read what the scientists have issued, particularly in the form of the National Climate Assessment. And it says that we’re going to have more intense storms, with greater amounts of precipitation, and higher storm surges. All of this should not be a surprise to us, but it still is…..
These record-breaking events will be our new norm. And, of course, a lot of the resulting flood damage can be laid to development.
BAS: Is development part of the reason for this storm’s effects? Things like the paving-over of rice fields and prairies in Texas to make hundreds of square miles of roads and shopping mall parking lots? They sealed off a lot of land that could have been absorbing water.
HILL: Very much so. Our land-use decisions have affected the ability of water to drain, and if the water can’t drain easily it’s going to sit there and cause increased flooding. So no question, the development choices we’ve made have an impact. Paving over wetlands and reducing our greenscape has increased the risk—as well as the amount—of flooding near urban areas.
………The problem is that we don’t have building codes that reflect this new reality yet. They’re working on them, but those codes aren’t widespread. There’s only a few communities that have planned for catastrophic floods. New York has done more in this area than almost all communities, in trying to figure out how to build more resiliently, but it’s the exception rather than the rule.
Most of our current building codes don’t yet reflect the future risk from climate change. We need more flood-proofing, to prepare for the more severe floods that will be a natural result of climate change. And some areas have no building codes. Some have adopted older building codes, and have not updated them. The frequent argument is, it’s too expensive to change things. Even if you have a great building code, you have to have enforcement of it. So, there are many challenges still on the building front………..
Sometimes our default is to build and think we’ll have a permanent fixed barrier to always keep the water out. Instead, we should be thinking, in my opinion, about green infrastructure. Lloyd’s of London, that insurance company that’s been around in one form or other for hundreds of years, recently came out with a report that said that green infrastructure—like mangroves or wetlands—can keep a community safe, and at a cost that’s about 30 times cheaper than building a sea wall.
So, I believe it’s important to look at green infrastructure. And a lot of land-use decisions are not federal decisions, but local ones. So that’s where coastal communities can step up to the plate.
Now the trick is that to do it right, you’ve got to have a bigger, overall plan—water does not pay attention to local boundary lines.
So, towns, states, regions, have to plan together, and decide what they’re going to allow development for and how. If you let a subdivision to be put forward here, then do you have adequate drainage for it over there? If you lay down more concrete in a city, you need to make sure that the water has some place to go so we’re not just increasing the flooding risk. It’s a matter of looking at your evacuation routes and making sure you keep in mind the places for the water to go, as well as places for people to get out easily. And if it’s at sea-level, the communities involved may want to decide if it make sense to be investing in retro-fitting or improving a waste water treatment plant that’s going to be inundated in the future by sea rise.
But that means these towns or states have to plan together. Which does increase complexity.
So, a lot of this does not have to be from the federal government, but it is a matter of coordinating effort and putting good practices in place region-wide……..
we need to have resilience at the forefront of any planning and any spending. Because we’re really at risk for having thrown away that money if we don’t include planning for a hotter, wetter, more flood-prone future……http://thebulletin.org/preparing-next-hurricane-harvey11059
Pope, Orthodox leader make climate change appeal to ‘heal wounded creation’, Reuters Staff VATICAN CITY (Reuters) 1 Sept 17 – Pope Francis and Orthodox Christian leader Patriarch Bartholomew called on Friday for a collective response from world leaders to climate change, saying the planet was deteriorating and vulnerable people were the first to be affected.
The appeal comes three months after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from a global agreement, struck in Paris, to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
“We urgently appeal to those in positions of social and economic, as well as political and cultural, responsibility to hear the cry of the earth and to attend to the needs of the marginalized,” Francis and Bartholomew said in a joint statement.
“Above all”, the leaders of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and up to 300 million Orthodox Christians asked for a response “to the plea of millions and support (for) the consensus of the world for the healing of our wounded creation.” The joint message was not addressed to any specific world leaders. Many were dismayed when the U.S. backed out of the Paris accord, a decision a senior Vatican official later called “a disaster”.
US state department to abolish climate change envoyClimate Home 29/08/2017,Critics say Rex Tillerson’s restructuring will further diminish US’ standing in international affairs, By Karl Mathiesen
Secretary of state Rex Tillerson has informed Congress that the US will no longer have a special envoy for climate change, the official that has led delegations to UN climate talks since 2009.
In a letter (below) addressed to Bob Corker (R-Tenn), the chairman of the Senate committee on foreign relations, Tillerson outlined a plan to abolish 36 out of 66 special envoy positions.
Some of the positions would be entirely scrapped, said Tillerson, or “if an issue no longer requires a special envoy or representative, then an appropriate bureau will manage any legacy responsibilities”. This was the case with climate change, which will now be managed under the Bureau of Oceans and International and Scientific Affairs (OES)……..
Under president Donald Trump, the US administration has announced plans to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, although it remains a party to the accord until it can formally withdraw in 2020……..
Houston: A Global WarningThe devastation of Hurricane Harvey marks a turning point and raises the terrible possibility that we’ve entered the age of climate chaos, Rolling Stone, By Jeff Goodell, 31 Aug 17, Let there be no doubt: the horrific damage wrought by Hurricane Harvey was an almost entirely man-made catastrophe, one fingerprinted by all-too-human neglect, corruption and denial. If we needed a reminder of the power of water to destroy an American city, Hurricane Harvey provided it. In Houston, a fast-growing metropolis of more than 2 million people, it wasn’t the wind that was so damaging, or a storm surge pushing in – it was just water everywhere, falling for days in biblical torrents and transforming highways into rivers, flowing into homes, killing dozens, sending tens of thousands of people fleeing for higher ground. It was a terrifying and deadly display of what happens when nature collides with urban life on a planet radically altered by climate change…….
given what scientists know now about how rising CO2 levels impact the climate, it’s wrong to dismiss Harvey as a purely “natural” event.
First, thanks to increasing carbon pollution, the waters in the Gulf of Mexico, over which Harvey formed, were about five degrees higher than average. “As the world warms, evaporation speeds up,” explained climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe. So on average, there is more water vapor in the air now to sweep up and later dump over land. Also, because hurricane winds are generated by the difference in temperature between the atmosphere and oceans, the warmer waters tend to intensify a hurricane’s gales.
Second, a warming climate fuels sea-level rise, which is the result of the thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers. Higher seas mean bigger storm surges, which can be devastating (recall the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy). But when the seas are higher, it also means that it is more difficult to drain rainwater into the ocean. And that is what happened in Houston: The water had nowhere to go.
This was a disaster foretold. ……
we’ve allowed cities like Houston to become empires of denial. If you set out to design a metropolis that is poorly adapted to the future, you couldn’t do much better than Houston. Consider the rate at which it’s paved over the wetlands, nature’s sponges for absorbing water. Thirty percent of the surrounding coastal prairie wetlands was developed between 1992 and 2010, creating what amount to concrete catch basins that capture the water and funnel it toward destruction. In Houston, the bayou is just a place to drive your Lexus – this is a city that’s said to have 30 parking spots for every resident.
Houston proudly touts itself as “the City With No Limits,” playing up its Wild West heritage of endless land and opportunity. But it is also the largest U.S. city to have no zoning laws, meaning you can build whatever you want, wherever you want. While that makes developers happy, it’s not how you build a climate-resilient city. According to aWashington Post investigation, more than 7,000 residential buildings have been constructed in 100-year FEMA-designated flood plains since 2010. But given that FEMA’s flood maps haven’t been updated to reflect sea-level rise and other factors, the actual number of new buildings constructed in high-risk places is likely much larger. And this is true not just in Houston but in Miami, South Carolina and every other flood-prone region. Ten years ago, Houston officials banned development in areas with high risk of flooding. But developers sued, until the policy was weakened by the City Council. Government officials tried putting up flood gauges in low-lying areas to show how high the water could get during a hurricane, but pressure from real-estate agents got the signposts removed.
The feds bear some responsibility for the disaster-friendly design of Houston, too. Virtually all flood insurance in America is administered through the National Flood Insurance Program, which is supposed to prevent risky development by requiring better building standards and relocation of buildings that flood repeatedly. But since it was founded in 1968, the program has been contorted by developers, real-estate agents, and politicians lobbying for special treatment for their constituents. In places like Houston, the program helps enable development in high-risk areas by offering subsidized insurance rates that don’t reflect the real cost of living in flood-prone areas, as well as by offering repeat payouts for often-flooded homes. Even before Harvey, the program was already $25 billion in debt……….
we are likely to get a lot of rah-rah about rebuilding Houston bigger and better than before, some marginal improvements in building codes, and a lot of fighting in Congress over how much money to spend on recovery. President Trump will tout the heroics of the rescuers and the TV ratings of the storm – he is his own empire of denial. He not only pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate deal, but just weeks before Harvey hit, he rolled back common-sense requirements for flood protection in federal projects.
Beyond the post-storm platitudes, it’s not hard to foresee what is coming. There will be another hurricane – next time it might hit Charleston or Miami or Norfolk, and it will destroy buildings and highways built in harm’s way and it will again cause billions of dollars worth of damage. Eventually, taxpayers in Kansas will get tired of bailing out people who live on the coast, and disaster-relief funds will dry up. As seas rise, mortgage companies will stop writing 30-year loans for homes by the sea. Bond ratings for cities will fall. Coastal roads will be washed away. Airports will be flooded. And the great coastal retreat will begin.
The simple truth is, it’s not just Houston that’s done a poor job of thinking about the future – it’s all of us. We’ve spent 40 years denying the risks of climate change, thinking that if we can just get everyone to buy a Prius and recycle their plastic, everything will be OK. The message of Hurricane Harvey is that it will not be OK. We’re living in a new world now, and we better get ready. Mother Nature is coming for us. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/hurricane-harvey-houston-flood-is-climate-change-warning-w500596
As Harvey Raged, Workers Stayed at Nuclear Plant’s Controls, Bloomberg, By Mark Chediak
August 31, 2017,
Despite heavy rain, South Texas Project runs at full capacity
Biggest challenge is finding workers who can return to plant
As Hurricane Harvey bore down on them, workers remained at the controls of Texas’s biggest nuclear power plant, keeping the lights on for 2 million customers even while some of their own homes were flooded.
Teams of employees have been stationed at the South Texas Project power plant since early Friday. While the site is 90 miles (145 kilometers) southwest of Houston and avoided the worst of the deadly storm, it had to cope with heavy rain and flooding on nearby roads that made it difficult for people to get around.
Plant technicians and engineers were organized into special storm-team crews, working rotating 12-hour shifts, washing clothes in the showers and sleeping on cots set up before Harvey hit. Throughout the storm, the concrete-domed twin reactors have continued operating at full capacity, providing electricity for Texans who can still get service amid a historic flood.
“Really, it’s a matter of getting the sleep you need so you are prepared and ready for the next shift,” said Bob Tatro, a 30-year veteran at the plant and a shift manager for a storm crew that’s kept the plant operating……..
Despite as many as 10 inches of rain on Monday, the nuclear plant near the Gulf of Mexico hasn’t been threatened by the rising waters in nearby tributaries, Eller said. Winds from Harvey never reached hurricane force at the site, which would have required the plant to shut down, he said. There was no flooding at the facility, which is near a wildlife nature preserve.
Workers have been making sure the site’s storm drains are clear and there is enough potable water, said Kurt Moorefield, a shift manager who has been at the plant since Friday.
‘Biggest Issue’
“The biggest issue is finding other employees who can safely make it back to the site,” Eller said. Some workers’ homes have flooded and the company was focused not only on keeping the plant running but helping to assist employees displaced by the storm, he said……..
nuclear-news 