Quote of the week, bonus edition

Wow. Common sense. A rare quality these days.

Chris Edwards: Isnt there a really old book that tells us not to build houses on sand? I doubt these people read that sort of book eh?
I prefer “The Three Little Pigs”, there’s better advice in there, what with the tale referring to houses being blown down.
But reference to fairy tales of any kind adds nothing to a rational debate.

There is a theory that the Mound-building Indians built their mounds to have high ground on the flood plains. It didn’t require UFO’s or heavy equipment. If everyone just transported three basketfuls of dirt a day, each person moves a thousand baskets a year. In a decade you had a pretty big pile of dirt, and a dry place in the floods, while harvesting from the richest soil. (Unfortunately some of those various societies apparently grew too dependant on corn and didn’t get enough meat; skeletons got smaller with time, and then the Little Ice Age stressed them out. However some were still around when the Spanish showed up.)
People have waterfronts because the sea provides both food and easy transport. It is simply too much work to roll your fishing boat down from the hills every morning. However the fishmen up in Maine were pretty smart, when it came to sensing when a big blow was coming, and finding a good hide-out for their boats.
People are gamblers by nature. Some get bored without a challange, and climb risky mountains and put themselves in danger just for the fun of it. Others gamble on the stock market. Still others live by the sea.
However there are some reasonable steps that could be taken to lessen the damages of superstorms. The NYC subways should have had floodgates put in years ago.

PS Gail, glad you’re back.

Sleepalot says:
November 4, 2012 at 4:44 am
There’s also an old story about building your house out of wood: “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in.”

Not exactly:

“The second little pig built his house out of sticks.”
http://www.shol.com/agita/pigs.htm

Gamecock says:
November 4, 2012 at 4:42 am
Bloomburg believes in CAGW. He believes sea level is rising. He endorses Obama because of his alleged belief in CAGW.
As mayor of New York for 11 years, he has done NOTHING to protect Lower Manhatten from the presumed rising tide. It cannot be rationalized that he blames CAGW and yet did nothing to prepare.

Roger Knights: In a bit of pro-active CYA, he or TPTB commissioned the following 2011 study, which frowns on preventative measures, because they provide “a false sense of security” (because they can’t protect against the worstest case) and thus amount to “disaster by design.” Instead, low-lying New York should pick up and move, reverting their spaces back to parkland. Dig it:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/111610145/NYC-Worst-Case
RISK INCREASE TO INFRASTRUCTURE DUE TO SEA LEVEL RISE.
Klaus H. Jacob, Noah Edelblum and Jonathan Arnold.
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University
[A center of warmist alarmism, I believe, and possibly chosen for that reason—Roger Knights]
———–
[pp. 49-51:]
Generic options for mitigating against the increased coastal storm surge hazards
and risks to the MEC’s infrastructure (and to other built assets) may include the
following, regardless of the political or fiscal likelihood to realize them. They fall
essentially into two categories: protective engineered solutions and those based on landuse changes. In more detail, they include the following.
(1) Short-term “Protective” Measures Using Local Engineering .
Individually engineered solutions can be achieved by raising individual structures and systems or critical system components to higher elevations. This may be done without moving them laterally to higher ground. Alternate solutions my include surrounding the exposed structures with local sea-walls and dykes, as for instance has been done by the PANYNJ [Port Authority of NY & NJ] for the La Guardia Airport. The problem with such engineered solutions is that after completion, they often give for some time a potentially false sense of security and encourage new asset concentrations behind the protective defenses. They often simply postpone rather than eliminate renewed flooding. When flooding recurs during the most extreme events, then they tend to be associated with even larger losses when the engineered protections are overwhelmed. This phenomenon, together with some of the earlier flood insurance policies, has led to the newly coined term “Disasters by Design” (Mileti, 1999).

By that logic, we shouldn’t require cars to have seatbelts, buildings to have fire extinguishers or fire escapes, etc., etc.—Roger Knights

(2) Regional Mega-Engineering.
The model for the mega-engineering approach is provided by the Netherlands where a large portion of the land, population and infrastructure is “protected” [note the sneer-quotes—Roger Knights] from the North Sea by major regional dam, dyke and levee systems, rather than by individually built local systems. In the US the Mississippi River dyke and levee system built largely by the US Army Corps of Engineers protecting New Orleans and many other cities (for the time being) [another sneer—Roger Knights] is the nearest example. If applied to the MEC region it would mean the future gating of the entrances to the New York harbor estuary, while somehow providing passage of ship traffic and outflow of freshwater and sediments from the Hudson, Passaic, Raritan and lesser river systems. Such mega-solutions have occasionally and half seriously been suggested [The endnotes contain no references to them—Roger Knights] , but have been rejected as far-fetched, utopian [Not as compared to “moving laterally to higher ground” (see below).—Roger Knights] , and in the long run environmentally unsustainable [that term pushes “environmentalists” hot buttons—Roger Knights] for many reasons, silting of the New York Harbor being only one such cause for concern. Also such a “solution” could lead to the ultimate disaster by design if the protective system were to fail by an extraordinarily extreme event. [So the Thames barrier should be dismantled, and the one protecting Leningrad, etc.?—Roger Knights]
(3) Long-term Remedy – Changed Landuse.
Perhaps the sole effective solution is a fundamental change in landuse. It implies to move, when and wherever possible, the infrastructures and other assets to higher ground. They would be moved not only vertically, but also laterally. If space does not exist or cannot be made available, in some instances it may be possible to put the infrastructure systems underground and have only their entrances located at sufficiently safe high ground. The freed water front spaces can then be turned into parks and recreational areas with low asset density where flooding losses can be kept minimal. Obviously such measures require large fiscal resources, a long-term planning, tenacious political will and foresight – all generally in short supply in a political landscape that is dominated by short-term economic gain and fierce competition.
In reality it is likely that combinations of solutions 1 and 3 (but probably not 2) will be applied in time as sea level keeps rising with continued global warming, on a generational time scale. The challenge will be to accelerate mitigation before the losses start to drastically increase in frequency and magnitude.
There are other options. One is to do nothing and pay when disaster strikes. Given the magnitude of the outlined risks this does not seem a realistic option that a developed society could afford. It would seem an unlikely option for the very metropolis that is keen to retain a position as a global leader in world financial markets. Risk management is a core concern of financial institutions and markets that dislike uncertainty. Whether the region is prepared to exercise forward looking risk management is a topic we defer to the sector report on “Institutional Decision Making (Zimmerman and Cusker, this study).
The problem outlined earlier, that losses do not tend to occur in annualized steady small doses, but instead in rare, large, sudden and extreme events, may point to a solution rather than a problem. That solution may build on the seemingly reverse modus operandi: i.e. mitigation measures, especially those associated with changes in landuse and rezoning, may be more readily implemented in small incremental steps rather than in single large-scale political actions. True, post disaster conditions often provide windows of opportunity. But typically they do so only, if sound plans are ready and widely known before the disaster strikes. Therefore one should not wait to begin planning until after the disaster strikes. Assessment and planning time is now. Implementation will come later, often by surprise opportunities. The technical vision needs to be grand and all encompassing and requires a master plan of extraordinary complexity and longevity. It also must ensure that the solutions and actions for the future link with actions for solving today’s problems. Once the planning is in place, the administrative implementation could be incremental and hence affordable if correctly prioritized. This would require concentrating first on the most exposed and most essential assets, and then steadily move on to the less exposed and less important or less valuable assets and systems. Largely lacking at this time are the technical and scientific assessments that provide sufficient detail, spatial resolution, and hence technical credibility. This credibility is needed to form a vision that can get the process started based on technical merit. The solutions (or lack thereof) will always be part of the political and socioeconomic processes. The technical findings must be widely accessible to ensure a reasonably equitable discourse and input towards a public consensus before it comes to hammering out the actual policies and solutions under conditions of political realities and fiscal constraints.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[pp. 52-53]
Conclusions and Recommendations.
The Metropolitan east coast region with New York City at its center has nearly 20 million people, a 1-Trillion dollar economy, and 2-Trillion dollars worth of built assets, nearly half of which are invested in a complex infrastructure.
Many elements of the transportation and other essential infrastructure systems in the MEC region, and even some of its regular building stock, are located at elevations from 6 to 20 feet above current sealevel. This is well within the range of expected coastal storm surge elevations of 8 to more than 20 feet for eastern tropical and extratropical storms. Depending on which climate models will apply, the sealevel rise over the next 100 years will accelerate and amount to at most 3 feet by the year 2100. This seemingly modest increase in sealevel has the astonishing effect to raise the frequency of coastal surging and related flooding by factors of 2 to 10, with an average of about 3.
The rate of incurring losses from these coastal floods will increase accordingly. Expected annualized losses from coastal storms, in the order of about $ 1 Billion per year, would be small enough to be absorbed by the 1-Trillion dollar economy of the region. However it is an unpleasant fact that the actual losses do not occur neatly in regular annualized doses. Rather they occur during infrequent extreme events that can amount to hundreds of billions of dollars for the largest events, albeit with low probability. Such large losses would deprive the economy of tens of percent of the gross regional product (GRP), a forfeiture that will be hard to bear. Insurers, policyholders and non-insured will be stretched to the brink. If the frequency of these and lesser events increases by factors of 2 to 10 due to accelerating sea level rise, mitigating actions will become urgent. The region will be in a race between increasing losses and needing to afford, at the same time, the costs of mitigation and remediation.
The region is already in the process to revamp its basic infrastructure at costs approaching a good fraction of 100 Billion dollars per decade. Therefore, the most cost- effective way to harden the infrastructure against future coastal storm surge losses would be to account for the increased flood potentials. A coherent policy is needed which should be based on technical input. Some uncertainties exist and will persist even after future detailed technical and scientific studies are performed which are needed to avoid unnecessary excessive remedies. However, these uncertainties must not be used to justify inaction since it is inevitable that the losses will accelerate just from the sheer growth of built and newly exposed assets alone.
The best mitigation is to avoid placing new or refurbished assets at low elevations. This requires an innovative landuse plan, tough zoning enforcement, and would be best combined with new engineering codes that place all critical components at sufficiently high elevations. [“Refurbished” could be interpreted, by a zealous enforcement agency, as covering preventative maintenance, and even mere maintenance.—Roger Knights] This objective could be well achieved by a Voluntary National Model or Reference Code. The usual local privileges to adopt the recommended standard into local law should be preserved. The National Flood Insurance Program’s Q3 mapping effort administered by FEMA may have a new and innovative role to play in this respect. Congress may need to put the necessary resources in place for NFIP to move from the past haphazard process of updating the flood zone maps to one that uses already proposed modern technologies to produce improved accurate digital maps on an accelerated pace. An infusion of resources will be needed to catch up with the rising tide – not an inexpensive undertaking, but one with a likely high benefit to cost ratio.
The problem of sea level rise that New York City and the MEC are about to face will be faced by coastal megacities and shore-bound populations all around the US coasts, in fact around the globe, in rich and poor countries alike. [Presuming global warming is accelerating—Roger Knights] New York City and the surrounding MEC region could be in the unique position to muster the financial and intellectual resources, perhaps even the communal political wit and will (sic!) to set a world-class example for how to deal with such a fundamental societal / environmental issue. NYC and the surrounding MEC could do so in par with its often self-declared status as the ‘financial capital’ of the world. The City that never sleeps? True or not, ‘mother nature’ will see to it that wake-up calls will abound.

”Abound” is a giveaway that the authors’ hearts are imbued with warmist alrmism. This report’s recommendations (mostly “move”) are largely based on accepting warmist projections of a 1-meter sea level rise by 2100. Further, based on nature of the the paragraph that sneeringly rejected “Regional Mega-Engineering,” I suspect that this report’s recommendations reflect current environmentalism’s knee-jerk rejection of man’s large-scale defiance of nature in the form of levees, surge barriers, etc.—i.e., a belief that such a stance is never justified and amounts to an affront to Gaia. The Dutch have told “mother nature” where to get off, and we should too, in this instance. (“This I know—Mother Nature is a maniac.”—Laurence Janifer, epigraph to You Sane Men.)—Roger Knights