Incompetence, stupidity, diversion, blame shifting, and false solutions to imaginary problems
Guest post by Paul Driessen
“Superstorm” Sandy killed more than 100 people, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, and left millions without food, water, electricity, sanitation or shelter for days or even weeks. Our thoughts and prayers remain focused on its victims, many of whom are still grieving as they struggle with the storm’s wintry aftermath and try to rebuild their lives.
Unfortunately, too many politicians continue to use the storm to advance agendas, deflect blame for incompetence and mistakes, and obfuscate and magnify future risks from building and development projects that they have designed, promoted, permitted and profited from.
Sandy was “unprecedented,” the result of “weather on steroids,” various “experts” insist. “It’s global warming, stupid,” intoned Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “Anyone who says there is not a change in weather patterns is denying reality,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared. We must protect the great NY metropolis from rising oceans, said the Washington Post. This storm should “compel all elected leaders to take immediate action” on climate change, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg pronounced.
Unfortunately for the politicians and spin-meisters, the facts do not support this obscene posturing.
North America’s northeastern coast has been battered by hurricanes and other major storms throughout history. A 1775 hurricane killed 4,000 people in Newfoundland; an 1873 monster left 600 dead in Nova Scotia; others pummeled Canada’s Maritime Provinces in 1866, 1886, 1893, 1939, 1959, 1963 and 2003.
Manhattan got pounded in 1667 and by the Great Storm of 1693. They were followed by more behemoths in 1788, 1821, 1893, 1944, 1954 and 1992. Other “confluences of severe weather events” brought killer storms like the four-day Great Blizzard of 1888. The 1893 storm largely eradicated Hog Island, and the 1938 “Long Island Express” hit LI as a category 3 hurricane with wind gusts up to 180 mph.
Experts say such winds today would rip windows from skyscrapers and cause a deadly blizzard of flying glass, masonry, chairs, desks and other debris from high-rise offices and apartments. People would seek safety in subway tunnels, where they would drown as the tunnels flood.
Sandy was merely the latest “confluence” (tropical storm, northeaster and full-moon high tide) to blast the New York-New Jersey area. It was never a matter of if, but only of when, such a storm would hit.
People, planners and politicians should have been better prepared. Instead, we are feted with statements designed to dodge responsibility and culpability, by trying to blame global warming. The reality is, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose to 391 ppm (0.0391%) today, average global temperatures have not changed in 16 years, and sea levels are rising no faster than in 1900. Even with Hurricane Sandy, November 2012 marked the quietest long-term hurricane period since the Civil War, with only one major hurricane strike on the US mainland in seven years. This is global warming and unprecedented weather on steroids?
In Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath – with millions freezing hungry in dark devastation – Mayor Bloomberg sidetracked police and sanitation workers for the NYC Marathon, until public outrage forced him to reconsider. While federal emergency teams struggled to get water, food and gasoline to victims, companies, religious groups, charities, local citizens and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie worked tirelessly to raise money and organize countless relief efforts.
Most outrageous of all, though, was how ill-prepared the region was for another major storm – and how many political decisions had virtually ensured that any repeat of the 1893, 1938, 1944 and other storms would bring devastation far worse than would likely have occurred in the absence of those decisions.
In one of the most obvious, architects, city planners, mayors and governors alike thought nothing of placing generators in the basements of hospitals and skyscrapers built in areas that are barely above sea level. Past storms have brought surges12 to 18 feet high onto Long Island, and studies have warned that a category 3 direct hit could put much of New York City and its key infrastructure under 30 feet of water. Sandy’s 9-foot surges (plus five feet of high tide) flooded those basements, rendering generators useless, and leaving buildings cold and dark. Perhaps if Mayor Bloomberg had worried less about 32-oz sodas and seas that are rising a mere foot per century, he could have devoted more time to critical issues.
The mayor has also obsessed about urban sprawl. However, when new developments mean high rents, high taxes and photo-op ground breakings, he has a different philosophy.
Mr. Bloomberg’s Arverne by the Sea initiative transformed what he called “a swath of vacant land” into a “vibrant and growing oceanfront community,” with “affordable” homes starting at $559,000. (The land was vacant because a 1950 storm wiped it clean of structures.) The new homes were built on 167 acres of land raised five feet above the surrounding Far Rockaway area. Those Arverne homes mostly survived Sandy. But the high ground caused storm surges to rise higher and move faster elsewhere than they would have on Rockaway lowlands that are always hit head-on by northward moving storms.
If Sandy had been a category 3 hurricane like its 1938 ancestor, the devastation would have been of biblical proportions – as winds, waves and surges slammed into expensive homes, businesses and high-rises, and roared up waterways rendered progressively narrower by hundreds of construction projects.
Lower Manhattan has doubled in width over the centuries. World Trade Center construction alone contributed 1.2 million cubic yards to build Battery Park City, narrowing the Hudson River by another 700 feet. The East River has likewise been hemmed in, while other water channels have been completely filled. Buildings, malls and raised roadways constructed on former potato fields, forests, grasslands and marshlands have further constricted passageways for storm surges and runoff.
As a result, storms like Sandy or the Long Island Express send monstrous volumes of water up ever more confined corridors. With nowhere else to go, the surges rise higher, travel faster and pack more power. It’s elementary physics – which governors, mayors, planners and developers ignore at their peril.
No wonder, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Cuomo and other politicos prefer to talk about global warming, rising seas and worsening weather – to deflect attention and blame from decisions that have put more people in the path of greater danger. Indeed, the very notion of packing more and more people into “sustainable, energy-efficient” coastal cities in the NY-NJ area is itself madness on steroids.
Worst of all, politicians are increasingly and intentionally obscuring and misrepresenting the nature, frequency and severity of storm, flood and surge risks, so that they can promote and permit more construction in high-risk areas, and secure more money and power. They insist that they can prevent or control climate change and sea level rise, by regulating CO2 emission – while they ignore real, known dangers that have arisen before and will arise again, exacerbated by their politicized decisions.
As a result, unsuspecting business and home owners continue to buy, build and rebuild in areas that are increasingly at risk from hurricanes, northeasters and “perfect storms” of natural and political events. And as the population density increases in this NY-NJ area, the ability to evacuate people plummets, especially when roadways, tunnels and other escape routes are submerged. Let the buyer beware.
Sandy may have been a rare (but hardly unprecedented) confluence of weather events. But the political decisions and blame avoidance are an all-too-common confluence of human tendencies – worsened by the dogged determination of our ruling classes to acquire greater power and control, coupled with steadily declining transparency, accountability and liability.
How nice it must be to have convenient scapegoats like “dangerous manmade global warming” and insurance companies – today’s equivalent of the witches whom our predecessors blamed for storms, droughts, crop failures, disease and destruction. It’s time to use the witches’ brooms to clean house.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
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Whoops! It seems I’ve been deleted!
I posted the following in reply to what Rob and Tom had written. It was there as Post #12, and suddenly… it was gone!
“Whoa! Simmer boys!
I didn’t mean to upset anyone.
Rob, I do not live in NY. I live in Brisbane Australia.
Our floods, cyclones, bushfires and droughts are now all blamed on AGW by some prominent commentators here, and none of those weather events are unusual when compared to historical records.
I believe the “sleeping masses” are growing more aware of this and are revolting. (!)
Tom, I’m sorry, but I think you’re drawing some pretty long bows in your last post. (especially item 4! Are you really saying that the term “denier” when used in mainstream media by the afore mentioned prominent commentators is not meant to be derogatory?)
Uncle Pete, I don’t think Boswarm meant any irony at all. (feel free to chime in Boswarm)
With respect, I’d still like to know what you meant in #5. (please?)
Rob, I do indeed read other sites. (of course I do)
The way people talk to each other from BOTH sides is a very sad indictment on our society.”
I think they are afraid of someone making sense.
@ur momisugly mpainter / December 29, 2012 at 2:38 pm
in April 2009 the Dutch company Arcadis has proposed a plan for a storm surge barrier in the Verrazano Narrows ;
accordig to Arcadis the barrier should be combined with other barriers in the East River and the Arthur Kill;
costs for the Verazano Barrier alone were a estimated 6,500.000.000 USD;
the citygovernment of New York was in 2009 not really interested in the plan;
the idea was a combination of two existing Dutch Barriers, the Maeslantkering near Rotterdam and the Oosterscheldekering in Zeeland;
regards
Thank you Paul, Anthony, and the commentators here. Thank you so much for putting infrastructure development and risk management into proper perspective; you have hit the nail on the head. I am an electric power engineer doing distribution network planning for a power distribution utility and I appreciate the input you all have to offer. What you have written here could be the basis of a textbook for planners.
Thank you especially to Anthony Watts. The impact of the learning available from this blog is beyond words. The continual flow of sensible and challenging thinking from smart people is simply amazing. Long may the work continue.
Wishing you all success for the year ahead.
Robin (New Zealand)
@ur momisugly mpainter
there is even a movie of the plan:
It is not just in New York. It is a global phenomena. I was in a developing country when the minister of health was interviewed on the dengue epidemic and instead of calling for action he merely shrugged the problem as beyond his control as it is caused by global warming.
Charles H says:
December 29, 2012 at 12:39 pm
….. What is a surprise is that the media seem to propagate the CAGW nonsense as a reason for these overdue natural events. Have the alarmists also full control of the media or is it just that the media want a good story? ….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The banks/financiers control the media. See discussion at Tallbloke: New York Times has vested interest in climate alarmism
The CO2 scam is a huge money maker for the financiers.
$2,000 billion that does NOTHING, it produces no wealth or any other benefit except create another method for transferring wealth from the sheeple to the elite.
““A disordered currency is one of the greatest of evils. It wars against industry, frugality, and economy. And it fosters the evil spirits of extravagance and speculation. Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money. This is one of the most effectual of inventions to fertilize the rich man’s field by the sweat of the poor man’s brow. Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation: These bear lightly the happiness of the mass of the community, compared with fraudulent currencies and robberies committed with depreciated paper.” ~ Sen. Daniel Webster 1832
Looks like they have invented something even better that paper currency although I have seen calls for making ‘Carbon Credits’ the new international reserve currency.
ETHICAL MARKETS: A Proposal for a Carbon-Based International Reserve Currency As a Major Component Of The UN Funding System For Development And Climate Mitigation And Adaptation International Institute of Monetary Transformation
Frans C. Verhagen, M.Div., M.I.A., Ph.D
I wish we would see writing like this in our professional news media. Unfortunately the MSM is nothing more than a propaganda outlet. You know it is really getting bad when the National Enquirer is doing block buster investigative reporting on our politicians link (snicker)
Lessons do get learned. When Hurricane Isabel hit the Norfolk area of VA one of the casualties was the flooding of the mid-town tunnel. The tunnel was designed with hurricane gates, but as they started to raise them, as the storm approached, they stuck. If my meorory is not too bad, it took about 6 months to dry the tunnel out and re-wire it. Now, days before any potential sotrm, they stop the traffic and give the gates a try on all the tunnels. So far so good, but none of the more recent storms has had a flood surge as high as Isable.
Flood gates on the rivers around Manhatten might provide some protection but a lot of the damage was to areas with direct exposure to the Atlantic. In those locations, storm walls and no first floors helps a lot. Locations like Hatteras Island routinly get battered by hurricanes much stronger than Sandy, with limited home damage.
Theodore White says:
December 29, 2012 at 2:43 pm
A good piece by Paul Driessen, and good choice by Anthony Watts….
In fact, Drieesen is being too kind, “No wonder, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Cuomo and other politicos prefer to talk about global warming, rising seas and worsening weather – to deflect attention and blame from decisions that have put more people in the path of greater danger. ….
What happened, and the excuse of the lie of ‘man-made global warming’ is far worse than madness on steroids. What we have here are complete, full-blown idiots posing as leaders. It’s Gilligan serving as captain of the USS Enterprise and Gomer Pyle running Starfleet Command.…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Now I have to clean my computer again. What a wonderful description of modern day politicians.
At least in ‘olden days’ the King had to get his butt out there and lead his army. Too bad we can not send modern politicians out to lead the army. It would quickly cut down on wars. Just visualize Obama in Afghanistan link
Tom in Texas
December 29, 2012 at 11:38 am
###
Silly boy! The money isn’t just to rebuild schools. 150 Million is going to Alaska, and 58 Million to plant trees on property owned by Democratic Party donators. Plus some is going to go into buying new fleets of GM cars for federal agencies, throughout the country. All worthy causes, I’m sure you’ll agree!
eo says:
December 29, 2012 at 4:16 pm
It is not just in New York. It is a global phenomena. I was in a developing country when the minister of health was interviewed on the dengue epidemic and instead of calling for action he merely shrugged the problem as beyond his control as it is caused by global warming.
====================================================================
Don’t take care of the problem, nurture “the cause”.
Michael of Brisbane says: December 29, 2012 at 3:06 pm
“..I’ve caused a bit of a kerfuffle Camburn! Tom Curtis has replied with a long post….”
Geez Michael … I’d be all over that first line of Tom Curtis’ … a one in a thousand year event? So would you like to call that unprecedented? You mean it has happened before but this time its different, right? (and I bet next you are going to tell me that models tell you it is going to happen more often now?)…. etc
I would say that, but I got banned again recently … and anyway those sort of lines and questions get instantly deleted …. and I’m tired of making new email addresses.
We have had a similar lamentable invocation of nebulous theories advanced to defend the indefensible. If not quite a mirror of that terrible night in NYC, very similar sounding excuses have been made for the recent rainfall totals experienced here in the UK – climate change and “we must make contingencies”, unheard of rainfall totals etc, etc.
True there has been some flooding and how hope destroying it is for those people who have been inundated more than once in the past few months – to the victims my heart goes out to you all.
But scrapping regulations and strict rules to prevent building homes on vulnerable flood plain and on low lying areas is simply idiotic. On the other hand, we used to dredge rivers to lower the bed, no longer because the EU forbids it – riparian flora and fauna are of greater concern and a higher priority to the eco-warriors, Brussels fruit-loops and bean counters. Our very own Environment Agency [Brussels reps in the UK] is the chief culprit, where absolute adherence to the church of global warming is a prime requisite for employee and senior management alike.
If it is [any manifestation of] severe weather, then if follows according to HMG – that it must be down to CAGW.
It’s the perfect ‘get out of Jail card’.
@Michael of Brisbane: December 29, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Re: SKS editing, deleting, propaganda generating, name calling, drum beating, arguing about types of argument, labeling…..etc ..etc..
Your will note that Tom is agreeing with Rob at comment 10. Except Rob’s comment is now at number 6. There is no doubt that is the comment he refers to as they both discuss the type of characters CAGW skeptics are… and anyway , that comment of Tom’s itself is now #9.
So, in the usual style, at least 4 comments from that page (of currently10 comments) have vanished without trace or comment.
Rule 2 of “The Seven Rules of Bureaucracy”?
Christine Milne, leader of the Australian Green Party on ABC radio earlier this month:
“We are track for 4-6 deg of warming”
“Our country is being swamped by extreme weather events”
ABC listeners might be scared stiff but I wonder if Nature is listening? It will be fascinating to see what the Australian area averaged mean temperature is for 2012 (in 2011 it was 0.14 °C below the 1961 to 1990 average of 21.81 °C). Another blue line on the graph may be extremely bad news for Ms Milne:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi
Of course the BOM reminded us that we had a strong La Liña in 2011 and no doubt they will find some record or other in 2012 to keep Christine Milne happy and ABC listeners alarmed even if the temperature isn’t in the red. And we still have a few months of the cyclone season left to boost up the extreme event trend:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/climatology/trends.shtml
But dare I say that on Christmas day we had wonderful gentle rain and one place on the globe Sydney is presently looking glorious with a max of 23 deg and we are being swamped with extremely wonderful days, one after the other?
But I guess that would be tempting providence for Christine’s crystal ball and we will soon have an extreme weather event happening somewhere, even if it is a willy willy hitting the main street of Gilgandra.
Gail Combs says: December 29, 2012 at 4:22 pm
“…….. World Bank Carbon Finance Report for 2007
The carbon economy is the fastest growing industry globally with US$84 billion of carbon trading conducted in 2007, doubling to $116 billion in 2008, and expected to reach over $200 billion by 2012 and over $2,000 billion by 2020.
$2,000 billion that does NOTHING, it produces no wealth or any other benefit except create another method for transferring wealth from the sheeple to the elite. …”
Dead right Gail.
And that is one of the main reasons why this whole shebang needs no conspiracy to keep on rolling …. government and finance institutions just instinctively and instantly embrace this sort of stuff.
And then just keep making money out of money popping from one trading account to the next.
Leaders leading – yeah – a now-dated cartoon on a Canadian paper portraying an out-of-the-closet opposition defense critic going to Iraq to negotiate for peace: the caption was “yoo hoo, Saddam…..!”
An excellent Guest post by Paul Driessen. In times past people and authorities responded to climate disasters by taking logical remedial action like building dykes, raising land levels, building dams, dredging rivers, etc. Since CAGW the official line is to blame every event on Climate whatever, do nothing and seek to raise taxes to alter peoples’ actions and hence the climate. The result is that people have less money to remedy their problems, pay more for energy and have less for food. Their survival depends on energy use which remains use remains obstinately the same. Authorities do not notice the effects that their taxes are having and believe that the taxes are an effective alternative to the old fashioned remedies that really did work. Since the reduction of CO2 has (virtually) no effect on world climate, the disasters continue with people having less ability to combat them. Authorities smugly believe that the disasters would have been even worse without their taxes, and carry on, as they cannot reason out the true and complex situation driving the climate. At some point people will either perish or replace the authorities with people taking effective actions for the peoples’ benefit. I hope that we can last out that long.
Anyone paying attention would have seen a huge storm gathering, and had days to prepare. I live in a low lying area of the Chesapeake Bay, and had Sandy turned west just several hours earlier, I would have been a Sandy “victim.” Still, I didn’t wait for the “authorities” to tell me what to do. I evacuated to higher ground, took my dog and my important documents and got out of danger.
People have to realize that living in coastal areas they will be subjected to perils…hundred-year perils..even if in their lifetimes and their parent’s lifetimes they haven’t seen it. But history is there, and can’t be ignored. Many tragedies have been documented, with terrible loss of life. We can blame Bloomberg, or the Weather people who may or may not have sounded greater alarms, or ordered evacuations. But the final responsibilty remains in the guts of those in harm’s way. And if you remain in your house, in the face of a 700 mile-wide, unusual fall storm, it is your respnsibility to decide what is most important to you. To hope for the best, thinking that it “has never happened here,” is to roll the dice. For me, I will give up my home and possessions for my life, figuring if nothing happens, or if I lose it all, at least I had an hand in my fate. I tempt no acts of Mother Nature.
ntesdorf says:
December 29, 2012 at 6:10 pm
…..Authorities smugly believe that the disasters would have been even worse without their taxes, and carry on, as they cannot reason out the true and complex situation driving the climate. At some point people will either perish or replace the authorities with people taking effective actions for the peoples’ benefit. I hope that we can last out that long.
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At this point I am just hoping I am dead of natural causes before the sheeple (especially those in the inner city) figure out just how badly they have been had by the politicians, academics and bankers.
When the rolling blackouts and ‘energy poverty’ hit the inner cities and they finally figure out it was done on purpose by the US government, I really really do not want to be around. link Heck some people were calling for riots on twitter if Obama did not win re-election, so what do you think they will do when they realize just how much they were betrayed?
Remember the real bill of goods being sold to the rank and file liberals is that we can have a viable economy and still be ‘green.’ That Wind and Solar can easily replace coal. That their current jobs will be replace by ‘green’ jobs.
The reality is a current 23-24% unemployment with red tape and Obamacare discouraging the growth in the small businesses who account of most new jobs. The earnings for the median man with a high school diploma and no further schooling fell by 41 percent from 1970 to 2010 and the future capacity prices [for electricty] in the RTO increased by an incredible 350 percent at the Future Capacity Auction for 2014/2015.
On top of that thanks to Bernanke doubling the USA money supply there is talk of Stagfation only unlike the 1970’s we do not have 24% of the work force employed in manufacturing. Instead we have a nation of bureaucrats, shop keepers and burger flippers with a huge trade deficit and federal debt. Obama may talk of taxing ‘The Rich’ but first they have to be enough people earning a wage high enough to BE tax!
It’s a fantasy world they live in…
I once was house shopping in Rhode Island. ( I had a potential job offer.) The realtor was all happy to show me houses close to the shore… I asked “The Question”… “What about hurricanes?”…
She demured and hemmed and hawed by did admit that yes, they had them, and yes, in 1950 something or other they had a bad one… but it had been decades since then…
So we looked at homes more inland and a bit higher ground… at my insistence…
“Those who forget history are doomed to make some involuntarily”…
And anyone who buys a home with an “ocean view” must expect up close and personal views of large waves and major storms.
If cities and states had to pay their own disaster relief I would bet that zoning and building codes would be more thought out. Instead we get disaster after disaster because people are unprepared to deal with the “disaster of the area”, this syndrome is not just confined to the coastlines.
@ur momisugly markx says: December 29, 2012 at 5:25 pm
Yep. There’s ~200,000 slot machines in Vegas. Every day about 5 of them have a 100 year event.
The harmonics of the lunar declinational tides in the atmosphere repeat about every 18.6 years, when the declinational angle at culmination is the same. Four cycles back in 1938;
“the 1938 “Long Island Express” hit LI as a category 3 hurricane with wind gusts up to 180 mph.
And others pummeled Canada’s Maritime Provinces in 1866, 1886, 1893, 1939, 1959, 1963 and 2003”.
We had the same effects, using the data from those days projected forward to last year and this one (2011-2012) we had the return of the same dynamics in phase with the declinational tides this time, same as last time. The maps for precipitation expected for the days for both Irene and Sandy moved up the East coast and made landfall, posted to my site are the repeat of the precipitation data from past hurricanes of the same tidal effects occurring with the same timing. Forecasting the extreme weather of the past two years, up to 18 years in advance, and nobody paid attention, except me, but no one would listen to me.(NO PHD I guess)
Richard Holle
Tonyb @ur momisugly 11:59 says “Very nice article well reasoned and referenced.”
I agree. My guess is that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg would not agree if he were required to read this slowly, carefully, and multiple times. Hundreds of thousands of other “leaders” would similarly dismiss this as unbelievably naive. And that’s a problem.
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following Tonyb, Martinbrumby asks “And why, at least, aren’t critical subway / tunnel entrances provided with storm surge barriers?”
Manhattan is like a gargantuan Swiss cheese. Many entrances to the labyrinth are old and unused, even unknown. Shortly after Sandy a news article explained this issue but I did not save it.