« Grab a cup o' joe. . . . | Main | Let's do the election corruption boogie. . . . . »
April 19, 2006
Oh damn, it's just gonna fall off?????????
Ok, so back in March, Larry O'Hanlon for the Discovery News service reported that there was "tectonic subsidence" in Louisiana which essentially amounted to:
"New Orleans is at the top end of what looks like a gigantic, slow-moving landslide"
O'Hanlon quotes LSU Geologist Roy Dokka as saying:
"Not only is southern Louisiana sinking, it's sliding"
O'Hanlon also describes the phenomenon as such:
"Like a smaller landslide on the side of a hill, the huge Southern Louisiana landslide has a "headwall" where the slide is breaking away and a "toe" out in the Gulf where the debris from the slide is piling up, Dokka explained. The only difference from a traditional landslide is that this one is far, far larger and it's buried under lots of wet sediments, so it requires very accurate survey measurements to detect it. "
Dokka's work in investigating the "Michoud Fault" which runs essentially through New Orleans' Ninth Ward is slipping, as a result of sediment piling up in the Gulf and pushing the tectonic plate down. While many have been keen to blame the "sinking" of SE Louisiana on the oil and gas industry, Dokka points out that:
"Subsidence associated with petroleum extraction was not a factor due to the lack of local production."
So that brings me full circle back to a topic I've explored here in the past. We simply are too quick and use too much energy decrying the evils of human impact on the planet without knowing enough about what we're talking about.
For years people have beat the U.S. up over CO2 emissions (one of those greenhouse gasses), stating that U.S. industry and American citizens (current target: the SUV) are killing the planet through global warming. For years this was a mantra repeated far and wide. Attempts to get the U.S. to voluntarily give up our industrious ways and return to eating grubs and berries, wearing loincloths (made from ecologically sound flax farming practices, not evil leather), and to continually in perpetuity pray to Gaia for her to forgive us our sins, have been made by the radical pseudo-scientists lamenting over global warming.
Then along comes a pretty exhaustive study from Columbia that the U.S. is not in fact adding to the global rate of CO2 production in the atmosphere, but we're actually sucking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than we're putting in, making us a NET ABSORBER OF CARBON DIOXIDE from the atmosphere. That's right, all those evil machines that pump out CO2 also had the coincident effect of allowing us to farm more efficiently, manage our forest better and keep millions of lovingly kept lawns and houseplants that sucked more CO2 out of the atmosphere than we were putting in. Big loss for the global warming crowd. They could no longer legitimately beat up on us for increasing CO2 levels (although they still try) and now they had to go look for another evil wrong-doer to blame the CO2 problem on (In truth, they still blame us, and simply ignore the evidence to the contrary, after all, the U.S. is an easy target, we're comfy and content, and the angry "change the world my way" crowd continues on.)
We've also been told that it's mankind that is responsible for Global Warming because of everything from the shoes we wear (more cows for more leather means more Methane) to the cars we drive (the CO2 issue again) to our air conditioners and hairsprays (nevermind we stopped using ozone depleting propellants and freon long ago and replaced them with safe alternatives unlike . . . cough . . . cough. . . Europe). Then we have NASA come back and let us know that the Sun is particularly angry right now (apparently at the U.S.) and burning hotter than any period since we've been aware that the Sun is a big ball of flaming nuclear hellfire at the center of our Solar System rather than Apollo's Chariot streaking across the sky. That would seem to be another loss for the "humans are evil" crowd, but again, it's not. They conveniently ignore the evidence and scream "It's the cars, it's all the cars, I tell you!!!!" This as they jump into their 70's era Volkswagen bus spewing black smoke behind.
[Ok Ok, that's not entirely fair, most of those "humans are evil" hippies are now driving hybrids filled with ecologically unfriendly heavy metal batteries which will be useless after 10 years and be hulks of rusting metal in junkyards with acid leaking from them. I'm not against hybrids, but their just a band-aid, we'll see the cool stuff soon enough if the hippies would just get out of the way of those people that are actually developing the technology. . . cough. . . Exxon. . . .cough. . . GM (ever wondered about why if GM's SUV sales are hurting so much why their stock and sales and profits keep going up. . . cough . . . cough . . . a nice shiny new SATURN anyone?)]
So anyway back to the Michoud Fault (pronounced Me-shoo with a silent d if you're a coon ass), and New Orelans and points south, sinking and sliding into the Gulf.
Here's my point, shut up with the blaming of every little environmental study and hiccup on humans and our activity on the planet. I've got a news flash for the hippies, Earth Firsters, Greenpeacers and my favorite environmental assholes the Earth Liberation Front (thanks alot for fucking up my second season in Vail), humans are a part of the natural environment too, we're animals just like the two toed slow moving Birdfood Salamander and we are filling our role in the evolutionary life cycle of the planet just like every other creature on the planet. The only real difference is that we've got opposable thumbs that allow us to all the things that a beaver can (build dams), the birds can (build nests -- but ours have roofs, score one for us --) and a cheetah can (move really fast, sure we use cars, but that's just another score for us). We're doing what we are simply because "we can". I've yet to see an environmentalist complain about a Beaver turning wetlands into a full fledged body of water, but having a human build it is an affront to Gaia or some such nonsense. We're here with opposable thumbs for a reason, because evolution or God or whatever construct you choose to follow gave them to us. Gave them to us so we could pick up one rock, spin it around a few times, and whack it on another rock to make a tool. Follow that out buy using that tool to break off some more rocks with ore in then, back to the opposable thumb allowing us to master the creation of fire and wham-o we've got metal George. Um, maybe we should put it back.
NO! We shouldn't put it back, we should get more and make more and use those big brains between our ears to accomplish more tasks, more complex tasks. Hey, lets try farming, and lets make some houses so we don't have to force bears out of their caves (or more correctly let's try to avoid having the bears force us out of caves by leaving the caves) and lets build the wheel so we can get around better and lets make a plow to increase our agricultural output to feed more humans, after all humans are animals too and they should be cared for and looked after and allowed to prosper because humans are a part of the natural order too.
Look, I know that it's a tragedy every time a species goes extinct, and it's just as tragic when a fishing village is swallowed by the sea, but lets get real for a moment, things have been going extinct since long before man started to stand up and look across the African steppes at the world beyond. There are also thousands of villages on seacoasts and waterways that have been washed away by rising tides, flooding, storms and tectonic subsidence. Let's get real for a minute and realize that we're just an ant colony (albeit a big one) to Mother Earth, we've got two power hands, like the ant's two powerful mandibles, with which to shape and develop our world to suit us.
When Mother Nature, Mother Earth, the planet, what have you, gets screwed up, she'll let us know, and she'll do it in a big way. Katrina wasn't that big of a storm, there have been bigger in the past, many more much bigger, what was big was that Katrina "just happened" to finally hit a city that for hundreds of years was unprepared for an event which they simply wished or willed to not come along. Well it finally did and to try and connect Katrina with global warming is downright silly. Unless you want to throw the one that hit Galveston, and Betsy and all the other into the "it's the U.S.'s fault bucket as well.
But let's connect up those opposable thumbs and get back to the Michoud fault. New Orleans is a doomed city. It's simply silly to think any other way. New Orleans was doomed from the start, when Iberville and Bienville had a spat and one brother took off to report back to his French overlords about progress in the New World, the other brother laid out New Orleans in a spot where the Dutch could come in and shell it, all for 30 pieces of silver. Yes kiddies, if you haven't heard it before, you heard it here first, the geographic placement of New Orleans is the result of traitorous actions and espionage committed against France so that the mouth of the Mississippi could be opened up to another nation and the port there (New Orleans) could be taken and destroyed, only to relocate the port to a more suitable location.
Events turned on their ear and New Orleans wasn't shelled or taken over and by the time the treachery and espionage was revealed, it was too late and too expensive to move the city to it's original surveyed location. New Orleans is doomed not only because of the treachery of an international plot, but it's doomed because one day the Mighty Mississippi is going to simply tell the Corps of Engineers to bugger off and it's going to reroute itself down the Atchafalaya Basin. No matter what the Corps does, it's merely buying time, the Mississippi is a bit tired of it's present location and wants a change of scenery, we've known this for decades upon decades, but we're fighting it, and putting up a good fight, an honorable battle, but a battle that is destined to be lost eventually. No matter how many control structures, levees, relief reservoirs and the like we build, eventually the Mississippi will change course, and leave New Orleans high and dry. Which to some will be a nice change, although economically it will be a disaster that dwarfs Katrina, Rita, Betsy and every other Gulf Coast hurricane combined.
Don't get me wrong now, I'm not about to suggest that we give up on New Orleans, I'm not saying that we shouldn't rebuild it at all. I'm saying we need to step back for a minute and realize that things are not necessarily what they seem. The present course, like the course of the Mississippi, is not necessarily a good one.
There is a strong urge to rebuild New Orleans exactly like it was (the new addendum to that plan is to raise everything in the city 1 to 3 feet off the ground. . . useless, but we'll get to that in a minute), and I understand that urge. New Orleans is my hometown and my trips down there since Katrina have been simply heartbreaking, but over time and with some reflection, I've come to realize that New Orleans was simply waiting for this to happen and in all honesty, Katrina wasn't quite bad enough for New Orleans. The storm actually missed the city, travelling up the Pearl River instead of the Mississippi. Katrina was a near miss for New Orleans. I know it doesn't seem that way from the destruction and chaos played out on our TV screens, but it actually did miss the city and that part of the storm that did hit the city were the weakest quadrants of the storm. An analysis of the data suggests that the actual category rating of the storm was somewhere between a 1 and a 2. That Cat 1 or 2 storm was enough however to bring about a cascade of disparate events sufficient to effectively destroy a city.
But I still say Katrina didn't destroy New Orleans enough. I'm sure many of my family members who read this, especially those still in the city will be positively horrified by me writing that, but in my mind it's true. I'm not wishing for any more loss of life (I wish Blanco and Nagin would have done their jobs and mitigated the loss of life when they had the chance), so don't try to paint this that way.
I'm talking about DESTRUCTION. I'm talking about shattering buildings instead of flooding them, I'm talking about scouring entire areas of the city clean, wiping the slate and REALLY allowing some rebuilding, the RIGHT kind of rebuilding to be done. Today across New Orleans people are ripping out sheetrock, carpets, and paneling, they are scraping out the inside of their homes with shovels and tossing the soggy remnants of former lives into the street where it cooks for days in the sun then carted away to landfills. Many of these people are "rebuilding" their lives, but it's my firm belief that most, not all but most are setting themselves up for even greater misfortune.
Katrina didn't do enough. The storm left hundreds of thousands of building shells, filled with the soaked remnants of their lives. Cruelly however, the storm left a false hope in place for many of those returning that they'd be able to rebuild, a false hope that levees would be rebuilt to protect against a future storm and a false hope that Katrina was "the Big One" and that New Orleans was safe from another storm for some time to come.
Talking to people in New Oreleans, many times I heard, "Well, it's over now, and we're safe for another hundred years." Similarly I heard, "Well, at least now we know what to expect, so we can build bigger levees to protect us." These are dangerous, albeit understandable, positions to take.
Like CO2 emissions and Global Warming and even "drilling is causing Louisana to sink" we simply don't have a good enough understanding of what happened during the storm on the BIG level. Sure we watched alot on TV, and we saw alot of destruction in real time, but we'll never know what forces were actually brought to bear at the height of the Cat 1 or 2 storm that hit the city. We'll never know if the local nutria had undermined the portion of the levees that failed, there's no possible way for us to know about that, because we hadn't looked at those sections, with an eye for observing what's about to cause this levee to break. Likewise we'll never know if the barge broke the London Ave. Canal levee or the barge was sucked into the Lower Ninth along with the water rushing in from the failed levee.
We do know however that it's far easier to blame human failure than it is to blame Mother Nature. After all, it's Mother Nature, we can't extract a pound of flesh from her, we can never toss her in jail or make sure she never has a job running the weather or even convince her never to strike the city (or another city) again. So we blame people. We look for individuals and say "It's your fault the levees failed" "It's your fault for driving that SUV that global warming increased and made storms increase and that caused Katrina, and it hit New Orleans to prove that Bush hates Black people." "It's you, the phantom government agent who mined the levee with dynamite to flood out the black homes." "It's you, the American people who caused all this by your insistence that you work hard and develop this nation and live comfortably in big houses while you use up oil that causes the SE Louisiana wetlands to sink."
It doesn't matter that all this is all bullshit, because it's easy. It delivers the pound of flesh.
So now that the pound of flesh has been taken. Come on people, it's been taken, lets move on. Let's use our opposable thumbs and big brains. We have to rebuild. But again, we find that the devastation is simply not as great as we needed it to be to make rebuilding easier, so we have to use our big brains to make some hard choices and difficult decisions.
Most of New Oreleans should be bulldozed. Most of the homes that people are currently ripping out sheetrock and carpet from should be bulldozed. Every flooded structure in New Orleans, no matter how severe, should be bulldozed. I'll never sell this argument to many people, but I believe it's what needs to be done.
Building a levee to protect the city against a CAT 4 or 5 storm is possible, but then again it's not. Many people who read this will have never experienced a hurricane. Many never will. Tornados however are a much simpler concept to understand and more of us have a common experience with or have seen a tornado in it's full scope on the television. We can easily grasp what a tornado is because we can see it in it's entirety in pictures with points of reference when we watch video of one.
A hurricane, in very simple terms is a tornado, a hundreds of miles across tornado.
Building a structure to withstand a direct hit from a tornado can be done. You wouldn't want to live in it however. It'd be an ugly structure, largely underground (ding ding. . . warning. . . put on your thinking caps), small and cramped and not what one would consider a home.
Have you figured it out yet? Structures that could withstand a tornado (the forces most similar to a CAT 4 or 5 storm) simply won't work in New Orleans, so it's back to the drawing board. Well, not really, we're back to levees. The levee system to survive a CAT 4 or 5 storm would have to be MASSIVE. Not just big, I mean MASSIVE, Great Wall kinds of massive, pyramids massive, panama canal massive. Massive with a tectonic fault running right through the middle. Do you see the problem yet??
So what's the solution. Honestly, there seems to me to be a solution, but you're not going to like it.
Bulldoze New Orleans. That's the solution. Buldoze every structure that experienced flooding, every structure that's been abandoned since the storm, hell, if someone leaves their home for the weekend and you can get away with it, bulldoze that one too. Wipe the slate clean, THEN you can rebuild the way rebuilding needs to be done.
The Ninth Ward should never be a residential area again. I'm sorry, but it's true. We have a major tectonic fault running right through the middle of it. It's indefensible, and to try is only to prolong the inevitable. I know that there will be an immediate kneejerk reaction to this. What about the homes, the lives, what will these people return to. The answer to that is simple, they won't. That's not a racist statement, although I'm sure I'll get email saying it is, but it's not, and I'd say bulldoze Lakeview if there was a fault running through that area of the city (wait a minute, I'm saying to bulldoze Lakeview too. . . maybe that will get the cries of racism off my back).
The Ninth Ward has a purpose in what I believe the New New Orleans should become. The ninth ward should be a shipping offload/onload and storage yard for the most advanced port facility the world has ever known. It's location is ideal for such a use, the land can be acquired at a reasonable fair market value and allow displaced families a real opportunity to rebuild someplace that A) Doesn't have a tectonic fault running through it and B) Isn't likely to be flooded again.
Rebuild the Ninth Ward levees to the levels they were pre-Katrina, level the shattered homes, pave it solid and turn it into a port facility that's the envy of the world, a port facility that can handle imports and exports for the new milennia, and most importantly, it's an area that would not have to be protected by new, larger levees that will be constantly on the move through tectonic subsidance.
Next, take a hard look at the size and shape of the New New Orleans. No matter what, it will be decades before New New Orleans has the population base that New Orleans did. The footprint of New New Orleans that is protected by levees can be adjusted, New Orleans East could be largely abandoned to create a series of chevron shaped open-ended levees to absorb the brunt of a storm coming from the Gulf and energy and resources can be devoted to rebuilding the core of the city and population centers on the north and west sides of the city.
Next, bring in the pumps. Begin pumping sediment from the Mississippi into the interior of the city. Millions of cubic yards will be needed, but it's there, in the river, and it can be relatively easily extracted, pumped and distributed throughout the city. The project would be a massive undertaking and certainly not easy, but filling the city would be far easier in the long run than raising every structure 1 to 3 feet above grade (the current plan) which will effectively do absolutely nothing in the event of a similar catastrophe (remember, this was a CAT 1 or 2 storm, 3 at most, but there are bigger storms out there, and ONE DAY, one will hit the city. Rebuilding to protect from the storm that just hit isn't enough, IF we're going to rebuild, and stay, we must plan and build for the storm that didn't hit, but almost did.
The filling of the bowl that is New Orleans may take years, but done sensibly, a section of the city at a time, with developers standing by at the ready to come in and build on the New New Orleans mound would do so mostly at their own expense, willingly. I also imagine that they'd be more efficient and effective than a government operation to do the same.
The material is there for us to do it. We have the technology. We just lack the will to do what's right because it's painful. It would be painful to tell families that their homes must be bulldozed and the entire level of the city must be raised 8 to 12 feet. It would be painful to watch billions of dollars go into a project that people wouldn't see create immediate gains.
The New New Orleans mound could be a planned city and again the envy of the world. A pace setting port for the rest of the world to look at and envy, a planned city laid out to maximize resources and space. Between the New Oreleans East Chevrons wetlands could form and nature would reclaim the land, further mitigating destructive forces from storms. Population centers on the West Bank and across the lake would supply safe housing for those wishing to work in the city and commute like workers from New Jersey and the East Bay do in Manhattan and San Francisco. A new example for city architecture and design could be built utilizing all the lessons we've learned over the millenia.
New New Orleans residents would finally see a day where rainwater falling into the city would naturally leave, the millions of dollars invested in pumps which can fail would be replaced by the natural force of gravity, which will never fail us no matter how severe the storm. New New Orleans residents would be able to look down upon the Mississippi river rather than up at it. New New Orleans residents would be facing the same set of problems and utilize the same solutions that other Gulf Coast cities on high ground do. The risk from storms would still be there, but the added danger of living in a bowl on top of a swamp with a tectonic fault running through it would be removed.
The character of New New Orleans must change too. New Orleans can no longer afford to be a hovel filled with poverty, it simply can't afford it. New New Orleans should be smaller, leaner, and meaner. It should be expensive to live in the city proper, and living there, just because it's where you live should be a thing of the past.
New New Orleans should be the Manhattan or San Francisco of the South. It should have a small footprint and space should be maximized due to the inherent dangers of living between a river that doesn't want to be there and a Lake that functions as a Hurricane Magnet (luckily we've dodged the bullet repeatedly of a Hurricane blasting all of it's energy into the city and then parking itself in Lake Ponchatrain to gain strength and batter the city to bits). New New Orelans could have the appeal for tourists that it's always had, with added attractions and facilities designed to handle the throngs effectively and maximize the returns to the businesses present and thereby the tax revenue to maintain the structures necessary to protect the city without fighting the constantly losing battle that it has been fighting for centuries.
What's happening in New Orleans now, as I watch it happen, only seems to be another step toward prolonging the inevitable. Lifting houses 1 to 3 feet is not going to help if New Orleans is hit again in the near future, and it certainly won't help if a bigger, stronger storm rolls through. Rebuilding the fragile wooden shells that have been wracked by Katrina will not serve the citizens well when the next storm hits. New, stronger building codes are necessary, and if the city is not going to "fill the bowl", then it MUST raise the houses, and not 1 to 3 feet, but 8 to 12 feet or more if damage by flooding is to be eliminated.
Stilts Ok, fine, build on stilts. They work, but there are other options, mandate that every residence be built on top of a first story (8 to 12 feet high) of cinder block or poured concrete, use the space for parking or storage, just don't be sad if the next storm comes along and junior is using it as his room, the goal is to save as much of the "authorized" living space as possible from the destructive forces of flooding.
DO SOMETHING EFFECTIVE NEW ORLEANS. Everyone in the city knows that 1 to 3 feet solves nothing. Most homes experienced far more water than 3 feet. Most homes were faced with 5 feet or more, some even more than that. 1 to 3 feet may put insurance risk tables into an acceptable range for flood insurance, but another Katrina event or worse and those 1 to 3 feet will be useless.
I'll wrap it up now, it's quite the rant already, and I went all over the chart with it. Alot of this is something I've wanted to say for a long time but I just couldn't bring myself to post something that my friends and family would read that said "Bulldoze New Orleans", but I really can't get behind the current plan by the city of having people build up 1 to 3 feet when every picture I took while I was there showed higher flood levels. I can't support 1 to 3 feet when I see that every home I ever lived in in New Orleans had 5 to 10 feet of flooding. I can't support the notion of rebuilding the Cat 3 levees that failed under a Cat 2 storm. I just can't.
A levee is like a chain, it's only as strong as the weakest link. The old New Orleans levee system incorporated hundreds of miles of levees, the breaches measured in 10's of feet, not miles, of levee. To assume the old system can be rebuilt and maintained to defend against the storm to come is simple unreasonable. Something bigger MUST BE DONE, a grander undertaking must occur if we're to rebuild New Orleans to any shade of her former self. If we decide not to have as big a city, that's GREAT, I'm all for it. Not because it's easier to evacuate, but because it makes the possibility of a LARGE USEFUL undertaking to commence. Not because I want to see a smaller New Orleans, but because logic dictates we NEED to see a smaller, stronger, leaner, meaner, more efficient, more robust NEW NEW ORLEANS.
Thanks for reading this rant if you got through it all, I appreciate your indulgence and welcome any comments, positive or negative, call me a loon, call me a prophet, I don't care, but if any portion of this struck a chord or sparked an idea, I'd love to hear it.
Thanks to Confederate Yankee (on the blogroll) for pointing me to the Discovery News Article, you can find Dokkas article here in abstract form and here in it's entirety, and once again, thanks for lending your ear (actually, your eyes) to me for a few minutes.
--Jason
I also have a hurricane Katrina category with pictures and other posts if you're interested.
-JC
Posted by JasonColeman at April 19, 2006 8:18 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.jasoncoleman.com/MT/mt-tb.cgi/340
Comments
Great post Jason.
I tried to give you a trackback but haloscan was wigging out on me.
Posted by: jwookie at April 21, 2006 11:57 AM
Great read. I've heard alot of the facts about the basic structure of New Orleans and the unstable land it sits on, but your plan to rebuild the city is interesting. The city is in a horrible location, but if people insist on living there, proper measures must be taken.
Posted by: Justin at May 10, 2006 10:49 PM
Your blog is a mixed bag of ignorant rhetoric and decent ideas. Seemingly a standard ideological diatribe blaming liberals for concepts like global warming, and for allowing Katrina victims to move back into neighborhoods.
Global warming is definitely happening, the only question is to what extent is it happening SO FAR.
The primary physics are well understood -- add CO2, the planet gets hotter. And we know that we have increase the CO2 content of our atmosphere, with a lot more on the way. Thus we can pretty clearly guess that whatever the temperature is, it would be less without the excess CO2. And of course, CO2 concentration is not stable, it's increasing faster and faster as we burn more fossil fuels.
Your aside about CO2, if it's right, is interesting and downright philosophically weird. Does that mean the burden is on the Brazillians not to destroy the rainforest, because we already destroyed our forests and are now sucking in some carbon because we're growing them back to some extent? I would say your argument makes the case for paying back the carbon we already put into the environment as we cut those forests, and/or not taking credit for happening to live in a fertile area. Should we be permitted to emit 1/4 of the anthropogenic CO2 because we are in possession of good real estate? Should the Native Americans get lots of carbon emissions and sell them to us instead of casinos?
I don't know how to qualify this, but since we are per-capita the biggest emitters on the planet, I would suggest it's nonsensical. Also, and this is much more complicated book-keeping, as the dominant economy, if you look at demand for goods, we are driving a great deal of consumption elsewhere as well. So the fact that we aren't clear cutting our forests is less of an argument given that we are buying cheap beef from Brazil, grown by burning theirs.
Note that even if we merely reduced our carbon emisions by half, we would still be only reducing the increase in CO2. I don't understand but performing an experiment whose outcome you don't know on your planet's climate without a backup plan is simply idiocy.
I don't even know why you made this point, given that you claim the nonexistence of global warming.
On Katrina, you're right that we should be building higher, and I think if it was made a priority, hydraulic dredges could very rapidly fill the areas near the river. Perhaps efficient ways could be found to dredge massively, build up the land higher, faster. Of course there's a problem that sediment is typically toxic, but New Orleans is not exactly in a position to argue about quality. And low-lying places could be sacrificed if necessary. But your answer is hardly the only answer, and almost certainly not economically the most efficient.
The Dutch have survived for centuries with the same situation, but they a) adequately engineered their dykes b) have segmented areas, so a single failure does NOT mean catastrophe for the whole country and c) continuously make improvements to their infrastructure. Why penalize the people of the 9th ward because their Congress wouldn't appropriately allocate funds to repair the levees according to the army corps quite reasonable requests?
While I think the best technical solution is to fill, it would not be unreasonable to rebuild if one built a grid of access roads at high elevations and segmented the city, and perhaps even dug retention basins to get material from which to build other areas higher, as well as to create a place to drain excess water. I am not familiar with the tectonics of the 9th ward, but your other science has been unsophisticated enough that I am not willing to take your statement at face value.
Your main point, that New Orleans is primed for another disaster, would be even stronger if you understood that while no single storm can be said to be "caused" by global warming, statistically, a 100 year event is now a 20 year event because of higher sea levels, and (probably) increased energy from the increased heat in the system. It is quite likely that New Orleans will be hit again in the next 30 years, and it is ludicrous to go through this again just as people are beginning to get the city together again. Clearly, some significant action should be taken.
Hurricanes are, after all, enormous heat engines, powered by hot surface water. They aren't tornados, caused by the random chance of a sharp gradient between the velocity of two air masses that decays rather quickly. Hurricanes are formed by heat, and they can be killed by cooling (believe it or not, we have propossed a study of just how to do that, reduce the intensity of hurricanes by offshore cooling, truly a massive engineering effort, and in my opinion, a potentially dangerous tampering with global climate)
Our forecast site:
http://www.stevens.edu/nyhops
Your blog also raises other ethical issues: If you're going to rail against rebuilding New Orleans as is, you logically have to stand against letting people build in the big earthquake zones, on the plains under large volcanos, etc. But we have massive populations in all these places in the United States. So when a big event occurs, as it must, do we just say told you so and tell them to go to hell? Why is it ok to tell people not to move back to a hazard zone, but not ok to tell them to get the hell out now before it happens? I don't know what to do about this, but it seems to me that given that the probability of a major earthquake in San Francisco is as high as it is:
62% chance of 6.7 or greater earthquake in San Francisco
http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/research/seismology/wg02/
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i05/05b01301.htm
I looked but can't find hard estimates of the likelihood of storms hitting New Orleans, but I would guess the probability of a Cat 4 hitting is lower than 67% in 30 years. But even if it that high, why should we tell Katrina victims not to rebuild if we're not going to disallow building in San Francisco, or in Seattle, or LA? What makes having had a recent disaster different? The answer is, it doesn't, except in the minds of people, and that is irrational but interesting.
Posted by: Dov Kruger at May 15, 2006 5:49 PM
Well, Dov, I'm so happy to see a Java Developer get work with some climatologists and then pass themselves off as one. Especially when in their first comment here you start by insulting me.
But we'll leave that aside and get to your comments.
Firstly, YES, Global Warming as a "construct" or a "theory" is certainly valid, what's invalid is that Global Warming as the environmental luddites would have everyone believe it is simply unsupported by anything other than junk science.
So let's make a few things perfectly clear. Sea levels rise and fall over time, that's very clear, and it's undisputed (although conveniently ignored by the environmentalists). Land masses also rise and fall, also very clear and also undisputed (although also conveniently ignored by the environmentalists). Further, the Earth as a biologic and geologic system heats up and cools down periodically regardless of human interaction within those systems, this is also clear and undisputed (which isn't merely "conveniently overlooked", but actually DENIED, by environmentalists).
The issue is whether or not human activity is "responsible" for climate change. Humans as a whole are an arrogant speices, perhaps the only arrogant species actually, and as such arrogant beings, we constanly seek to find ourselves at the center of any activity or action we can observe within our supposed sphere of influence. We even go so far as to suggest that we are the center of activity and action which exist well beyond our sphere of influence, because we are arrogant.
Now lets add to that arrogance a very real and evident self-hatred of everything we do, from creating bronze in campfires, to building dams and power plants. Humans are a part of the biologic system that comprises the Earth, and relatively recently we've become a part of the geologic system of the planet. This is natural, it's what we do as a species, we modify the environment to suit our needs, just as termites, ants, beavers and other species do.
To suggest, based on what can only at best be a few decades of actual valid research and data, that humans are altering the global climate is simply ludicrous. I can understand when people like you take some data and put it into an incomplete computer model and extrapolate from that various doomsday scenarios, because that's what you do for a living, you create models based on information handed to you and then you hype the results of your model up for your own gain. (Seriously, you didn't think that I wouldn't check up on you and Fast TRAK before I published a slanderous comment, did you?)
So lets move on.
CO2 - Global CO2 levels have climbed recently, and it's VERY EASY for us to assume that such an increase is only because of human activity, but this is merely arrogance, it's not hard and fast fact. CO2 in the atmosphere comes from a variety of sources, biologic, geologic and techtonic sources, the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere is constantly changing, to suggest that it's simply and merely the result of human activity is arrogance, and I'll further suggest it's political machinations designed to further not only political objectives, but also financial gain.
Yes, it's true that the United States is the largest producer of atmospheric CO2, but what is also true is that the United States absorbs more CO2 than it puts out and it's been doing so for some time. You made a serious mistake when you brought up reforestation and deforestation in the U.S., because you exposed a weakness of Java Developers playing climatologists on the web. Old trees absorb less CO2 than young trees do, so deforestation and reforestation in the context you'd like to present it in is actually a good thing. However, it's not the reforestation of the United States that is driving the absorbsion rates, it's a part of it surely, and that's good, but it's also the economic activity that resulted from industry that is driving absorbsion rates. The dramatic increase in lawns, parks, and the dramatic increases in farm productivity are doing just as much if not more to decrease NET CO2 emissions than reforestation is.
I know that the US being a NET ABSORBER of CO2 tosses a big monkey wrench into your desire to blame the U.S. for the world's ills, but the fact remains that we are a NET ABSORBER, regardless of what it does to your position of having to cry chicken-little so it supports your position as a modeler for climatologists whose funding depends on blaming industry.
I'm curious, do you forcast models take into account the upheaval of the ocean floor where plates collide? Do your models account for volcano formation undersea? Do your models account for erosion deposits into the oceans from riverine systems? Do they take into account techtonic subsidnence when plates submerge? I didn't think so.
Just as the early data collected in the early to mid 1900's was flawed because a majority of the data was collected within heat sinks surrounding the major univerisites and weather stations collecting the data, current data collection is flawed by it's own pre-suppositions. Rather than looking at the data with an objective view, the environmentalist and climatologists who tout global warming as a creation of man fail to account for a majority of the factors that contribute to the real temperature of the Earth. Your sea-based data probably doesn't account for the relative hot spell of our Solar parent? Maybe it does, but if so, I'd be surprised as it's mentioned no where in your site.
As far as Katrina and New Orleans go, you obviously haven't been there or you'd know that New Orleans is in fact "compartmentalized" and it was a few of these compartments that flooded from levee breaches, additional compartments flooded because of the loss of power to the pumps and as they filled up with water, there was no way to get it out. Also telling is your suggestion that a way be found to "drain" the city as the levees are repaired. New Orleans is a bowl Dov, a bowl that sits below sea level, and also below the level of the lake and river that bound her. THERE IS NO WAY TO DRAIN, the city, the water must be pumped out, not drained away.
I appreciate your agreement that the city in toto should be raised, and I appreciate that you agree that it is technically feasible, but your characterizations of draining the city and your view that the city is not compartmentalized show that you know very little about the city and how it's structured.
As to Brazil and the destruction of the rain forest, you're missing a few key points here in your effort to blame the U.S. for what Brazillians are doing. The reason that Brazillians feel the need to deforest, is that they are finding that they are depleting the land faster than the market will support replenishing it. They are doing this because we will buy their products that they put on the market, but if we stop buying, that doesn't mean they'll stop deforesting, they'll simply go to the next buyer in line, who will pay less than we do and who will in turn encourage more of the Rain Forest to be destroyed. You want to blame the U.S. for Brazillian deforestation rates, when you should be congratulating the U.S. for buying Brazillian beef (which we actually buy very little of) at such high prices that deforestation is slowed. If the Brazillians are left selling their beef to Europe or the Russians for less than what the U.S. will pay, the deforestation rate of the rain forest will increase. I'm guessing that you thought that if the U.S. stopped buying beef, that the Brazillians would stop producing a key export. This again shows your arrogance and desire to merely blame the U.S. for a perceived (but not proven) "problem".
As for your ethical claims about earthquake zones. I support building anywhere you can afford to build and if and only if you are willing to take the financial risks and responsibility for doing so in the current conditions. Would I support rebuilding inadequate housing in Earthquake zones on the public dime, HELL NO, and I don't support rebuilding inadequate housing in flood zones one the public dime either. However, if you have te money to go in an build and insure your home where you know it could be destroyed in an instant? Sure, go for it, if that's what you want to do, just don't come whining to me when it falls down because you didn't build it strong enough or when it floods because you didn't raise the living levels above the probable flood levels.
You note that the probability of a CAT 4 storm hitting New Orleans is 67% in 30 years. SO WHAT DOV? You're showing your own ignorance now because the storm that hit New Orleans was a CAT 1, CAT 2 at most storm. The problem New Orleans faces is not a CAT 3 or 4 storm, the problem is that with over 500 miles of levee, you face an "only as strong as the weakest link" scenario again with even a minor storm. Bitch and moan about funding levels or the Corps of Engineers desires all you want, but until you know a little more about the forces arrayed against New Orleans and the actual physical layout and construction of the city, stop trying to assume you have the answers. I lived there for a majority of my life and I don't "know" the answers, I just know what won't work.
I appreciate you coming by to slander me and my opinions though, and welcome you back. However, if you do come back (and I'm encouraging you to) be a bit careful with the slanders and presenting your opinions as the end all be all when you present obviously slanted and false information while shilling for your employer.
I'm very open about my biases, and I'll accept challenges to them, but I'll also check out your biases and challenge them as well.
--Jason
Posted by: Jason Coleman at May 16, 2006 2:42 PM
