In Storm's Ruins, a Rush to Rebuild and Reopen for Business
By JOHN M. BRODER. Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Baton Rouge, La., for this article, Raymond Hernandez and Glen Justice from Washington, and Leslie Wayne and Ron Nixon from New York.
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 9 - Private contractors, guided by two former directors of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other well-connected lobbyists and consultants, are rushing to cash in on the unprecedented sums to be spent on Hurricane Katrina relief and reconstruction.
From global engineering and construction firms like the Fluor Corporation and Halliburton to local trash removal and road-building concerns, the private sector is poised to reap a windfall of business in the largest domestic rebuilding effort ever undertaken.
Normal federal contracting rules are largely suspended in the rush to help people displaced by the storm and reopen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts have already been let and billions more are to flow to the private sector in the weeks and months to come. Congress has already appropriated more than $62 billion for an effort that is projected to cost well over $100 billion.
Some experts warn that the crisis atmosphere and the open federal purse are a bonanza for lobbyists and private companies and are likely to lead to the contract abuses, cronyism and waste that numerous investigations have uncovered in post-war Iraq.
"They are throwing money out, they are shoveling it out the door," said James Albertine, a Washington lobbyist and past president of the American League of Lobbyists. "I'm sure every lobbyist's phone in Washington is ringing off the hook from his clients. Sixty-two billion dollars is a lot of money - and it's only a down payment."
Joe M. Allbaugh, a close friend of President Bush, the president's 2000 campaign manager and the FEMA director from 2001 to 2003, and James Lee Witt, an Arkansan close to former President Bill Clinton and a former FEMA director, are now high-priced consultants, and they have been offering their services to companies seeking or holding federal contracts in the post-hurricane gold rush.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he was helping private companies, including his clients, cut through federal red tape to speed provision of services and supplies to the storm-wracked region. Two of his major clients, Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, and The Shaw Group, already are at work on disaster response efforts.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he had played no role in helping Shaw or Kellogg get the work, insisting that help with federal contracts is not a service he offers to clients.
"A lot of people want to connect the dots, but the dots don't exist," he said in a telephone interview from Texas. "I don't do federal contracts, end of story."
Heavens, certainly a friend of Dear Leader wouldn't lie.
However, one of the first things Shaw did after the storm was to invite Mr. Allbaugh to Louisiana, where he helped the company assemble its disaster team, giving advice on how to match the company's efforts to those of the government agencies it serves. He later helped other companies provide assistance.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he was not paid for these efforts and that he did not sign up any new clients in Louisiana. He did acknowledge that he suggested to UltraStrip Systems Inc., a client that markets water filtration products through a subsidiary, that it send representatives to Louisiana.
"Given the situation in the hospitals and nursing homes, I called them up," he said. "I said, 'You've got to get your unit down there, I'm sure they can put it to use.' "
Clients of Mr. Witt, who is advising Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana on managing the crisis, are also in position to profit. Among the clients are Nextel Communications, Whelen Engineering, a manufacturer of warning systems, and the Harris Corporation, a telecommunications equipment company.
Mr. Witt said in a brief interview here on Thursday that it is critical to move quickly after a disaster to restore basic services and that rather than speed such efforts, government often gets in the way.
"Time is of the essence here and we have to make sure it's fast and smooth and works well," he said at the Louisiana emergency operations center here. He said that FEMA had been bureaucratically and financially hobbled since it was absorbed by the new Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Witt's company, James Lee Witt Associates, also employs Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander and Democratic presidential candidate, and Rodney Slater, a secretary of transportation in the Clinton administration. The firm's Web site says it provides "advice, counsel and assistance with strategic introductions primarily in the area of homeland security."
Mr. Witt did not respond to a request to comment specifically on the role of his clients in reconstruction.
One of the most immediate tasks after Hurricane Katrina hit was repair of the breaches in the New Orleans levees. Three companies - the Shaw Group, Kellogg Brown & Root and Boh Brothers Construction of New Orleans - have been awarded no-bid contracts by the Army Corps of Engineers to perform the restoration.
"After a disaster, we have certain authorities to execute contracts faster than we ordinarily would," Gene Pawlik, a Corps of Engineers spokesman in Baton Rouge, said on Friday. "There is a pot of money that Congress gives us that lets us respond quickly to an emergency."
The Shaw Group, based in Baton Rouge, is a $3 billion-a-year construction and engineering firm. It announced this week that it had received two contracts of up to $100 million each, one from FEMA, the other from the Corps of Engineers, to work on levees, pump water out of New Orleans and provide assistance with housing.
Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root's parent company, has a $500 million, five-year contract with the Navy to provide emergency repairs at military installations damaged in the hurricane. Under terms of the contract, Halliburton draws down on the money as it performs services for the military.
Halliburton is doing repair work at three Mississippi naval facilities, as well as at the Stennis Space Center. The company will also assess pump and infrastructure damage in New Orleans and construct a facility to support recovery efforts, it said.
To provide immediate housing in the region, FEMA says it suspended normal bidding rules in awarding contracts to the Shaw group and CH2MHill, based in Denver. Fluor, of Aliso Viejo, Calif.; Bechtel National Inc., of San Francisco; and Dewberry Technologies, of Fairfax, Va.; are doing similar work under longstanding FEMA contracts that allow the agency to turn to them during disasters.
John Corsi, a spokesman for CH2MHill, said that the contract could be the first of several and that it was awarded on a no-bid basis "because of unusual and compelling situation."
The sheer volume of the contracts and the speed in which they are being issued troubles some. The government is drawing down on Hurricane Katrina relief money at a rate of more than $500 million a day.
Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit government spending watchdog group, said Katrina, like Iraq before it, would bring the greedy and the self-interested out of the woodwork.
"This is very painful," Ms. Brian said. "You are likely to see the equivalent of war profiteering - disaster profiteering."
Ya think?
Fluor already has identified some sites, including in Slidell, La., where the first 400 new homes will be installed, each of which can handle about five people, Mr. Tashjan said.
Bechtel, with $17.4 billion in annual revenues globally, is working under an informal agreement with no set payment terms, scope of work or designated total value. The company's zone is Mississippi, where it has started to install the first homes.
The company has 100 employees assigned to the task and it does not know how many will ultimately be working on it, said Howard Menaker, a Bechtel spokesman. It is also looking for subcontractors that can deliver portable water treatment, sewage and power plants, as well as mess halls, showers, even helicopters to move supplies.
Bechtel has a long pedigree in emergency response work, including helping to remove the remains of the twin towers in New York, building refugee camps in Kosovo in 1999 and doing safety assessment after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco. It is performing reconstruction work in Iraq under a large federal contract.
"Political contributions are not a factor," Mr. Menaker said. "It is the fact that we could get the job done."
The job being what it is, of course.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Friday, September 09, 2005
The Only Timeline that Mattered
Quiddity points out this:
Sat 27 Aug
White House "The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing. The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures"
Mon 29 Aug
CNN 7 a.m.: Katrina makes landfall on the Louisiana coast
Got that?
The Feds told everyone they were taking over two days before landfall.
One must assume, in fact, either that things went according to plan, or that Chertoff and Brown are incompetent.
Sat 27 Aug
White House "The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing. The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures"
Mon 29 Aug
CNN 7 a.m.: Katrina makes landfall on the Louisiana coast
Got that?
The Feds told everyone they were taking over two days before landfall.
One must assume, in fact, either that things went according to plan, or that Chertoff and Brown are incompetent.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Your Tax Dollars at Work
Gravy Train is rolling now.
FEMA Contracts to Provide Housing Relief for Displaced Hurricane Victims
The Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency has contracted with five of the nation’s major corporations to speed emergency housing relief to Gulf Coast families displaced by Hurricane Katrina...
The corporations contracted for support include:
* The Shaw Group Inc., of Baton Rouge, La. will stay close to home and will provide design, construction, transportation, utilities and facilities management. The company is also providing support to hospitals and other public buildings.
* Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo, Calif. heads up operations for the Housing Area Command. An engineering and construction firm, it is now in Louisiana beginning construction on temporary housing units that will provide electricity, potable water and sanitary sewage facilities.
* Bechtel National Inc. of San Francisco, an engineering and construction firm that is now on the scene in Gulf states to provide emergency housing relief.
* CH2M Hill of Denver specializes in sewerage design, hazardous-waste cleanup and transportation projects such as highways and bridges. It will be working on providing housing in Alabama.
* Dewberry Technologies, Fairfax, Va., an advanced technologies company, will be providing planning and reporting tools...
An interesting group. Bechtel certainly has a long interesting history with the Bush administration. Fluor Corp. has also helped rebuild Iraq. Dewberry has a long history of Pentagon and FEMA contracting being rather well connected to both sides of the aisle in Congress.
It's a small world, after all.
FEMA Contracts to Provide Housing Relief for Displaced Hurricane Victims
The Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency has contracted with five of the nation’s major corporations to speed emergency housing relief to Gulf Coast families displaced by Hurricane Katrina...
The corporations contracted for support include:
* The Shaw Group Inc., of Baton Rouge, La. will stay close to home and will provide design, construction, transportation, utilities and facilities management. The company is also providing support to hospitals and other public buildings.
* Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo, Calif. heads up operations for the Housing Area Command. An engineering and construction firm, it is now in Louisiana beginning construction on temporary housing units that will provide electricity, potable water and sanitary sewage facilities.
* Bechtel National Inc. of San Francisco, an engineering and construction firm that is now on the scene in Gulf states to provide emergency housing relief.
* CH2M Hill of Denver specializes in sewerage design, hazardous-waste cleanup and transportation projects such as highways and bridges. It will be working on providing housing in Alabama.
* Dewberry Technologies, Fairfax, Va., an advanced technologies company, will be providing planning and reporting tools...
An interesting group. Bechtel certainly has a long interesting history with the Bush administration. Fluor Corp. has also helped rebuild Iraq. Dewberry has a long history of Pentagon and FEMA contracting being rather well connected to both sides of the aisle in Congress.
It's a small world, after all.
First Things First
Wrong Priorities?
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Updated: 6:09 p.m. ET Sept. 7, 2005
In the weeks before Hurricane Katrina, state emergency-planning directors repeatedly warned that the Bush administration’s post-September 11 focus on terrorism was seriously undercutting the federal government’s ability to respond to catastrophic hurricanes and other natural disasters.
In a tough letter to Congress last July and in a private meeting with top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on Aug. 21, a group of state emergency-planning directors complained that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s traditional role of preparing for natural disasters “has been forgotten” under a DHS almost entirely devoted to the terror threat.
Not only did the Bush administration slash funding for natural-disaster planning this year, the state directors charged, Homeland Security—acting under a directive signed by the president—has geared almost all planning exercises with the states to responding to hypothetical terror attacks such as radioactive “dirty bombs” or anthrax attacks rather than far more common, and costly, disasters such as hurricanes, tornados and floods.
Internal Homeland Security documents obtained by NEWSWEEK lend support to the state directors’ complaints. Out of 15 “all hazards” disaster-planning scenarios approved by DHS and the White House Homeland Security Council last May, only three involved natural disasters, one document shows.
“I’ve been beating this drum for the past two years,” Bruce Baughman, director of the Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency and a former top FEMA official, told NEWSWEEK. “What I’ve seen happening is a total de-emphasis on natural disaster planning.”
The warnings by Baughman, the new president of the National Emergency Management Association, and other state emergency-planning directors are likely to become a focus of investigations now being planned by Congress into the administration’s botched response to the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans.
They also have fueled a push in Congress to undo at least part of the major federal government overhaul that created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan said this week he was introducing legislation to take FEMA out of DHS and restore it as an independent agency whose director would have direct access to the president.
Once it was thrown into DHS, under the massive governmentwide reorganization proposed by President Bush in 2002, FEMA got swallowed up by a “monster bureaucracy” and lost clout, Dingell said. Moreover, DHS’s new secretary, Michael Chertoff, was chosen primarily because of his credentials as a terrorist fighter—not his ability to respond to natural disasters, Dingell added. A federal appellate-court judge prior to being chosen by President Bush, Chertoff had been assistant chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time of the September 11 attacks. “All Chertoff wants to do is chase terrorists and repeal parts of the Constitution,” Dingell told NEWSWEEK.
For his part, Baughman noted that FEMA’s two directors under Bush—Joe Allbaugh, who had previously served as the president’s 2000 campaign manager, and current director Michael Brown, a childhood friend of Allbaugh who had previously served as a commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association—also have had no experience in planning for and responding to natural disasters.
“To me, this is like putting somebody in charge of the Justice Department that has no legal background or putting somebody in charge of the FBI with no law-enforcement background,” said Baughman, who had previously served as director of FEMA’s Office of Natural Preparedness until he resigned two years ago.
Asked about the criticism from the state directors, Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke responded that in the aftermath of Katrina "a lot of people are wanting to play the blame game." But this was not the time to point fingers and assess blame while response and recovery operations in the disaster area are still continuing, he said. Knocke also said that concerns raised by state emergency officials about the lack of planning for natural disasters have already been incorporated in Homeland Security plans and procedures.
The concerns about the direction of FEMA have been building for some time, according to Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Planning Association, a group that represents state emergency planners. Some of it revolves around funding. While grants to states and local governments for counterterrorism emergency planning have soared to more than $1.1 billion a year, funding under FEMA’s Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) program—which is specifically for natural disasters—was cut back $10 million by the White House this year to only $170 million, she noted.
Baughman said the disparities for Alabama are especially sharp. In his state, between $30 million to $40 million in federal funds are available to plan and train for hypothetical terror attacks while only $1.8 million is available for natural disasters. Although Alabama hasn’t suffered any terror attacks in recent years, it has had 24 natural-disaster declarations over the past decade, including three in the last year or so, Baughman said.
The internal FEMA documents underscore the point even further. Even before Homeland Security officials published their set of theoretical disaster scenarios last spring—which involved planning for such calamities as an “aerosol anthrax” attack and the unleashing of a “10-Kiloton Improved Nuclear Device”—an earlier February 2004 “National All-Hazards Exercise Schedule” prepared by Homeland Security showed the same imbalance. The schedule, marked “for Official Use Only,” included planning for more than 100 disaster scenarios, almost all of them terror incidents. In fact, only seven involved natural disasters—two earthquakes and four hurricanes, although two of the hurricanes were described as incidents in which relief and recovery efforts would be practiced “in context of a credible WMD threat during a natural disaster.”
The dissatisfaction among state planning directors was raised even more this summer when Chertoff proposed a reorganization of DHS that would take the Office of Preparedness out of FEMA and set it up as a special Directorate for Preparedness within the department. In a July 27 letter to Congress, the state directors noted that there had already been 25 major disaster declarations in 2005 alone, including ones for flooding, severe storms, hurricanes, tropical cyclones and landslides. Chertoff’s reorganization plan “totally neglects natural hazards preparedness and, if implemented, will have an extremely negative impact on the people of this nation,” stated the letter, signed by David Lieberbach, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and Baughman’s predecessor as president of the state directors’ group.
The complaints finally led to a meeting in Washington on Aug. 21—just days before Katrina first started approaching the Gulf Coast—between a group of four state emergency planners, led by Baughman, and Michael Jackson, deputy secretary of Homeland Security, and FEMA Director Michael Brown. Baughman said he laid out the group’s concerns in some detail. While Jackson and Brown assured them that they understood their concerns and would address them, Baughman said he was not assuaged. “They were hell bent on going forward with [the reorganization],” he said. “They met with us as a courtesy.”
Doubtless Dons Brownie and Jackson expected something rather different from Baughman.
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Updated: 6:09 p.m. ET Sept. 7, 2005
In the weeks before Hurricane Katrina, state emergency-planning directors repeatedly warned that the Bush administration’s post-September 11 focus on terrorism was seriously undercutting the federal government’s ability to respond to catastrophic hurricanes and other natural disasters.
In a tough letter to Congress last July and in a private meeting with top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on Aug. 21, a group of state emergency-planning directors complained that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s traditional role of preparing for natural disasters “has been forgotten” under a DHS almost entirely devoted to the terror threat.
Not only did the Bush administration slash funding for natural-disaster planning this year, the state directors charged, Homeland Security—acting under a directive signed by the president—has geared almost all planning exercises with the states to responding to hypothetical terror attacks such as radioactive “dirty bombs” or anthrax attacks rather than far more common, and costly, disasters such as hurricanes, tornados and floods.
Internal Homeland Security documents obtained by NEWSWEEK lend support to the state directors’ complaints. Out of 15 “all hazards” disaster-planning scenarios approved by DHS and the White House Homeland Security Council last May, only three involved natural disasters, one document shows.
“I’ve been beating this drum for the past two years,” Bruce Baughman, director of the Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency and a former top FEMA official, told NEWSWEEK. “What I’ve seen happening is a total de-emphasis on natural disaster planning.”
The warnings by Baughman, the new president of the National Emergency Management Association, and other state emergency-planning directors are likely to become a focus of investigations now being planned by Congress into the administration’s botched response to the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans.
They also have fueled a push in Congress to undo at least part of the major federal government overhaul that created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan said this week he was introducing legislation to take FEMA out of DHS and restore it as an independent agency whose director would have direct access to the president.
Once it was thrown into DHS, under the massive governmentwide reorganization proposed by President Bush in 2002, FEMA got swallowed up by a “monster bureaucracy” and lost clout, Dingell said. Moreover, DHS’s new secretary, Michael Chertoff, was chosen primarily because of his credentials as a terrorist fighter—not his ability to respond to natural disasters, Dingell added. A federal appellate-court judge prior to being chosen by President Bush, Chertoff had been assistant chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time of the September 11 attacks. “All Chertoff wants to do is chase terrorists and repeal parts of the Constitution,” Dingell told NEWSWEEK.
For his part, Baughman noted that FEMA’s two directors under Bush—Joe Allbaugh, who had previously served as the president’s 2000 campaign manager, and current director Michael Brown, a childhood friend of Allbaugh who had previously served as a commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association—also have had no experience in planning for and responding to natural disasters.
“To me, this is like putting somebody in charge of the Justice Department that has no legal background or putting somebody in charge of the FBI with no law-enforcement background,” said Baughman, who had previously served as director of FEMA’s Office of Natural Preparedness until he resigned two years ago.
Asked about the criticism from the state directors, Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke responded that in the aftermath of Katrina "a lot of people are wanting to play the blame game." But this was not the time to point fingers and assess blame while response and recovery operations in the disaster area are still continuing, he said. Knocke also said that concerns raised by state emergency officials about the lack of planning for natural disasters have already been incorporated in Homeland Security plans and procedures.
The concerns about the direction of FEMA have been building for some time, according to Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Planning Association, a group that represents state emergency planners. Some of it revolves around funding. While grants to states and local governments for counterterrorism emergency planning have soared to more than $1.1 billion a year, funding under FEMA’s Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) program—which is specifically for natural disasters—was cut back $10 million by the White House this year to only $170 million, she noted.
Baughman said the disparities for Alabama are especially sharp. In his state, between $30 million to $40 million in federal funds are available to plan and train for hypothetical terror attacks while only $1.8 million is available for natural disasters. Although Alabama hasn’t suffered any terror attacks in recent years, it has had 24 natural-disaster declarations over the past decade, including three in the last year or so, Baughman said.
The internal FEMA documents underscore the point even further. Even before Homeland Security officials published their set of theoretical disaster scenarios last spring—which involved planning for such calamities as an “aerosol anthrax” attack and the unleashing of a “10-Kiloton Improved Nuclear Device”—an earlier February 2004 “National All-Hazards Exercise Schedule” prepared by Homeland Security showed the same imbalance. The schedule, marked “for Official Use Only,” included planning for more than 100 disaster scenarios, almost all of them terror incidents. In fact, only seven involved natural disasters—two earthquakes and four hurricanes, although two of the hurricanes were described as incidents in which relief and recovery efforts would be practiced “in context of a credible WMD threat during a natural disaster.”
The dissatisfaction among state planning directors was raised even more this summer when Chertoff proposed a reorganization of DHS that would take the Office of Preparedness out of FEMA and set it up as a special Directorate for Preparedness within the department. In a July 27 letter to Congress, the state directors noted that there had already been 25 major disaster declarations in 2005 alone, including ones for flooding, severe storms, hurricanes, tropical cyclones and landslides. Chertoff’s reorganization plan “totally neglects natural hazards preparedness and, if implemented, will have an extremely negative impact on the people of this nation,” stated the letter, signed by David Lieberbach, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and Baughman’s predecessor as president of the state directors’ group.
The complaints finally led to a meeting in Washington on Aug. 21—just days before Katrina first started approaching the Gulf Coast—between a group of four state emergency planners, led by Baughman, and Michael Jackson, deputy secretary of Homeland Security, and FEMA Director Michael Brown. Baughman said he laid out the group’s concerns in some detail. While Jackson and Brown assured them that they understood their concerns and would address them, Baughman said he was not assuaged. “They were hell bent on going forward with [the reorganization],” he said. “They met with us as a courtesy.”
Doubtless Dons Brownie and Jackson expected something rather different from Baughman.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Alternative Explanation for Some Very Funny Business
With all the oddball things FEMA and the United States have done about the disaster in New Orleans over the last week, perhaps there is a simpler explanation than the desire to eliminate a blue city in a red state.
Perhaps some of the private contractors associated with FEMA and Bu$hCo have noticed there are tens of millions of dollars laying around the drowned city.
Perhaps they regard this cash as perks of their business, and are willing to do anything to get it, and want no witnesses.
Perhaps some of the private contractors associated with FEMA and Bu$hCo have noticed there are tens of millions of dollars laying around the drowned city.
Perhaps they regard this cash as perks of their business, and are willing to do anything to get it, and want no witnesses.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Conflict of Interest
Billmon noticed a few days back the difference between the FEMA response to Florida's hurricanes and the situation in New Orleans.
As I'm sure you can imagine, this display of the good old American can-do spirit didn't go unnoticed by the people of Florida -- nor did the millions of dollars in disaster relief and damage insurance checks that were cut by various federal agencies with record speed. FEMA officials must have been deeply gratified to see the effect their heroic efforts had in the place where they were most desperately needed -- Bush's poll numbers...
So you can see that when the chips are down, and the need is absolutely dire, this administration can still deliver the kind of coordinated emergency response that once made the U.S. government the envy of the world -- just as it cooly and capably protected the Iraqi Oil Ministry from the chaos and looting that trashed every other government office in post-invasion Baghdad. As is usually the case in public service, it's just a matter of having the right incentives.
The comparison between the TLC showered on Florida last year and Bush's initial "What, me worry?" response to this year's disaster no doubt will go unnoticed by the amnesia patients in the corporate media. And since I'm lucky enough to live in a swing state that is also coveted by GOP political strategists, I probably don't have to worry about it either -- that is, as long as any future disasters around my neck of the woods happen in one of those years divisible by two.
But for the citizens of staunch, deep red Mississippi and slightly less staunch but still red Louisiana, the lessons are painfully obvious. If you're going to insist on living in a hurricane alley, then you need to take personal responsibility for your own actions, stop whining about government incompetence, and embrace the free market solution to your problems -- by moving to Florida.
Quiddity posted a timeline of the response- and included yesterday's events where FEMA wouldn't let the Red Cross and other relief workers into the city.
As more people die.
As Halliburton mobilizes and the Republipork machine licks its chops.
As private citizens take initiative to act despite government orders to back off.
I prefer using Occam's razor, but when you compare the response of FEMA in New Orleans to their response last year in Florida, it only cuts one way.
New Orleans was a vibrant blue city in a red state. It had, as Louisiana stll has, many important Democrat politicians. New Orleans was allowed to die.
It is a waste of time to search for the blameworthy.
Simply follow the money.
We are witnessing a pogrom by neglect, but it's too unthinkable for most people to wrap their minds around.
As I'm sure you can imagine, this display of the good old American can-do spirit didn't go unnoticed by the people of Florida -- nor did the millions of dollars in disaster relief and damage insurance checks that were cut by various federal agencies with record speed. FEMA officials must have been deeply gratified to see the effect their heroic efforts had in the place where they were most desperately needed -- Bush's poll numbers...
So you can see that when the chips are down, and the need is absolutely dire, this administration can still deliver the kind of coordinated emergency response that once made the U.S. government the envy of the world -- just as it cooly and capably protected the Iraqi Oil Ministry from the chaos and looting that trashed every other government office in post-invasion Baghdad. As is usually the case in public service, it's just a matter of having the right incentives.
The comparison between the TLC showered on Florida last year and Bush's initial "What, me worry?" response to this year's disaster no doubt will go unnoticed by the amnesia patients in the corporate media. And since I'm lucky enough to live in a swing state that is also coveted by GOP political strategists, I probably don't have to worry about it either -- that is, as long as any future disasters around my neck of the woods happen in one of those years divisible by two.
But for the citizens of staunch, deep red Mississippi and slightly less staunch but still red Louisiana, the lessons are painfully obvious. If you're going to insist on living in a hurricane alley, then you need to take personal responsibility for your own actions, stop whining about government incompetence, and embrace the free market solution to your problems -- by moving to Florida.
Quiddity posted a timeline of the response- and included yesterday's events where FEMA wouldn't let the Red Cross and other relief workers into the city.
As more people die.
As Halliburton mobilizes and the Republipork machine licks its chops.
As private citizens take initiative to act despite government orders to back off.
I prefer using Occam's razor, but when you compare the response of FEMA in New Orleans to their response last year in Florida, it only cuts one way.
New Orleans was a vibrant blue city in a red state. It had, as Louisiana stll has, many important Democrat politicians. New Orleans was allowed to die.
It is a waste of time to search for the blameworthy.
Simply follow the money.
We are witnessing a pogrom by neglect, but it's too unthinkable for most people to wrap their minds around.
Ownership Society
Rescue 'ticket'
I am stunned by an interview I conducted with New Orleans Detective Lawrence Dupree. He told me they were trying to rescue people with a helicopter and the people were so poor they were afraid it would cost too much to get a ride and they had no money for a "ticket." Dupree was shaken telling us the story. He just couldn't believe these people were afraid they'd be charged for a rescue.
Depending on who the rescuers were, they might be.
That alone might make some want to shoot at helicopters.
Thanks to Atrios for the link.
I am stunned by an interview I conducted with New Orleans Detective Lawrence Dupree. He told me they were trying to rescue people with a helicopter and the people were so poor they were afraid it would cost too much to get a ride and they had no money for a "ticket." Dupree was shaken telling us the story. He just couldn't believe these people were afraid they'd be charged for a rescue.
Depending on who the rescuers were, they might be.
That alone might make some want to shoot at helicopters.
Thanks to Atrios for the link.
Monday, September 05, 2005
No Surprise
Facing extensive damage by Hurricane Katrina to naval installations in Mississippi, the Navy turned immediately to the Halliburton Company's KBR subsidiary for tasks like restoring electricity, repairing roofs and clearing debris at bases that are urgently needed for response efforts.
No wonder help is so long in arriving.
New Orleans and especially the French Quarter- which didn't get submerged entirely- is about to be eminent domained out of existence.
Doubtless Bu$hCo plans to open up a Dixieland version of Las Vegas. They'll certainly have a Halliburton-run port for all the oil that comes in, and all the Midwestern food that goes out of the Newer New Orleans, now that Big Time Dick understands its importance. There's just one itty bitty problem.
No matter how many times they re-build the flood walls, that patch of land will be part of the continental shelf in a generation or so.
Why?
Because the fools will burn every gram of fossil fuel before they think about alternative fuels.
They might as well use this architecture when they do the New Improved Superdome.
What did the islander who cut the last tree to move the last stone think?
Ask Dear Leader.
There's a similar depth of insight to his genius.
No wonder help is so long in arriving.
New Orleans and especially the French Quarter- which didn't get submerged entirely- is about to be eminent domained out of existence.
Doubtless Bu$hCo plans to open up a Dixieland version of Las Vegas. They'll certainly have a Halliburton-run port for all the oil that comes in, and all the Midwestern food that goes out of the Newer New Orleans, now that Big Time Dick understands its importance. There's just one itty bitty problem.
No matter how many times they re-build the flood walls, that patch of land will be part of the continental shelf in a generation or so.
Why?
Because the fools will burn every gram of fossil fuel before they think about alternative fuels.
They might as well use this architecture when they do the New Improved Superdome.
What did the islander who cut the last tree to move the last stone think?
Ask Dear Leader.
There's a similar depth of insight to his genius.
All the Information Fit to Search
Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.
"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."
The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.
As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.
"A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest," John Battelle wrote in his widely read "Searchblog." "Thanks to Google Purge, you'll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music."
"Book burning is just the beginning," said Google co-founder Larry Page. "This fall, we'll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers."
Page added: "And thanks to Google Purge, anything our global microphone network can't pick up will be silenced by noise-cancellation machines in low-Earth orbit."
As a part of Phase One operations, Google executives will permanently erase the hard drive of any computer that is not already indexed by the Google Desktop Search.
"We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive," Schmidt said. "If you haven't given it a try, now's the time. In one week, the deleting begins."
Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.
The company's new directive may explain its recent acquisition of Celera Genomics, the company that mapped the human genome, and its buildup of a vast army of laser-equipped robots.
"Google finally has what it needs to catalog the DNA of every organism on Earth," said analyst Imran Kahn of J.P. Morgan Chase. "Of course, some people might not want their DNA indexed. Hence, the robot army. It's crazy, it's brilliant—typical Google."
Google's robot army is rumored to include some 4 million cybernetic search-and-destroy units, each capable of capturing and scanning up to 100 humans per day. Said co-founder Sergey Brin: "The scanning will be relatively painless. Hey, it's Google. It'll be fun to be scanned by a Googlebot. But in the event people resist, the robots are programmed to liquify the brain."
Markets responded favorably to the announcement of Google Purge, with traders bidding up Google's share price by $1.24, to $285.92, in late trading after the announcement. But some critics of the company have found cause for complaint.
"This announcement is a red flag," said Daniel Brandt, founder of Google-Watch.org. "I certainly don't want to accuse of them having bad intentions. But this campaign of destruction and genocide raises some potential privacy concerns."
Brandt also expressed reservations about the company's new motto. Until yesterday's news conference, the company's unofficial slogan had been "Don't be evil." The slogan has now been expanded to "Don't be evil, unless it's necessary for the greater good."
Co-founders Page and Brin dismiss their critics.
"A lot of companies are so worried about short-term reactions that they ignore the long view," Page said. "Not us. Our team is focused on something more than just making money. At Google, we're using technology to make dreams come true."
"Soon," Brin added, "we'll make dreams clickable, or destroy them forever."
Wait until you see the Microsoft version for Windows.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.
"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."
The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.
As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.
"A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest," John Battelle wrote in his widely read "Searchblog." "Thanks to Google Purge, you'll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music."
"Book burning is just the beginning," said Google co-founder Larry Page. "This fall, we'll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers."
Page added: "And thanks to Google Purge, anything our global microphone network can't pick up will be silenced by noise-cancellation machines in low-Earth orbit."
As a part of Phase One operations, Google executives will permanently erase the hard drive of any computer that is not already indexed by the Google Desktop Search.
"We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive," Schmidt said. "If you haven't given it a try, now's the time. In one week, the deleting begins."
Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.
The company's new directive may explain its recent acquisition of Celera Genomics, the company that mapped the human genome, and its buildup of a vast army of laser-equipped robots.
"Google finally has what it needs to catalog the DNA of every organism on Earth," said analyst Imran Kahn of J.P. Morgan Chase. "Of course, some people might not want their DNA indexed. Hence, the robot army. It's crazy, it's brilliant—typical Google."
Google's robot army is rumored to include some 4 million cybernetic search-and-destroy units, each capable of capturing and scanning up to 100 humans per day. Said co-founder Sergey Brin: "The scanning will be relatively painless. Hey, it's Google. It'll be fun to be scanned by a Googlebot. But in the event people resist, the robots are programmed to liquify the brain."
Markets responded favorably to the announcement of Google Purge, with traders bidding up Google's share price by $1.24, to $285.92, in late trading after the announcement. But some critics of the company have found cause for complaint.
"This announcement is a red flag," said Daniel Brandt, founder of Google-Watch.org. "I certainly don't want to accuse of them having bad intentions. But this campaign of destruction and genocide raises some potential privacy concerns."
Brandt also expressed reservations about the company's new motto. Until yesterday's news conference, the company's unofficial slogan had been "Don't be evil." The slogan has now been expanded to "Don't be evil, unless it's necessary for the greater good."
Co-founders Page and Brin dismiss their critics.
"A lot of companies are so worried about short-term reactions that they ignore the long view," Page said. "Not us. Our team is focused on something more than just making money. At Google, we're using technology to make dreams come true."
"Soon," Brin added, "we'll make dreams clickable, or destroy them forever."
Wait until you see the Microsoft version for Windows.
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Ignoring the Perfect Storm
Krugman:
Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.
So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.
First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all.
There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.
Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"
Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.
Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain."
In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.
Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.
Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared."
I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.
At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
Dowd:
Stuff happens.
And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.
Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
Who are we if we can't take care of our own?
And last but certainly not least, Rich, truncated here because he justs keeps on frying them:
As the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja...
Aside from the storm brewing among the voters, there is also trouble brewing for the more lucrative financial engines of the Ownership Society:
OF all the sectors of the financial universe, the hedge fund world is probably the most secretive and almost certainly the most alluring. Open only to institutions and the wealthy, hedge funds offer sophisticated models of risk, access to the best financial minds and the chance for outsized returns. According to Van Hedge Advisors, hedge fund assets have topped a trillion dollars...
Andrew W. Lo, a finance professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been studying hedge fund failures and risks, and he says that another hedge fund industry shakeout is likely in the near future. Mr. Lo runs a company, AlphaSimplex, that manages a $400 million hedge fund - so he is not looking for a reason to say hedge funds are in trouble. But that is exactly what he's saying, backing it up with powerful data and a couple of unexpected theories...
Traditionally, economists have thought that big up-and-down fluctuations in returns indicated risky investments, so many hedge fund investors have hoped to see a pattern of smooth and even returns. But Mr. Lo quickly saw that lots of hedge funds were posting returns that were just too smooth to be realistic. Digging deeper, he found that funds with hard-to-appraise, illiquid investments - like real estate or esoteric interest rate swaps - showed returns that were particularly even. In those cases, he concluded, managers had no way to measure their fluctuations, and simply assumed that their value was going up steadily. The problem, unfortunately, is that those are exactly the kinds of investments that can be subject to big losses in a crisis. In 1998, investors retreated en masse from such investments.
Now, in a paper to be published by the University of Chicago, Mr. Lo, working with his graduate students, has come to a disturbing conclusion: that smooth returns, far from proving that hedge funds are safe, may be a warning sign for the industry. (The paper is at http://web.mit.edu/alo/www/Papers/systemic2.pdf.)
...By Mr. Lo's measures, hedge fund investments are less liquid now than they have been in 20 years. His work shows that the same pattern of investing preceded the 1998 global hedge fund meltdown and the 1987 stock market crash...
So even some of the University of Chicago boys are saying the center will not hold?
Looks like there's a Storm coming.
Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.
So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.
First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all.
There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.
Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"
Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.
Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain."
In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.
Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.
Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared."
I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.
At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
Dowd:
Stuff happens.
And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.
Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
Who are we if we can't take care of our own?
And last but certainly not least, Rich, truncated here because he justs keeps on frying them:
As the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja...
Aside from the storm brewing among the voters, there is also trouble brewing for the more lucrative financial engines of the Ownership Society:
OF all the sectors of the financial universe, the hedge fund world is probably the most secretive and almost certainly the most alluring. Open only to institutions and the wealthy, hedge funds offer sophisticated models of risk, access to the best financial minds and the chance for outsized returns. According to Van Hedge Advisors, hedge fund assets have topped a trillion dollars...
Andrew W. Lo, a finance professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been studying hedge fund failures and risks, and he says that another hedge fund industry shakeout is likely in the near future. Mr. Lo runs a company, AlphaSimplex, that manages a $400 million hedge fund - so he is not looking for a reason to say hedge funds are in trouble. But that is exactly what he's saying, backing it up with powerful data and a couple of unexpected theories...
Traditionally, economists have thought that big up-and-down fluctuations in returns indicated risky investments, so many hedge fund investors have hoped to see a pattern of smooth and even returns. But Mr. Lo quickly saw that lots of hedge funds were posting returns that were just too smooth to be realistic. Digging deeper, he found that funds with hard-to-appraise, illiquid investments - like real estate or esoteric interest rate swaps - showed returns that were particularly even. In those cases, he concluded, managers had no way to measure their fluctuations, and simply assumed that their value was going up steadily. The problem, unfortunately, is that those are exactly the kinds of investments that can be subject to big losses in a crisis. In 1998, investors retreated en masse from such investments.
Now, in a paper to be published by the University of Chicago, Mr. Lo, working with his graduate students, has come to a disturbing conclusion: that smooth returns, far from proving that hedge funds are safe, may be a warning sign for the industry. (The paper is at http://web.mit.edu/alo/www/Papers/systemic2.pdf.)
...By Mr. Lo's measures, hedge fund investments are less liquid now than they have been in 20 years. His work shows that the same pattern of investing preceded the 1998 global hedge fund meltdown and the 1987 stock market crash...
So even some of the University of Chicago boys are saying the center will not hold?
Looks like there's a Storm coming.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
So Dear Leader Knows Someone Could Guess What's Coming
Just like a picture of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico provided by an NOAA satellite (which the Bush administration wants to cut funding for, and Republicans want to make it so a private corporation charges you for, even though you've already paid for it), so scientists across the world have been trying to alert us to the radical changes the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels produces worldwide.
For your consideration, an example, greatly condensed and hopefully easy enough to understand:
Modern Global Climate Change
Thomas R. Karl and Kevin E. Trenberth
Science 5 December 2003; 302: 1719-1723 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1090228]
Modern climate change is dominated by human in•uences, which are now large enough to exceed the bounds of natural variability. The main source of global climate change is human-induced changes in atmospheric composition. These perturbations primarily result from emissions associated with energy use, but on local and regional scales, urbanization and land use changes are also important. Although there has been progress in monitoring and understanding climate change, there remain many scienti•c, technical, and institutional impediments to precisely planning for, adapting to, and mitigating the effects of climate change. There is still considerable uncertainty about the rates of change that can be expected, but it is clear that these changes will be increasingly manifested in important and tangible ways, such as changes in extremes of temperature and precipitation, decreases in seasonal and perennial snow and ice extent, and sea level rise. Anthropogenic climate change is now likely to continue for many centuries. We are venturing into the unknown with climate, and its associated impacts could be quite disruptive.
...Planet Earth is habitable because of its location relative to the sun and because of the natural greenhouse effect of its atmosphere. Various atmospheric gases contribute to the greenhouse effect, whose impact in clear skies is ~60% from water vapor, ~25% from carbon dioxide, ~8% from ozone, and the rest from trace gases including methane and nitrous oxide (1). Clouds also have a greenhouse effect. On average, the energy from the sun received at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere amounts to 175 petawatts (PW) (or 175 quadrillion watts), of which ~31% is reflected by clouds and from the surface. The rest (120 PW) is absorbed by the atmosphere, land, or ocean and ultimately emitted back space as infrared radiation (1). Over the century, infrequent volcanic eruptions gases and debris into the atmosphere have significantly perturbed these energy flows; however, the resulting cooling has lasted for a few years (2). Inferred changes in total irradiance appear to have increased mean temperatures by perhaps as much as 0.2°C in the first half of the 20th century, but measured changes in the past 25 years have been small (2). Over the past 50 years, human influences have been the dominant detectable influence on climate change (2). The following briefly describes the human influences climate, the resulting temperature and precipitation changes, the time scale of responses, some important processes involved, the development of climate models for assessing the past or making projections into the future, and the need for better observational and information systems.
The main way in which humans alter global climate is by interference with the natural flows of energy through changes in atmospheric composition, not by the actual generation of heat in energy usage. On a global scale, even a 1% change in the energy flows, which is the order of the estimated change to date (2), dominates all other direct influences humans have on climate. For example, an energy output of just one PW is equivalent to that of a million power stations of 1000-MW capacity, among the largest in the world. Total human energy use is about a factor of 9000 less than the natural flow (3).
Global changes in atmospheric composition occur from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide that results from the burning of fossil fuels and methane and nitrous oxide from multiple human activities. Because these gases have long (decades to centuries) atmospheric lifetimes, the result is an accumulation in the atmosphere and a buildup in concentrations that are clearly shown both by instrumental observations of air samples since 1958 and in bubbles of air trapped in ice cores before then. Moreover, these gases are well distributed in the atmosphere across the globe, simplifying a global monitoring strategy. Carbon dioxide has increased 31% since preindustrial times, from 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to more than 370 ppmv today, and half of the increase has been since 1965 (4) (Fig. 1). The greenhouse gases trap outgoing radiation from the Earth to space, creating a warming of the planet.
Fig. 1. Time series of departures from the 1961 to 1990 base period for an annual mean global temperature of 14.0°C (bars) and for a carbon dioxide mean of 334 ppmv (solid curve) during the base period, using data fromice cores and (after 1958) from Mauna Loa (4). The global average surface heating approximates that of carbon dioxide increases, because of the cancellation of aerosols and other greenhouse gas effects, but this does not apply regionally (2). Many other factors (such as the effects of volcanic eruptions and solar irradiance changes) are also important.
...There is no doubt that the composition of the atmosphere is changing because of human activities, and today greenhouse gases are the largest human influence on global climate (2). Recent greenhouse gas emission trends in the United States are upward (11), as are global emissions trends, with increases between 0.5 and 1% per year over the past few decades (12). Concentrations of both reflective and nonreflective aerosols are also estimated to be increasing (2). Because radiative forcing from greenhouse gases dominates over the net cooling forcings from aerosols (2), the popular term for the human influence on global climate is “global warming,” although it really means global heating, of which the observed global temperature increase is only one consequence (13) (Fig. 1). Already it is estimated that the Earth’s climate has exceeded the bounds of natural variability (2), and this has been the case since about 1980...
...There is considerable uncertainty as to exactly how anthropogenic global heating will affect the climate system, how long it will last, and how large the effects will be. Climate has varied naturally in the past, but today’s circumstances are unique because of human influences on atmospheric composition. As we progress into the future, the magnitude of the present anthropogenic change will become overwhelmingly large compared to that of natural changes. In the absence of climate mitigation policies, the 90% probability interval for warming from 1990 to 2100 is 1.7° to 4.9°C (19). About half of this range is due to uncertainty in future emissions and about half is due to uncertainties in climate models (2, 19), especially in their sensitivity to forcings that are complicated by feedbacks, discussed below, and in their rate of heat uptake by the oceans (20). Even with these uncertainties, the likely outcome is more frequent heat waves, droughts, extreme precipitation events, and related impacts (such as wild fires, heat stress, vegetation changes, and sea level rise) that will be regionally dependent. ....
...Our understanding of the climate system is complicated by feedbacks that either amplify or damp perturbations, the most important of which involve water in various phases. As temperatures increase, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases along with water vapor amounts, producing water vapor feedback. As water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, this diminishes the loss of energy through infrared radiation to space. Currently, water vapor feedback is estimated to contribute a radiative effect from one to two times the size of the direct effect of increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases (24, 25). Precipitation-runoff feedbacks occur because more intense rains run off at the expense of soil moisture, and warming promotes rain rather than snow. These changes in turn alter the partitioning of solar radiation into sensible versus latent heating (14). Heat storage feedbacks include the rate at which the oceans take up heat and the currents redistribute and release it back into the atmosphere at variable later times and different locations...
Here I skip some fairly technical material and a figure regarding how as temperatures and the associated water holding capacity of the atmosphere (15) increase, more precipitation falls in heavy (more than 40 mm/day) to extreme (more than 100 mm/day) daily amounts.
In other words, as a climate gets hotter, it rains heavier.
Fig. 3. Components of the climate system and the interactions among them, including the human component. All these components have to be modeled as a coupled system that includes the oceans, atmosphere, land, cryosphere, and biosphere. GCM, General Circulation Model.
...Ensembles of model predictions have to be run to generate probabilities and address the chaotic aspects of weather and climate. This can be addressed in principle with adequate computing power, a challenge in itself. However, improving models to a point where they are more reliable and have sufficient resolution to be properly able to represent known important processes also requires the right observations, understanding, and insights (brain power). Global climate models will need to better integrate the biological, chemical, and physical components of the Earth system (Fig. 3). Even more challenging is the seamless flow of data and information among observing systems, Earth system models, socioeconomic models, and models that address managed and unmanaged ecosystems. Progress here is dependent on overcoming not only scientific and technical issues but also major institutional and international obstacles related to the free flow of climate-related data and information. In large part, reduction in uncertainty about future climate change will be driven by studies of climate change assessment and attribution. Along with climate model simulations of past climates, this requires comprehensive and long-term climate-related data sets and observing systems that deliver data free of time-dependent biases. These observations would ensure that model simulations are evaluated on the basis of actual changes in the climate system and not on artifacts of changes in observing system technology or analysis methods (34). The recent controversy regarding the effects that changes in observing systems have had on the rate of surface versus tropospheric warming (35, 36) highlights this issue. Global monitoring through space-based and surface-based systems is an international matter, much like global climate change. There are encouraging signs, such as the adoption in 1999 of a set of climate monitoring principles (37), but these principles are impotent without implementation. International implementation of these principles is spotty at best (38). We are entering the unknown with our climate. We need a global climate observing system, but only parts of it exist. We must not only take the vital signs of the planet but also assess why they are fluctuating and changing. Consequently, the system must embrace comprehensive analysis and assessment as integral components on an ongoing basis, as well as innovative research to better interpret results and improve our diagnostic capabilities. Projections into the future are part of such activity, and all aspects of an Earth information system feed into planning for the future, whether by planned adaptation or mitigation. Climate change is truly a global issue, one that may prove to be humanity’s greatest challenge. It is very unlikely to be adequately addressed without greatly improved international cooperation and action.
References and Notes
1. J. T. Kiehl, K. E. Trenberth, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 78, 197 (1997).
2. J. T. Houghton et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001) (available at www.ipcc.ch/).
3. R. J. Cicerone, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 10304 (2000).
4. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations fromair samples and from ice cores are available at http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm and http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/siple.htm, respectively.
5. M. Sato et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 6319 (2003).
6. A. J. Dolman, A. Verhagen, C. A. Rovers, Eds. Global Environmental Change and Land Use (Kluwer, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 2003).
7. G. B. Bonan, Ecol. Appl., 9, 1305 (1999).
8. J. G. Charney, Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 101, 193 (1975).
9. C. Nobre et al., in Vegetation, Water, Humans, and the Climate, P. Kabot et al., Eds. (Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, in press, 2003).
10. A. N. Hahmann, R. E. Dickinson, J. Clim. 10, 1944 (1997).
11. U.S. Department of State, U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 (Washington, DC, 2002) (available at http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/ResourceCenterPublicationsUSClimateActionReport.html).
12. G. Marland, T. A. Boden, R. J. Andres, at the Web site Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change (CO2 Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 2002; available at http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/em-cont.htm).
13. Global temperatures are available from www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2002/ann/ann02.html.
14. K. E. Trenberth, A. Dai, R. M. Rasmussen, D. B. Parsons, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 1205 (2003) (available at www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/rainChBamsR. pdf).
15. The Clausius Clapeyron equation governs the waterholding capacity of the atmosphere, which increases by ~7% per degree Celsius increase in temperature (13).
16. R. W. Katz, Adv. Water Res. 23, 133 (1999).
17. P. Ya. Groisman, Clim. Change. 42, 243 (1999).
18. T. R. Karl, R. W. Knight, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 78, 1107 (1998).
19. T. Wigley, S. Raper, Science 293, 451 (2001).
20. S. J. Levitus et al., Science 287, 2225 (2001).
21. W. S. Broecker, Science 278, 1582 (1997).
22. T. F. Stocker, O. Marchal, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 97, 1362 (2000).
23. M. Hoffert et al., Science 298, 981 (2002).
24. U.S. National Research Council, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy, Washington, DC, 2001).
25. R. Colman, Clim. Dyn. 20, 865 (2003).
26. T. R. Karl, K. E. Trenberth, Sci. Am. 281, 100 (December 1999).
27. P. Ya. Groisman, T. R. Karl, R. W. Knight, G. L. Stenchikov, Science 263, 198 (1994).
28. C. E. Forest, P. H. Stone, A. Sokolov, M. R. Allen, M. D. Webster, Science 295, 113 (2002).
29. J. Coakley Jr., C. D. Walsh, J. Atmos. Sci. 59, 668 (2002).
30. J. Coakley Jr., personal communication.
31. M. A. Saunders, Geophys. Res. Lett. 30, 1378 (2003).
32. M. P. Hoerling, J. W. Hurrell, T. Xu, Science 292, 90 (2001).
33. K. E. Trenberth, T. J. Hoar, Geophys. Res. Lett. 24, 3057 (1997).
34. K. E. Trenberth, T. R. Karl, T. W. Spence, Bull. Amol. Meteor. Soc. 83, 1558 (2002).
35. The Climate Change Science Program plan is available at www.climatescience.gov.
36. B. Santer et al., Science, 300, 1280 (2003).
37. The climate principles were adopted by the Subsidiary Body on Science, Technology and Assessment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
38. Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), The Second Report on the Adequacy of the Global Observing Systems for Climate in Support of the UNFCCC. (GCOS-82, WMO/TD 1143, World Meteorological Organisation, Geneva, 2003) (available from www. wmo.ch/web/gcos/gcoshome.html).
39. We thank A. Leetmaa, J. Hurrell, J. Mahlman, and R. Cicerone for helpful comments, and J. Enloe for providing the calculations for Fig. 2. This article reflects the views of the authors and does not reflect government policy. The National Climatic Data Center is part of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Services. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the NSF.
Web Resources
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5651/1719/
For your consideration, an example, greatly condensed and hopefully easy enough to understand:
Modern Global Climate Change
Thomas R. Karl and Kevin E. Trenberth
Science 5 December 2003; 302: 1719-1723 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1090228]
Modern climate change is dominated by human in•uences, which are now large enough to exceed the bounds of natural variability. The main source of global climate change is human-induced changes in atmospheric composition. These perturbations primarily result from emissions associated with energy use, but on local and regional scales, urbanization and land use changes are also important. Although there has been progress in monitoring and understanding climate change, there remain many scienti•c, technical, and institutional impediments to precisely planning for, adapting to, and mitigating the effects of climate change. There is still considerable uncertainty about the rates of change that can be expected, but it is clear that these changes will be increasingly manifested in important and tangible ways, such as changes in extremes of temperature and precipitation, decreases in seasonal and perennial snow and ice extent, and sea level rise. Anthropogenic climate change is now likely to continue for many centuries. We are venturing into the unknown with climate, and its associated impacts could be quite disruptive.
...Planet Earth is habitable because of its location relative to the sun and because of the natural greenhouse effect of its atmosphere. Various atmospheric gases contribute to the greenhouse effect, whose impact in clear skies is ~60% from water vapor, ~25% from carbon dioxide, ~8% from ozone, and the rest from trace gases including methane and nitrous oxide (1). Clouds also have a greenhouse effect. On average, the energy from the sun received at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere amounts to 175 petawatts (PW) (or 175 quadrillion watts), of which ~31% is reflected by clouds and from the surface. The rest (120 PW) is absorbed by the atmosphere, land, or ocean and ultimately emitted back space as infrared radiation (1). Over the century, infrequent volcanic eruptions gases and debris into the atmosphere have significantly perturbed these energy flows; however, the resulting cooling has lasted for a few years (2). Inferred changes in total irradiance appear to have increased mean temperatures by perhaps as much as 0.2°C in the first half of the 20th century, but measured changes in the past 25 years have been small (2). Over the past 50 years, human influences have been the dominant detectable influence on climate change (2). The following briefly describes the human influences climate, the resulting temperature and precipitation changes, the time scale of responses, some important processes involved, the development of climate models for assessing the past or making projections into the future, and the need for better observational and information systems.
The main way in which humans alter global climate is by interference with the natural flows of energy through changes in atmospheric composition, not by the actual generation of heat in energy usage. On a global scale, even a 1% change in the energy flows, which is the order of the estimated change to date (2), dominates all other direct influences humans have on climate. For example, an energy output of just one PW is equivalent to that of a million power stations of 1000-MW capacity, among the largest in the world. Total human energy use is about a factor of 9000 less than the natural flow (3).
Global changes in atmospheric composition occur from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide that results from the burning of fossil fuels and methane and nitrous oxide from multiple human activities. Because these gases have long (decades to centuries) atmospheric lifetimes, the result is an accumulation in the atmosphere and a buildup in concentrations that are clearly shown both by instrumental observations of air samples since 1958 and in bubbles of air trapped in ice cores before then. Moreover, these gases are well distributed in the atmosphere across the globe, simplifying a global monitoring strategy. Carbon dioxide has increased 31% since preindustrial times, from 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to more than 370 ppmv today, and half of the increase has been since 1965 (4) (Fig. 1). The greenhouse gases trap outgoing radiation from the Earth to space, creating a warming of the planet.
Fig. 1. Time series of departures from the 1961 to 1990 base period for an annual mean global temperature of 14.0°C (bars) and for a carbon dioxide mean of 334 ppmv (solid curve) during the base period, using data fromice cores and (after 1958) from Mauna Loa (4). The global average surface heating approximates that of carbon dioxide increases, because of the cancellation of aerosols and other greenhouse gas effects, but this does not apply regionally (2). Many other factors (such as the effects of volcanic eruptions and solar irradiance changes) are also important.
...There is no doubt that the composition of the atmosphere is changing because of human activities, and today greenhouse gases are the largest human influence on global climate (2). Recent greenhouse gas emission trends in the United States are upward (11), as are global emissions trends, with increases between 0.5 and 1% per year over the past few decades (12). Concentrations of both reflective and nonreflective aerosols are also estimated to be increasing (2). Because radiative forcing from greenhouse gases dominates over the net cooling forcings from aerosols (2), the popular term for the human influence on global climate is “global warming,” although it really means global heating, of which the observed global temperature increase is only one consequence (13) (Fig. 1). Already it is estimated that the Earth’s climate has exceeded the bounds of natural variability (2), and this has been the case since about 1980...
...There is considerable uncertainty as to exactly how anthropogenic global heating will affect the climate system, how long it will last, and how large the effects will be. Climate has varied naturally in the past, but today’s circumstances are unique because of human influences on atmospheric composition. As we progress into the future, the magnitude of the present anthropogenic change will become overwhelmingly large compared to that of natural changes. In the absence of climate mitigation policies, the 90% probability interval for warming from 1990 to 2100 is 1.7° to 4.9°C (19). About half of this range is due to uncertainty in future emissions and about half is due to uncertainties in climate models (2, 19), especially in their sensitivity to forcings that are complicated by feedbacks, discussed below, and in their rate of heat uptake by the oceans (20). Even with these uncertainties, the likely outcome is more frequent heat waves, droughts, extreme precipitation events, and related impacts (such as wild fires, heat stress, vegetation changes, and sea level rise) that will be regionally dependent. ....
...Our understanding of the climate system is complicated by feedbacks that either amplify or damp perturbations, the most important of which involve water in various phases. As temperatures increase, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases along with water vapor amounts, producing water vapor feedback. As water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, this diminishes the loss of energy through infrared radiation to space. Currently, water vapor feedback is estimated to contribute a radiative effect from one to two times the size of the direct effect of increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases (24, 25). Precipitation-runoff feedbacks occur because more intense rains run off at the expense of soil moisture, and warming promotes rain rather than snow. These changes in turn alter the partitioning of solar radiation into sensible versus latent heating (14). Heat storage feedbacks include the rate at which the oceans take up heat and the currents redistribute and release it back into the atmosphere at variable later times and different locations...
Here I skip some fairly technical material and a figure regarding how as temperatures and the associated water holding capacity of the atmosphere (15) increase, more precipitation falls in heavy (more than 40 mm/day) to extreme (more than 100 mm/day) daily amounts.
In other words, as a climate gets hotter, it rains heavier.
Fig. 3. Components of the climate system and the interactions among them, including the human component. All these components have to be modeled as a coupled system that includes the oceans, atmosphere, land, cryosphere, and biosphere. GCM, General Circulation Model.
...Ensembles of model predictions have to be run to generate probabilities and address the chaotic aspects of weather and climate. This can be addressed in principle with adequate computing power, a challenge in itself. However, improving models to a point where they are more reliable and have sufficient resolution to be properly able to represent known important processes also requires the right observations, understanding, and insights (brain power). Global climate models will need to better integrate the biological, chemical, and physical components of the Earth system (Fig. 3). Even more challenging is the seamless flow of data and information among observing systems, Earth system models, socioeconomic models, and models that address managed and unmanaged ecosystems. Progress here is dependent on overcoming not only scientific and technical issues but also major institutional and international obstacles related to the free flow of climate-related data and information. In large part, reduction in uncertainty about future climate change will be driven by studies of climate change assessment and attribution. Along with climate model simulations of past climates, this requires comprehensive and long-term climate-related data sets and observing systems that deliver data free of time-dependent biases. These observations would ensure that model simulations are evaluated on the basis of actual changes in the climate system and not on artifacts of changes in observing system technology or analysis methods (34). The recent controversy regarding the effects that changes in observing systems have had on the rate of surface versus tropospheric warming (35, 36) highlights this issue. Global monitoring through space-based and surface-based systems is an international matter, much like global climate change. There are encouraging signs, such as the adoption in 1999 of a set of climate monitoring principles (37), but these principles are impotent without implementation. International implementation of these principles is spotty at best (38). We are entering the unknown with our climate. We need a global climate observing system, but only parts of it exist. We must not only take the vital signs of the planet but also assess why they are fluctuating and changing. Consequently, the system must embrace comprehensive analysis and assessment as integral components on an ongoing basis, as well as innovative research to better interpret results and improve our diagnostic capabilities. Projections into the future are part of such activity, and all aspects of an Earth information system feed into planning for the future, whether by planned adaptation or mitigation. Climate change is truly a global issue, one that may prove to be humanity’s greatest challenge. It is very unlikely to be adequately addressed without greatly improved international cooperation and action.
References and Notes
1. J. T. Kiehl, K. E. Trenberth, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 78, 197 (1997).
2. J. T. Houghton et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001) (available at www.ipcc.ch/).
3. R. J. Cicerone, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 10304 (2000).
4. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations fromair samples and from ice cores are available at http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm and http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/siple.htm, respectively.
5. M. Sato et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 6319 (2003).
6. A. J. Dolman, A. Verhagen, C. A. Rovers, Eds. Global Environmental Change and Land Use (Kluwer, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 2003).
7. G. B. Bonan, Ecol. Appl., 9, 1305 (1999).
8. J. G. Charney, Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 101, 193 (1975).
9. C. Nobre et al., in Vegetation, Water, Humans, and the Climate, P. Kabot et al., Eds. (Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, in press, 2003).
10. A. N. Hahmann, R. E. Dickinson, J. Clim. 10, 1944 (1997).
11. U.S. Department of State, U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 (Washington, DC, 2002) (available at http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/ResourceCenterPublicationsUSClimateActionReport.html).
12. G. Marland, T. A. Boden, R. J. Andres, at the Web site Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change (CO2 Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 2002; available at http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/em-cont.htm).
13. Global temperatures are available from www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2002/ann/ann02.html.
14. K. E. Trenberth, A. Dai, R. M. Rasmussen, D. B. Parsons, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 1205 (2003) (available at www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/rainChBamsR. pdf).
15. The Clausius Clapeyron equation governs the waterholding capacity of the atmosphere, which increases by ~7% per degree Celsius increase in temperature (13).
16. R. W. Katz, Adv. Water Res. 23, 133 (1999).
17. P. Ya. Groisman, Clim. Change. 42, 243 (1999).
18. T. R. Karl, R. W. Knight, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 78, 1107 (1998).
19. T. Wigley, S. Raper, Science 293, 451 (2001).
20. S. J. Levitus et al., Science 287, 2225 (2001).
21. W. S. Broecker, Science 278, 1582 (1997).
22. T. F. Stocker, O. Marchal, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 97, 1362 (2000).
23. M. Hoffert et al., Science 298, 981 (2002).
24. U.S. National Research Council, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy, Washington, DC, 2001).
25. R. Colman, Clim. Dyn. 20, 865 (2003).
26. T. R. Karl, K. E. Trenberth, Sci. Am. 281, 100 (December 1999).
27. P. Ya. Groisman, T. R. Karl, R. W. Knight, G. L. Stenchikov, Science 263, 198 (1994).
28. C. E. Forest, P. H. Stone, A. Sokolov, M. R. Allen, M. D. Webster, Science 295, 113 (2002).
29. J. Coakley Jr., C. D. Walsh, J. Atmos. Sci. 59, 668 (2002).
30. J. Coakley Jr., personal communication.
31. M. A. Saunders, Geophys. Res. Lett. 30, 1378 (2003).
32. M. P. Hoerling, J. W. Hurrell, T. Xu, Science 292, 90 (2001).
33. K. E. Trenberth, T. J. Hoar, Geophys. Res. Lett. 24, 3057 (1997).
34. K. E. Trenberth, T. R. Karl, T. W. Spence, Bull. Amol. Meteor. Soc. 83, 1558 (2002).
35. The Climate Change Science Program plan is available at www.climatescience.gov.
36. B. Santer et al., Science, 300, 1280 (2003).
37. The climate principles were adopted by the Subsidiary Body on Science, Technology and Assessment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
38. Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), The Second Report on the Adequacy of the Global Observing Systems for Climate in Support of the UNFCCC. (GCOS-82, WMO/TD 1143, World Meteorological Organisation, Geneva, 2003) (available from www. wmo.ch/web/gcos/gcoshome.html).
39. We thank A. Leetmaa, J. Hurrell, J. Mahlman, and R. Cicerone for helpful comments, and J. Enloe for providing the calculations for Fig. 2. This article reflects the views of the authors and does not reflect government policy. The National Climatic Data Center is part of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Services. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the NSF.
Web Resources
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5651/1719/
Friday, September 02, 2005
Information Control and Consent of the Damned
...With a crucial assist from the Supreme Court, George W. Bush became the first president of the 21st century and promptly set about restoring, even increasing, presidential powers. A hallmark of this effort was his assertion of control over information about what the government is, or has been, up to.
The first case was the work of a task force on energy policy chaired by Vice President Cheney. This was followed in November 2001 by an executive order giving an incumbent president decisionmaking authority over release of past presidents' papers. This overrode a congressional act that requires a president's records be available to the public no later than 12 years after he has left office. The Bush executive order makes this contingent upon the incumbent president's consent.
A further opportunity to assert presidential authority came when Al Qaeda terrorists flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center buildings in New York, another into the Pentagon, and would have flown a fourth into another target in Washington (probably the White House or Capitol) but for heroic passengers who forced a crash in rural Pennsylvania.
Historically, wars lead to increased presidential powers. There is an urge in the public and in Congress to rally round the flag and support the president no matter how foolish his actions.
But it was a Democratic Senate that forced Democrat Johnson into early retirement. In 2001, Senate Democrats were overcome by jelly where their backbones had been in 1968-69. True, their numbers had been reduced to 50 out of 100 senators, but 50 senators can be a powerful bloc. Nevertheless, Democrats acquiesced in the misnamed USA Patriot Act which shredded the Bill of Rights. They acquiesced in scandalous tax cuts. Worse, they supported the invasion of Iraq, on the basis of false justifications.
The question of controlling information has arisen again in connection with the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee reasonably want to know what Judge Roberts did and what views he expressed during his service in the Reagan administration. While Bush professes full cooperation with the Senate Judiciary Committee, including its Democratic members, he has been careful about which documents from these periods of Roberts' career are made available. A great many documents have been supplied, but some have been withheld. Many of those that have been supplied have large sections blacked out. The Bush executive order says these redactions should be made on the basis of national security considerations, but in the end they come down to subjective judgments by the incumbent president or his White House staff.
In the name of protecting national security, President Bush has arrogated to himself and to all his successors (unless one of them should be sufficiently public-spirited to change it) the power to control which presidential papers going back to George Washington can be made public. One must ask: Why would Bush be moved to do this?
A cynical, but possibly true, explanation is to protect Reagan and his vice president - the current president's father - from disclosure of the full truth about the Iran-contra scandal, which possibly contained grounds for another impeachment.
Pat M. Holt, The Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 1, 2005
Thanks to Lambert for the tip.
If the Company had the media control it wants, yesterday we would have nothing but the Happy Talk from Bush, Chertoff, and Brown.
The stories of what were really happening in New Orleans would be unheard.
One wonders if the the food and water would have ever arrived- and how many would survive.
One also wonders, since food and water and aid didn't show up to where the cameras were until yesterday evening, how much aid is showing up to where the cameras aren't?
With over a million displaced persons, the possibility of 100,000 dead, and a country reeling, one wonders how much of the apparent ineptitude is an lassiez faire rape of a blue city in a red state?
Last night there was an interesting exhange between a Louisiana Senator and a distaught cable anchorman, and a silent assent by Bill Clinton as Poppy asserted Junior was doing the best he could do- that no one predicted this nightmare.
Landrieu and the Clintons both feel it important to get the Congress to send those billions to the relief of New Orleans and avoid the passive resistance of the Company.
That is, of course, why they are letting themselves get buggered by by Bu$hCo.
They feel compromise is the only way to get the ruthless to help.
The problem is that when you sleep with people to get them to show a little mercy to your babies, they just end up raping the children too.
Clinton and Landrieu make the mistake of thinking they can negotiate with the robber barons. In reality they are being puppets. They may get some relief for the needy in the short run, but in the long run they enable enslavement and despoilation.
The first case was the work of a task force on energy policy chaired by Vice President Cheney. This was followed in November 2001 by an executive order giving an incumbent president decisionmaking authority over release of past presidents' papers. This overrode a congressional act that requires a president's records be available to the public no later than 12 years after he has left office. The Bush executive order makes this contingent upon the incumbent president's consent.
A further opportunity to assert presidential authority came when Al Qaeda terrorists flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center buildings in New York, another into the Pentagon, and would have flown a fourth into another target in Washington (probably the White House or Capitol) but for heroic passengers who forced a crash in rural Pennsylvania.
Historically, wars lead to increased presidential powers. There is an urge in the public and in Congress to rally round the flag and support the president no matter how foolish his actions.
But it was a Democratic Senate that forced Democrat Johnson into early retirement. In 2001, Senate Democrats were overcome by jelly where their backbones had been in 1968-69. True, their numbers had been reduced to 50 out of 100 senators, but 50 senators can be a powerful bloc. Nevertheless, Democrats acquiesced in the misnamed USA Patriot Act which shredded the Bill of Rights. They acquiesced in scandalous tax cuts. Worse, they supported the invasion of Iraq, on the basis of false justifications.
The question of controlling information has arisen again in connection with the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee reasonably want to know what Judge Roberts did and what views he expressed during his service in the Reagan administration. While Bush professes full cooperation with the Senate Judiciary Committee, including its Democratic members, he has been careful about which documents from these periods of Roberts' career are made available. A great many documents have been supplied, but some have been withheld. Many of those that have been supplied have large sections blacked out. The Bush executive order says these redactions should be made on the basis of national security considerations, but in the end they come down to subjective judgments by the incumbent president or his White House staff.
In the name of protecting national security, President Bush has arrogated to himself and to all his successors (unless one of them should be sufficiently public-spirited to change it) the power to control which presidential papers going back to George Washington can be made public. One must ask: Why would Bush be moved to do this?
A cynical, but possibly true, explanation is to protect Reagan and his vice president - the current president's father - from disclosure of the full truth about the Iran-contra scandal, which possibly contained grounds for another impeachment.
Pat M. Holt, The Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 1, 2005
Thanks to Lambert for the tip.
If the Company had the media control it wants, yesterday we would have nothing but the Happy Talk from Bush, Chertoff, and Brown.
The stories of what were really happening in New Orleans would be unheard.
One wonders if the the food and water would have ever arrived- and how many would survive.
One also wonders, since food and water and aid didn't show up to where the cameras were until yesterday evening, how much aid is showing up to where the cameras aren't?
With over a million displaced persons, the possibility of 100,000 dead, and a country reeling, one wonders how much of the apparent ineptitude is an lassiez faire rape of a blue city in a red state?
Last night there was an interesting exhange between a Louisiana Senator and a distaught cable anchorman, and a silent assent by Bill Clinton as Poppy asserted Junior was doing the best he could do- that no one predicted this nightmare.
Landrieu and the Clintons both feel it important to get the Congress to send those billions to the relief of New Orleans and avoid the passive resistance of the Company.
That is, of course, why they are letting themselves get buggered by by Bu$hCo.
They feel compromise is the only way to get the ruthless to help.
The problem is that when you sleep with people to get them to show a little mercy to your babies, they just end up raping the children too.
Clinton and Landrieu make the mistake of thinking they can negotiate with the robber barons. In reality they are being puppets. They may get some relief for the needy in the short run, but in the long run they enable enslavement and despoilation.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Great Oil PhWrauds
It has been just one disgusting day as the Company tries both hard and soft spin to get the spreading stain of Lake George off its hands.
Since a lot of these links were summarized well today at Eschaton and Corrente and other places, let me start off with a generalized kudos to these sites and their supporting casts.
Dear Leader started it off today with the amazing statement that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." This is a pretty baldfaced lie, as noted, quoted, and referenced in heavy detail. Thank Matthew Yglesias for that last one. Leah A. at Corrente has a long rant about this, too, referencing a Bill Moyers NOW episode outlining the entire problem and the likely results if not attended to... in 2002.
Babies dying while Chertoff blames the victims for not gassing up the SUVs and getting out of town. I guess he thinks all good people are part of the Ownership Society. Even those who owned a ticket out but were stranded by a sudden cancellation of all air and land transportation.
The guy heading FEMA, Michael D. Brown, was an estate planning lawyer before Bush hired him to manage our emergencies.
And FEMA is telling people to give donations to Pat Robertson instead of organizations that might actually do some good.
Still to come in these pages over the long weekend ahead: more about the causes and effects of global warming, and why legitimate scientists might think that if we crank through all that fossil fuel left in the ground we might start to look like this in a hundred years or so.
Just so long as somebody tells Dear Leader.
I wouldn't want it to surprise him.
Since a lot of these links were summarized well today at Eschaton and Corrente and other places, let me start off with a generalized kudos to these sites and their supporting casts.
Dear Leader started it off today with the amazing statement that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." This is a pretty baldfaced lie, as noted, quoted, and referenced in heavy detail. Thank Matthew Yglesias for that last one. Leah A. at Corrente has a long rant about this, too, referencing a Bill Moyers NOW episode outlining the entire problem and the likely results if not attended to... in 2002.
Babies dying while Chertoff blames the victims for not gassing up the SUVs and getting out of town. I guess he thinks all good people are part of the Ownership Society. Even those who owned a ticket out but were stranded by a sudden cancellation of all air and land transportation.
The guy heading FEMA, Michael D. Brown, was an estate planning lawyer before Bush hired him to manage our emergencies.
And FEMA is telling people to give donations to Pat Robertson instead of organizations that might actually do some good.
Still to come in these pages over the long weekend ahead: more about the causes and effects of global warming, and why legitimate scientists might think that if we crank through all that fossil fuel left in the ground we might start to look like this in a hundred years or so.
Just so long as somebody tells Dear Leader.
I wouldn't want it to surprise him.
Ecological Disaster
In case you were wondering what may be coming down in the Gulf weather-wise, you can get good satellite information here. The major cable services, even the Weather Channel, are too obsessed with their storm porn and commercials to keep the general public updated. We're relatively lucky: the only organized storms in the Atlantic are still in their breeding ground off the coast of Africa, giving us some breathing room. Hopefully the evacuations in the Gulf area will continue with no new storms.
Meanwhile, from Kos, it seems we've lost a large number of our oil rigs in the Gulf, and a major ecological disaster is brewing.
20 oil rigs missing in Gulf of Mexico: US Coast Guard
"WASHINGTON (AFP) - At least 20 oil rigs and platforms are missing in the Gulf of Mexico and a ruptured gas pipeline is on fire after Hurricane Katrina tore through the region, a US Coast Guard official said. "We have confirmed at least 20 rigs or platforms missing, either sunk or adrift, and one confirmed fire where a rig was," Petty Officer Robert Reed of the Louisiana Coast Guard told AFP."
Onto the diary...
Newest (and very informative and very scary) report from an anonymous insider
"There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10's of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. Most larger ones have 20-30 wells in this area, with numerous caisson wells. They are on their sides, on the bottom of the gulf - they will likely be left as reef material, provided we can get permission. MMS regulations require us to plug each of the wells that were on these platforms - HUGE cost now, as the platforms are gone... Hopefully, MMS will grant `abandon in place' status for these wiped out structures."
Sounds like an ecological disaster to me.
"In short, the Gulf area hit by the storm is basically in about the same shape as Biloxi. The damage numbers you have gotten from the government and analysts are, in my opinion, much too low. We are looking at YEARS to return to the production levels we had prior to the storm. The eastern Gulf of Mexico is primarily oil production..."
There's more to the article but I think what this basically says is that oil production in the Gulf is going to be affected in a much larger way than is being reported, and also for a much longer time.
Thanks to Atrios for the tip.
If they get another couple of hurricanes this season, the Gulf shore may end up on the north side of the lake.
And regarding the media: no, they won't talk about the real trouble, and they won't hold Bush or the energy cartels that produced this insane situation responsible.
But it will be amusing next year (in a very black sort of way) to watch the republicans steal the '06 elections- you know they will, every last seat in Congress they can- with only, say, ten percent of the public supporting them.
Especially if after the end of this year's hurricane season and a summer of category 5's next year, the Gulf coast is at Vicksburg, and gasoline is $20 a gallon.
When do you suppose Negroponte will declare martial law nationwide? Before or after 2006? Because if there aren't some major policy changes, the national dysfunctionality is only going to grow.
When do you think people realize Negroponte and Gonzales are the ones now running the show? Karl Rove never could run anything- he's great at vicious plans, but little else. On the other hand, Negroponte and Gonzales can run a Secret Police force, but little else.
Bush is overtly demented and nonfunctional, Dick is sick (when Team Xinhua tried to buy Unocal it almost killed him), and Rummy's barking crazy when he talks in public.
Meanwhile, from Kos, it seems we've lost a large number of our oil rigs in the Gulf, and a major ecological disaster is brewing.
20 oil rigs missing in Gulf of Mexico: US Coast Guard
"WASHINGTON (AFP) - At least 20 oil rigs and platforms are missing in the Gulf of Mexico and a ruptured gas pipeline is on fire after Hurricane Katrina tore through the region, a US Coast Guard official said. "We have confirmed at least 20 rigs or platforms missing, either sunk or adrift, and one confirmed fire where a rig was," Petty Officer Robert Reed of the Louisiana Coast Guard told AFP."
Onto the diary...
Newest (and very informative and very scary) report from an anonymous insider
"There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10's of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. Most larger ones have 20-30 wells in this area, with numerous caisson wells. They are on their sides, on the bottom of the gulf - they will likely be left as reef material, provided we can get permission. MMS regulations require us to plug each of the wells that were on these platforms - HUGE cost now, as the platforms are gone... Hopefully, MMS will grant `abandon in place' status for these wiped out structures."
Sounds like an ecological disaster to me.
"In short, the Gulf area hit by the storm is basically in about the same shape as Biloxi. The damage numbers you have gotten from the government and analysts are, in my opinion, much too low. We are looking at YEARS to return to the production levels we had prior to the storm. The eastern Gulf of Mexico is primarily oil production..."
There's more to the article but I think what this basically says is that oil production in the Gulf is going to be affected in a much larger way than is being reported, and also for a much longer time.
Thanks to Atrios for the tip.
If they get another couple of hurricanes this season, the Gulf shore may end up on the north side of the lake.
And regarding the media: no, they won't talk about the real trouble, and they won't hold Bush or the energy cartels that produced this insane situation responsible.
But it will be amusing next year (in a very black sort of way) to watch the republicans steal the '06 elections- you know they will, every last seat in Congress they can- with only, say, ten percent of the public supporting them.
Especially if after the end of this year's hurricane season and a summer of category 5's next year, the Gulf coast is at Vicksburg, and gasoline is $20 a gallon.
When do you suppose Negroponte will declare martial law nationwide? Before or after 2006? Because if there aren't some major policy changes, the national dysfunctionality is only going to grow.
When do you think people realize Negroponte and Gonzales are the ones now running the show? Karl Rove never could run anything- he's great at vicious plans, but little else. On the other hand, Negroponte and Gonzales can run a Secret Police force, but little else.
Bush is overtly demented and nonfunctional, Dick is sick (when Team Xinhua tried to buy Unocal it almost killed him), and Rummy's barking crazy when he talks in public.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
"Your Town is Next"
From Antifa commenting in Moon of Alabama :
Your Town Is Next
The central thread of the New Orleans situation is that there for years there wasn't enough money for protecting the city. So no protection was in place when disaster arrived.
The engineers charged with protecting the city from hurricane flooding saw their budgets slashed again and again since 2000, leaving them at the last to beg for emergency funds all this year for fixing just the weakest levees. The very levees now leaking billions of gallons of dirty water into the city.
No dice, said the Bush people. Iraq. 9/11. War President. It's hard. Vacation. Terry Schiavo. Vacation. 9/11 is hard.
Seeing a community heartlessly stripped of its ability to protect, feed or fend for itself makes you wonder -- what has Bush stripped from my community? What have we lost right here since 2000? Education, National Guard, police, gas prices, Medicaid, Medicare, Parks & Recreation, flood control, emergency preparedness?
What's been taken from my town, in the night, when no one was looking?
The Bush gang has been quietly stealing from all of us, to give to the rich, to run a war of aggression on behalf of their oil company cronies.
This is a bustout, town by town, across this country. A mafia crew is running the White House, siphoning off our assets to their pals, feeding upon America, running up debts for our grandkids to cope with.
It's catching up with New Orleans right now.
Your Town Is Next.
This is a comment on an excellent post by Billmon :
...media reports paint an picture of almost biblical desolation -- of pillars of smoke rising from fires that can't be as fought because there's no pressure in the water mains; of the risk that corpses from the city's vast above-ground cemeteries might be exhumed by the floodwaters and sent drifting through streets transformed into canals; of snakes, alligators and a three-foot shark -- yes, a shark -- spotted swimming in the fetid water.
Add in the raw waste from a hundred backed-up sewer lines, the rotting food from a hundred thousand kitchen refrigerators and the industrial filth of one of the country's largest ports and petrochemical centers, plus the corpses, dead animals, debris and the mosquito eggs -- many of them no doubt already hatching -- and you've got the makings of a first-class public health nightmare. Stew in the sun and the heat of a Louisiana September for a week or two, and watch the nightmare become a reality...
The big problem, or so I've read, is that while the river and the lake keep getting higher as sediment settles on their bottoms -- half a continent's worth, in the Mississippi's case -- the ground that New Orleans sits on keeps sinking lower -- in part because the same levees that keep the water out also prevent fresh layers of silt and mud from being deposited to offset natural subsidiance. As a result, the city is sinking at a rate of three feet per century -- about eight times faster than the world average. Which means the levees have to be raised steadily higher, and the pumps have to work steadily harder, to keep it dry.
Now that the worst has happened, many pundits, particularly on the left, are pointing to the budget cuts that have hamstrung the Army Corps of Engineers in its endless battle of New Orleans:
"The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars..."
...But the bigger story behind the drowning of New Orleans is what it reveals about the longer-term consequences of America's lunatic environmental priorities. For nearly 160 years, private industry and governments alike have been chopping and channeling the Mississippi and its tributaries -- turning rivers into drainage ditches, riverbanks into Maginot Line-style fortifications, and wetlands into factory farms. This has created the same self-defeating spiral that doomed New Orleans -- the rivers rise, the riverbanks sink, forcing the levees higher and higher, until some of them are now as tall as four-story buildings.
There's no future in this -- and for Southern Lousiana, home to about 40% of the wetlands in the entire continental United States, the future is now. Without the silt and mud that the Mississippi once spread liberally across the entire network of sloughs and bayous that flow to the sea, the Gulf of Mexico is not-so-gradually munching its way north -- even as the federal government spends millions each year to dredge the main shipping channels of sediment:
"Up to 35 square miles of Louisiana's wetlands sink into the Gulf of Mexico each year. To date, an area the size of Rhode Island has been lost. In some places, the coastline has retreated 30 miles..."
...even Dick Cheney might want to think about the effect the destruction of South Lousiana could have on his beloved energy industry. The infrastructure -- drilling platforms, ports, shipyards -- that supports something like 20% of all U.S. oil and gas production is being left further and further out to sea:
"As executive director of the Greater LaFourche Port Commission, [Ted Falgout] manages the country's largest transportation hub for offshore oil and gas drilling. There are 600 offshore drilling platforms within 40 miles of the port.
"The road connecting Port Fourchon to civilization, Louisiana Route 1, sits four feet above sea level for its final 18 miles. If a hurricane were to wash it away, nearly 20% of the total U.S. oil supply would be jeopardized. Gasoline prices might triple, Falgout warns."
Now, thanks to Katrina, the hidden costs of all those decades of insane policies are being made visible to the entire world.
...The real lesson of Katrina, though, is that the scenes we've been watching in New Orleans could be repeated in many other places in the decades ahead, if the worst-case scenarios generated by the global climate change models become realities.
It's easy, even for reasonable people, to disregard those scenarios. The worst case, after all, doesn't usually happen. But the flooding of New Orleans, like the destruction of Pompeii, is a graphic demonstration of the fact that sometimes the worst case (or something like it) does happen, especially when it is preceded by years of willful ignorance and blind self interest.
If the worst case for global climate change comes to pass, the environmental and economic losses will dwarf, many times over, the costs of Hurricane Katrina. They'll also reduce into insignificance the price tag on the Kyoto Treaty -- which itself may be too little, too late. If Shrub really thinks that doing something about climate change would "wreck the economy," he should spend some of his unused vacation time thinking about what just happened to New Orleans.
Your Town Is Next
The central thread of the New Orleans situation is that there for years there wasn't enough money for protecting the city. So no protection was in place when disaster arrived.
The engineers charged with protecting the city from hurricane flooding saw their budgets slashed again and again since 2000, leaving them at the last to beg for emergency funds all this year for fixing just the weakest levees. The very levees now leaking billions of gallons of dirty water into the city.
No dice, said the Bush people. Iraq. 9/11. War President. It's hard. Vacation. Terry Schiavo. Vacation. 9/11 is hard.
Seeing a community heartlessly stripped of its ability to protect, feed or fend for itself makes you wonder -- what has Bush stripped from my community? What have we lost right here since 2000? Education, National Guard, police, gas prices, Medicaid, Medicare, Parks & Recreation, flood control, emergency preparedness?
What's been taken from my town, in the night, when no one was looking?
The Bush gang has been quietly stealing from all of us, to give to the rich, to run a war of aggression on behalf of their oil company cronies.
This is a bustout, town by town, across this country. A mafia crew is running the White House, siphoning off our assets to their pals, feeding upon America, running up debts for our grandkids to cope with.
It's catching up with New Orleans right now.
Your Town Is Next.
This is a comment on an excellent post by Billmon :
...media reports paint an picture of almost biblical desolation -- of pillars of smoke rising from fires that can't be as fought because there's no pressure in the water mains; of the risk that corpses from the city's vast above-ground cemeteries might be exhumed by the floodwaters and sent drifting through streets transformed into canals; of snakes, alligators and a three-foot shark -- yes, a shark -- spotted swimming in the fetid water.
Add in the raw waste from a hundred backed-up sewer lines, the rotting food from a hundred thousand kitchen refrigerators and the industrial filth of one of the country's largest ports and petrochemical centers, plus the corpses, dead animals, debris and the mosquito eggs -- many of them no doubt already hatching -- and you've got the makings of a first-class public health nightmare. Stew in the sun and the heat of a Louisiana September for a week or two, and watch the nightmare become a reality...
The big problem, or so I've read, is that while the river and the lake keep getting higher as sediment settles on their bottoms -- half a continent's worth, in the Mississippi's case -- the ground that New Orleans sits on keeps sinking lower -- in part because the same levees that keep the water out also prevent fresh layers of silt and mud from being deposited to offset natural subsidiance. As a result, the city is sinking at a rate of three feet per century -- about eight times faster than the world average. Which means the levees have to be raised steadily higher, and the pumps have to work steadily harder, to keep it dry.
Now that the worst has happened, many pundits, particularly on the left, are pointing to the budget cuts that have hamstrung the Army Corps of Engineers in its endless battle of New Orleans:
"The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars..."
...But the bigger story behind the drowning of New Orleans is what it reveals about the longer-term consequences of America's lunatic environmental priorities. For nearly 160 years, private industry and governments alike have been chopping and channeling the Mississippi and its tributaries -- turning rivers into drainage ditches, riverbanks into Maginot Line-style fortifications, and wetlands into factory farms. This has created the same self-defeating spiral that doomed New Orleans -- the rivers rise, the riverbanks sink, forcing the levees higher and higher, until some of them are now as tall as four-story buildings.
There's no future in this -- and for Southern Lousiana, home to about 40% of the wetlands in the entire continental United States, the future is now. Without the silt and mud that the Mississippi once spread liberally across the entire network of sloughs and bayous that flow to the sea, the Gulf of Mexico is not-so-gradually munching its way north -- even as the federal government spends millions each year to dredge the main shipping channels of sediment:
"Up to 35 square miles of Louisiana's wetlands sink into the Gulf of Mexico each year. To date, an area the size of Rhode Island has been lost. In some places, the coastline has retreated 30 miles..."
...even Dick Cheney might want to think about the effect the destruction of South Lousiana could have on his beloved energy industry. The infrastructure -- drilling platforms, ports, shipyards -- that supports something like 20% of all U.S. oil and gas production is being left further and further out to sea:
"As executive director of the Greater LaFourche Port Commission, [Ted Falgout] manages the country's largest transportation hub for offshore oil and gas drilling. There are 600 offshore drilling platforms within 40 miles of the port.
"The road connecting Port Fourchon to civilization, Louisiana Route 1, sits four feet above sea level for its final 18 miles. If a hurricane were to wash it away, nearly 20% of the total U.S. oil supply would be jeopardized. Gasoline prices might triple, Falgout warns."
Now, thanks to Katrina, the hidden costs of all those decades of insane policies are being made visible to the entire world.
...The real lesson of Katrina, though, is that the scenes we've been watching in New Orleans could be repeated in many other places in the decades ahead, if the worst-case scenarios generated by the global climate change models become realities.
It's easy, even for reasonable people, to disregard those scenarios. The worst case, after all, doesn't usually happen. But the flooding of New Orleans, like the destruction of Pompeii, is a graphic demonstration of the fact that sometimes the worst case (or something like it) does happen, especially when it is preceded by years of willful ignorance and blind self interest.
If the worst case for global climate change comes to pass, the environmental and economic losses will dwarf, many times over, the costs of Hurricane Katrina. They'll also reduce into insignificance the price tag on the Kyoto Treaty -- which itself may be too little, too late. If Shrub really thinks that doing something about climate change would "wreck the economy," he should spend some of his unused vacation time thinking about what just happened to New Orleans.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
They Write Letters
As I've mentioned, the correlation between burning fossil fuels, greenhousing, and storms is nothing new. Disasters like New Orleans have been predicted for some time. But as long as the people that own the government have an interest in burning all of our fossil fuels, for their profit and to keep us in line with their program, nothing will change.
Yet many people know better, and the best scientists have been fighting an unseen battle to get the word out.
In 2001, a letter to the Editor of Science magazine, organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was written and published ( Science 6 July 2001; 293: 48-49 [DOI: 10.1126/science.293.5527.48] ) :
Climate Variability and Global Warming
Although uncertainties in global warming are many and varied, they are not as great as stated in the recent U.S. National Research Council (NRC) report (1). As Richard A. Kerr notes in his News of the Week article, President George W. Bush seized upon these uncertainties to justify the administration's limited response ("Bush backs spending for a 'global problem,'" 15 Jun., p. 1978). Specifically, Bush "emphasized that the contribution of natural climate variability to the past century's warming is uncertain," to quote Kerr.
Unfortunately, in the NRC report, two aspects of natural climate variability are conflated. First, there is natural variability that is tied to external forcings, such as variations in the Sun, volcanoes, and the orbital variations of Earth around the Sun. The latter is the driving force for the major ice ages and interglacial periods. Second, there is natural variability that is internal to the climate system, arising, for instance, from interactions between the atmosphere and ocean, such as El Niño. This internal variability occurs even in an unchanging climate.
In the NRC report and in its summary, natural variability is said to be "quite large," but both kinds of variability are treated as if they are internal. Glacial to interglacial swings are discussed without mention of the known causes. Several lines of evidence, from the instrumental and paleoclimate records (2) and from climate models (3), strongly suggest that the recent increase in global mean temperature is beyond that possible from internal processes and thus must be caused by an increase in heating. This reasoning also puts limits on how large aerosol cooling could be. Further, known causes such as changes in the Sun and volcanic activity in the past 50 years have, if anything, led to cooling in this interval, leaving only the human-caused increase in greenhouse gases as the culprit. This reasoning has also been quantitatively confirmed with climate models (3, 4).
A consequence of mistreatment of natural climate variability in the NRC report is that the caveats are overstated. Natural climate variability is dealt with much more thoroughly in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment (4), which was developed over about 3 years (versus 1 month for the NRC report). The summary from the IPCC is that "[t]here is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
Kevin E. Trenberth
Head,
Climate Analysis Section,
National Center for Atmospheric Research,
Boulder, CO 80307, USA.
E-mail: trenbert@ucar.edu
References and Notes
1. Committee on the Science of Climate Change, Division of Earth and Life Studies, National Research Council, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2001). Available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10139.html
2. M. E. Mann, R. S. Bradley, M. K. Hughes, Geophys. Res. Lett. 26, 759 (1999).
3. P. A. Stott et al., Science 281, 2133 (2000).
4. IPCC, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, J. T. Houghton et al., Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge).
What Dr. Trenberth is saying to his colleagues is that the "known unknowns" aren't unknown at all. In fact, the evidence is known quite well. Not being one to take rebuffs from the President lightly, more work from his lab along these lines was pursued, and will be discussed here soon.
Yet many people know better, and the best scientists have been fighting an unseen battle to get the word out.
In 2001, a letter to the Editor of Science magazine, organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was written and published ( Science 6 July 2001; 293: 48-49 [DOI: 10.1126/science.293.5527.48] ) :
Climate Variability and Global Warming
Although uncertainties in global warming are many and varied, they are not as great as stated in the recent U.S. National Research Council (NRC) report (1). As Richard A. Kerr notes in his News of the Week article, President George W. Bush seized upon these uncertainties to justify the administration's limited response ("Bush backs spending for a 'global problem,'" 15 Jun., p. 1978). Specifically, Bush "emphasized that the contribution of natural climate variability to the past century's warming is uncertain," to quote Kerr.
Unfortunately, in the NRC report, two aspects of natural climate variability are conflated. First, there is natural variability that is tied to external forcings, such as variations in the Sun, volcanoes, and the orbital variations of Earth around the Sun. The latter is the driving force for the major ice ages and interglacial periods. Second, there is natural variability that is internal to the climate system, arising, for instance, from interactions between the atmosphere and ocean, such as El Niño. This internal variability occurs even in an unchanging climate.
In the NRC report and in its summary, natural variability is said to be "quite large," but both kinds of variability are treated as if they are internal. Glacial to interglacial swings are discussed without mention of the known causes. Several lines of evidence, from the instrumental and paleoclimate records (2) and from climate models (3), strongly suggest that the recent increase in global mean temperature is beyond that possible from internal processes and thus must be caused by an increase in heating. This reasoning also puts limits on how large aerosol cooling could be. Further, known causes such as changes in the Sun and volcanic activity in the past 50 years have, if anything, led to cooling in this interval, leaving only the human-caused increase in greenhouse gases as the culprit. This reasoning has also been quantitatively confirmed with climate models (3, 4).
A consequence of mistreatment of natural climate variability in the NRC report is that the caveats are overstated. Natural climate variability is dealt with much more thoroughly in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment (4), which was developed over about 3 years (versus 1 month for the NRC report). The summary from the IPCC is that "[t]here is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
Kevin E. Trenberth
Head,
Climate Analysis Section,
National Center for Atmospheric Research,
Boulder, CO 80307, USA.
E-mail: trenbert@ucar.edu
References and Notes
1. Committee on the Science of Climate Change, Division of Earth and Life Studies, National Research Council, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2001). Available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10139.html
2. M. E. Mann, R. S. Bradley, M. K. Hughes, Geophys. Res. Lett. 26, 759 (1999).
3. P. A. Stott et al., Science 281, 2133 (2000).
4. IPCC, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, J. T. Houghton et al., Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge).
What Dr. Trenberth is saying to his colleagues is that the "known unknowns" aren't unknown at all. In fact, the evidence is known quite well. Not being one to take rebuffs from the President lightly, more work from his lab along these lines was pursued, and will be discussed here soon.
"Farfetched"
That Terra'ist Truthout site has a couple of interesting reports.
In Storm Turns Focus to Global Warming, Miguel Bustillo in The Los Angeles Times says:
...Most hurricane scientists maintain that linking global warming to more-frequent severe storms, such as Hurricane Katrina, is premature, at best.
Though warmer sea-surface temperatures caused by climate change theoretically could boost the frequency and potency of hurricanes, scientists say the 150-year record of Atlantic storms shows ample precedent for recent events.
But a paper published last month in the journal Nature by meteorologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is part of an emerging body of research challenging the prevailing view.
It concluded that the destructive power of hurricanes had increased 50% over the last half a century, and that a rise in surface temperatures linked to global warming was at least partly responsible.
"I was one of those skeptics myself - a year ago," Emanuel said Monday.
But after examining data on hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific, he said, "I was startled to see this upward trend" in duration and top wind speeds.
"People are beginning to seriously wonder whether there is a [global warming] signal there. I think you are going to see a lot more of a focus on this in coming years."
Hurricane activity in the Atlantic has been higher than normal in nine of the last 11 years, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This month, the agency raised its already-high hurricane forecast for this year to 18 to 21 tropical storms, including as many as 11 that would become hurricanes and five to seven that would reach major-hurricane status. That could make 2005 one of the most violent hurricane seasons ever recorded. A typical storm year in the Atlantic results in six hurricanes.
But the agency believes that the increase in hurricanes is most likely the result of a confluence of cyclical ocean and atmospheric conditions that tend to produce heightened tropical storms every 20 to 30 years. If global warming is playing any role in the hurricanes, it is a minor one, the federal agency maintains.
Computer models have shown for years that rising sea-surface temperatures resulting from global warming could create more ideal conditions for hurricanes.
Yet before Emanuel's research there were few indications that hurricanes had become stronger or more frequent, despite well-documented increases in surface temperatures.
Moreover, skeptical hurricane scientists were quick to point out that worldwide weather records were too inadequate for a thorough examination of such trends. They said that would require an analysis of storm activity going back hundreds if not thousands of years.
"There is absolutely no empirical evidence..."
I have found that training as a scientist is not always a guarantee of your objectivity, especially when your funding requires you abandon it. Just sayin'.
Bustillo continues:
...Nonetheless, some scientists have maintained that the rise in mean global temperatures over the last half a century - a well-documented trend widely linked to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels - will inevitably have an effect on storms, if it hasn't already.
"It's the ocean temperatures and sea-surface temperatures that provide the fuel for hurricanes," said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who recently published a paper in the journal Science contending that climate change could cause hurricanes to produce more rain and thereby become more dangerous.
"It's the big guys, the more intense storms, that have been increasing," Trenberth said. Hurricane scientists have been "unduly influenced by what has been happening in their corner of the world in the Atlantic. But if you look more broadly, at what has been happening in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, there is a clear trend."
Such views remain controversial among veteran hurricane scientists...
To say the least.
Dr. Trenberth has published some interesting things recently in Science:
Uncertainty in Hurricanes and Global Warming
Kevin Trenberth
Science 17 June 2005; 308: 1753-1754 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1112551]
Modern Global Climate Change
Thomas R. Karl and Kevin E. Trenberth
Science 5 December 2003; 302: 1719-1723 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1090228]
Toward Integrated Reconstruction of Past Climates
Kevin E. Trenberth and Bette L. Otto-Bliesner
Science 25 April 2003; 300: 589-590 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1083122]
Changes in Tropical Clouds and Radiation
Kevin E. Trenberth, Bruce A. Wielicki, Anthony D. Del Genio, Takmeng Wong, Junye Chen, Barbara E. Carlson, Richard P. Allan, Franklin Robertson, Herbert Jacobowitz, Anthony Slingo, David A. Randall, Jeffrey T. Kiehl, Brian J. Soden, C. T. Gordon, Alvin J. Miller, Shi-Keng Yang, and Joel Susskind
Science 21 June 2002; 296: 2095 [DOI: 10.1126/science.296.5576.2095a]
Climate Variability and Global Warming
Kevin E. Trenberth
Science 6 July 2001; 293: 48-49 [DOI: 10.1126/science.293.5527.48]
Basically, he has some real evidence, and covers it in exquisite detail.
Farfetched? Certainly enough for me to blog on for a few days. I'll be reproducing some of it here for you to think about. Of course there will be massive farfetched interpretation for you.
In the second article, there's less objectivity, and more anger. Which, objectively, may be justified.
In Katrina's Real Name, Ross Gelbspan at the The Boston Globe says:
The Hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming... As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours, more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms.
Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.
The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying.
Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of Hurricane Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue.
The reason is simple: To allow the climate to stabilize requires humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent. That, of course, threatens the survival of one of the largest commercial enterprises in history.
In 1995, public utility hearings in Minnesota found that the coal industry had paid more than $1 million to four scientists who were public dissenters on global warming. And ExxonMobil has spent more than $13 million since 1998 on an anti-global warming public relations and lobbying campaign.
In 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when President George W. Bush was elected president - and subsequently took suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies.
As the pace of climate change accelerates, many researchers fear we have already entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change.
Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the US media.
When the US press has bothered to cover the subject of global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what the warming is doing to our agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather.
For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations...
Ah, yes, anger over farfetched possibilities, and a report of the opinion of a majority of the world's atmospheric scientists. Which, of course, must be balanced by the best meterologists Halliburton can buy.
But enough of balance.
More reality based facts for you, as real as the coliforms swimming 20 feet deep in the streets of New Orleans tonight, with reference citations, soon.
In Storm Turns Focus to Global Warming, Miguel Bustillo in The Los Angeles Times says:
...Most hurricane scientists maintain that linking global warming to more-frequent severe storms, such as Hurricane Katrina, is premature, at best.
Though warmer sea-surface temperatures caused by climate change theoretically could boost the frequency and potency of hurricanes, scientists say the 150-year record of Atlantic storms shows ample precedent for recent events.
But a paper published last month in the journal Nature by meteorologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is part of an emerging body of research challenging the prevailing view.
It concluded that the destructive power of hurricanes had increased 50% over the last half a century, and that a rise in surface temperatures linked to global warming was at least partly responsible.
"I was one of those skeptics myself - a year ago," Emanuel said Monday.
But after examining data on hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific, he said, "I was startled to see this upward trend" in duration and top wind speeds.
"People are beginning to seriously wonder whether there is a [global warming] signal there. I think you are going to see a lot more of a focus on this in coming years."
Hurricane activity in the Atlantic has been higher than normal in nine of the last 11 years, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This month, the agency raised its already-high hurricane forecast for this year to 18 to 21 tropical storms, including as many as 11 that would become hurricanes and five to seven that would reach major-hurricane status. That could make 2005 one of the most violent hurricane seasons ever recorded. A typical storm year in the Atlantic results in six hurricanes.
But the agency believes that the increase in hurricanes is most likely the result of a confluence of cyclical ocean and atmospheric conditions that tend to produce heightened tropical storms every 20 to 30 years. If global warming is playing any role in the hurricanes, it is a minor one, the federal agency maintains.
Computer models have shown for years that rising sea-surface temperatures resulting from global warming could create more ideal conditions for hurricanes.
Yet before Emanuel's research there were few indications that hurricanes had become stronger or more frequent, despite well-documented increases in surface temperatures.
Moreover, skeptical hurricane scientists were quick to point out that worldwide weather records were too inadequate for a thorough examination of such trends. They said that would require an analysis of storm activity going back hundreds if not thousands of years.
"There is absolutely no empirical evidence..."
I have found that training as a scientist is not always a guarantee of your objectivity, especially when your funding requires you abandon it. Just sayin'.
Bustillo continues:
...Nonetheless, some scientists have maintained that the rise in mean global temperatures over the last half a century - a well-documented trend widely linked to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels - will inevitably have an effect on storms, if it hasn't already.
"It's the ocean temperatures and sea-surface temperatures that provide the fuel for hurricanes," said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who recently published a paper in the journal Science contending that climate change could cause hurricanes to produce more rain and thereby become more dangerous.
"It's the big guys, the more intense storms, that have been increasing," Trenberth said. Hurricane scientists have been "unduly influenced by what has been happening in their corner of the world in the Atlantic. But if you look more broadly, at what has been happening in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, there is a clear trend."
Such views remain controversial among veteran hurricane scientists...
To say the least.
Dr. Trenberth has published some interesting things recently in Science:
Uncertainty in Hurricanes and Global Warming
Kevin Trenberth
Science 17 June 2005; 308: 1753-1754 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1112551]
Modern Global Climate Change
Thomas R. Karl and Kevin E. Trenberth
Science 5 December 2003; 302: 1719-1723 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1090228]
Toward Integrated Reconstruction of Past Climates
Kevin E. Trenberth and Bette L. Otto-Bliesner
Science 25 April 2003; 300: 589-590 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1083122]
Changes in Tropical Clouds and Radiation
Kevin E. Trenberth, Bruce A. Wielicki, Anthony D. Del Genio, Takmeng Wong, Junye Chen, Barbara E. Carlson, Richard P. Allan, Franklin Robertson, Herbert Jacobowitz, Anthony Slingo, David A. Randall, Jeffrey T. Kiehl, Brian J. Soden, C. T. Gordon, Alvin J. Miller, Shi-Keng Yang, and Joel Susskind
Science 21 June 2002; 296: 2095 [DOI: 10.1126/science.296.5576.2095a]
Climate Variability and Global Warming
Kevin E. Trenberth
Science 6 July 2001; 293: 48-49 [DOI: 10.1126/science.293.5527.48]
Basically, he has some real evidence, and covers it in exquisite detail.
Farfetched? Certainly enough for me to blog on for a few days. I'll be reproducing some of it here for you to think about. Of course there will be massive farfetched interpretation for you.
In the second article, there's less objectivity, and more anger. Which, objectively, may be justified.
In Katrina's Real Name, Ross Gelbspan at the The Boston Globe says:
The Hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming... As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours, more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms.
Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.
The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying.
Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of Hurricane Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue.
The reason is simple: To allow the climate to stabilize requires humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent. That, of course, threatens the survival of one of the largest commercial enterprises in history.
In 1995, public utility hearings in Minnesota found that the coal industry had paid more than $1 million to four scientists who were public dissenters on global warming. And ExxonMobil has spent more than $13 million since 1998 on an anti-global warming public relations and lobbying campaign.
In 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when President George W. Bush was elected president - and subsequently took suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies.
As the pace of climate change accelerates, many researchers fear we have already entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change.
Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the US media.
When the US press has bothered to cover the subject of global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what the warming is doing to our agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather.
For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations...
Ah, yes, anger over farfetched possibilities, and a report of the opinion of a majority of the world's atmospheric scientists. Which, of course, must be balanced by the best meterologists Halliburton can buy.
But enough of balance.
More reality based facts for you, as real as the coliforms swimming 20 feet deep in the streets of New Orleans tonight, with reference citations, soon.
Homeland Insecurity
...The 2004 hurricane season, as you probably recall, was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:
The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.
"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.
But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions:
"We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.
Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich.
And now Bush has lost that gamble, big time. We hope that Congress will investigate what went wrong here.
The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home, and yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?
Of course, it's not enough, whatever he says. You might also notice that despite a lot of Mission Accomplished talk, Bush has gutted the FEMA. Thank Hecate for the link.
The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.
"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.
But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions:
"We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.
Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich.
And now Bush has lost that gamble, big time. We hope that Congress will investigate what went wrong here.
The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home, and yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?
Of course, it's not enough, whatever he says. You might also notice that despite a lot of Mission Accomplished talk, Bush has gutted the FEMA. Thank Hecate for the link.
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