Climate change doesn’t care about our plans - that’s why cities need to plan for climate change

Ban Ki Moon, then United Nations Secretary General observed in 2011, that “Climate change does not respect borders, it does not respect who you are -- rich and poor, small and big.”

Interstate highway 45 is submerged from the effects
 of Hurricane Harvey seen during widespread flooding
in Houston, Texas, U.S. August 27, 2017.

Recent events from the immense damage that hurricanes Maria, Harvey and Irma have wreaked on Puerto Rico, Houston, Miami and the Caribbean, or the monsoon floods that have forced millions from their homes in India and Bangladesh, illustrate that climate change does not respect whether we are ready or not. Our planet’s climate has changed and its impact will be felt by every one of us and for generations to come.

Climate scientists have, historically, been reluctant to attribute specific natural disasters or weather events to climate change. Yet, there is no doubt that warmer surface water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean and the seas and oceans of South Asia contributed to the intensity of recent hurricanes and monsoon rains.

Read the zilent.org story by Mark Watts - “Climate change doesn’t care about our plans - that’s why cities need to plan for climate change.”

Conspiracies, Corruption and Climate

After the devastation wreaked by Harvey on Houston — devastation that was right in line with meteorologists’ predictions — you might have expected everyone to take heed when the same experts warned about the danger posed by Hurricane Irma. But you would have been wrong.

Rush Limbaugh in 2012, left; A satellite image on Thursday
 showed Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean Sea.

On Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh accused weather scientists of inventing Irma’s threat for political and financial reasons: “There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it,” he declared, adding that “fear and panic” help sell batteries, bottled water, and TV advertising.

He evacuated his Palm Beach mansion soon afterward.

Read Paul Krugman’s thoughts in The New York Times - “Conspiracies, Corruption and Climate.”

The Great Flood - Chris Hedges

How many times will we rebuild Florida’s cities, Houston, coastal New Jersey, New Orleans and other population centers ravaged by storms lethally intensified by global warming? At what point, surveying the devastation and knowing more is inevitable, will we walk away, leaving behind vast coastal dead zones? Will we retreat even further into magical thinking to cope with the fury we have unleashed from the natural world? Or will we respond rationally and radically alter our relationship to this earth that gives us life?

"People walk down a flooded street as they evacuate their homes
after the area was inundated with flooding from Hurricane Harvey
 on August 28, 2017 in Houston, Texas." 

Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception. The physical ruins of these empires, including the Mesopotamian, Roman, Mayan and Indus, litter the earth. They elevated, during acute distress, inept and corrupt leaders who channeled anger, fear and dwindling resources into self-defeating wars and vast building projects. The ruling oligarchs, driven by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds—the Forbidden City, Versailles—and hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery and poverty. The worse it got, the more the people lied to themselves and the more they wanted to be lied to. Reality was too painful to confront. They retreated into what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promised the return of the lost world through magical beliefs.

“The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present,” philosopher and psychologist William James wrote, “and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.”

Read the Common Dreams story by Chris Hedges - “The Great Flood.”.”

Who suffers when disasters strike? The poorest and most vulnerable.

When the skies opened over Houston, some of the worst flooding rose in Greenspoint. The low-income neighborhood off Interstate 45 — south of George Bush Intercontinental Airport and home to a namesake mall known for crime and vacant stores (its “days are definitely numbered,” DeadMalls.com noted in 2005) — is situated along Greens Bayou. The area’s black and Hispanic residents live mostly in multifamily, three- to five-bedroom apartments, in complexes built in not only floodplains but floodways , which the Federal Emergency Management Agency defines as channels or land reserved for discharging floodwaters. In a time-lapse video filmed Saturday night, a residential parking lot in the neighborhood goes quickly from damp to puddle to lake, until sunrise reveals a brown sea that has swallowed the first floor of the adjacent apartment buildings and half a dozen cars.

Alejandra Castillo takes a break from
carrying water-soaked items out of
her family's home after flood waters
receded in Houston.

A resident, Exavier Blanchard, set up the camera as the storm rolled in. “I heard the area floods,” he explained to HuffPost.

He heard right. Just over a year before, much of Greenspoint was inundated under several feet of water in what Houstonians call the Tax Day Flood, an intense storm that dumped 17 inches of rain on the city. Residents were still recovering from that deadly deluge — dealing with moldy apartments and fighting with landlords who had pushed them out with nowhere to go, or who were forcing them to keep paying rent on damaged homes — when Hurricane Harvey came calling.

Read The Washington Post story by by Jonathan M. Katz - “Who suffers when disasters strike? The poorest and most vulnerable.”

'Katrina brain': New Orleans looks to Houston, and sees itself

New Orleans: Several of Nance Harding's clients were acting oddly last week. Harding, a psychotherapist in New Orleans, noticed that some were quick to cry, others were irritable and easily startled; some were drinking more heavily than usual.

Fuel oil mixed with floodwaters near the collapsed
12th Street levee during Hurricane Katrina in
New Orleans, September 1, 2005. 

These were clients who had gone through Hurricane Katrina 12 years ago, and she was picking up the signals of a localised form of post-traumatic stress syndrome - or, as she calls it, "Katrina brain”.

It is a condition, she said, that ramps up each June with the return of hurricane season and spikes with the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 29. And this year, there is Hurricane Harvey.

Harding said she finds it easy to recognise the symptoms because "I have it", though not from Hurricane Katrina. She was nine years old and living in Galveston, Texas, when Hurricane Carla hit in September 1961. "I've walked in water up to my chest," she said.

Read the story in today's Melbourne Age by Campbell Robertson and John Schwartz - “'Katrina brain': New Orleans looks to Houston, and sees itself.”

Hurricane Harvey’s warning to all

Nobody wants to pick on Texas, or especially Houston, after a 1,000-year weather event that for several days turned the city into a lake and dispossessed thousands of their homes, belongings and, in some cases, loved ones.

Kathleen Parker.

The ultimate effects of the storm blandly named Harvey are yet to be fully understood. What is known is that most of the homes destroyed were uninsured for flooding and that U.S. taxpayers will be doing much of the bailing.

Meanwhile, comparisons to Hurricane Katrina 12 years ago are intriguing, if one is fortunate enough to be hugging dry land. Chief among the obvious differences is the death toll. Katrina took close to 2,000 lives. As of Friday, Harvey’s toll was 46, and the figure wasn’t expected to rise significantly.

Read the opinion piece on The Washington Post by Kathleen Parker - “Hurricane Harvey’s warning to all.”

With Harvey, imperfect engineering meets a perfect storm

Addicks and Barker Reservoirs are swaths of placid Texas prairie, wetland, and forest straddling I-10 where it hits Highway 6, about 20 miles west of downtown Houston. But that’s not how nature sees them. To nature, those two open spaces are the top of a hydrological basin that drains through the city and into the Houston Ship Channel.

Most of the time the reservoirs don’t reserve any water. But when it rains and rains and rains, they fill up, letting water burble through their gates into Buffalo Bayou and out toward the sea, to control flooding.

An aerial photograph of Lake Houston's
 spillway in on August 29, 2017.

Today, after five days of rain thanks to Hurricane Harvey, Addicks and Barker Reservoirs are as full as full can be. Houses both upstream and down are sitting in feet of water. Believe it or not, that’s how things are supposed to work. The question is whether Houstonians and the Corps are seeing the edge of the dams’ design envelope. Don't worry, for a moment, about 100-year storms and 500-year storms. Dam builders worry about a different standard: the Probable Maximum Flood.

Read the Wired story by Adam Rogers - “With Harvey, imperfect engineering meets a perfect storm.”

Tropical storm Harvey: catastrophic floods in Houston as city braces for days of rain

Tropical Storm Harvey has continued to batter Texas, hurling record rainfall at the nation’s fourth-largest city, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes and testing flood control systems to their limits.

 Interstate highway 45 is submerged.

Parts of the Houston area saw more than 22in (55cm) of rain in a 24-hour period to Sunday evening; too much for the bayous to handle, too much for roads to remain passable and threatening to overwhelm emergency teams.

Early on Monday army engineers released water from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs south-west of the city. Several thousand homes were likely to flood as a result but the plan was designed to save the city centre and its surrounding districts. Residents near the reservoirs have been told to monitor water levels and evacuate if they are in danger, but to wait until daylight before they do so.

The rising waters forced thousands of people to rooftops or higher ground as rescuers struggled to keep up with the constant calls for help. Helicopters landed near flooded freeways and high-water vehicles ploughed through water-logged intersections while some householders fled in kayaks or canoes or even swam to safety.

Read the story on The Guardian from Tom Dart in Houston - “Tropical storm Harvey: catastrophic floods in Houston as city braces for days of rain.”