Climate Change Discussion

[EddieWalker]

Most of what you said here is true but I must disagree with some of your Katrina falacies.

Tallyho,

I learned more about why people didn't evacuate Katrina reading your post than I have from the news media since it happened!!!! What you say makes allot of sense. I had no idea about the previous evacuations, nor did I consider what was inolved with evacuating. I know that I've never done it and hopt to never have to.

It seems to me that the finger pointing got so severe, that the media totaly forgot to report what actually happened. They focused on the dead and wild stories that were later proven to be false, and ignored the basics of the entire event. National Geographic did a show in what happened that broke it down very nicely. From the time Katrina started to form to the aftermath. It was very imformative and it's where I learned that the Levi's broke during the storm. I'd heard in the news that they broke well after the storm. But that was just more bad coverage by the media.

It really makes more sense to me why the people didn't evacuate now that I've read your post. Thanks.

Eddie

 

[IH3444]

I feel I owe you an apoligy Tallyho, and appreciate the lenghty explaination about the evacuations, but many of those living in New Orleans are their by choice. It is low lands located near a highly active coastline. Your assesment of the city officals is very accurate, and I said the same thing 2 days before Katrina hit.

 

[tallyho8]

Now all of a sudden it's the goverment's fault that people decided to live in areas which were below sea level, and risk , then experience the extreme hardships that those decisions resulted in. QUOTE]

What many fail to realize it that much of this area was NOT below sea level when our parents or grandparents moved here years ago. The land has been steadily sinking and eroding away due to actions taken by the feds which are too numerous to list here. National oil companies dug hundreds of canals through our wetlands which brought in saltwater intrusion and eroded away millions of acres of land that protected the area, between the New Orleans area and the Gulf. New Orleans is 50 miles closer to the Gulf than it was 75 years ago due to these actions.

Our main flooding came from the destructive actions of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet channel which the feds built here in the 1960s against fierce protest. This was a multi-million dollar pork barrel project that the huge majority of people in the area did not want and which has done nothing but lose huge sums of money over the years. Warnings, protests and court actions over the years to get this canal closed before it flooded the area fell on deaf ears. This one canal, which serves no useful purpose whatsoever, caused all the flooding in St Bernard Parish where 100% of the homes were underwater, many of them well above sea level, and it caused almost all of the flooding in Orleans Parish. Though the purposes this canal was built for were never utilized, and only one business in the area has much use for it, and it alone has caused billions of dollars in damages to the area, the feds have still not said if they will close it and it remains open to flood the area again in the next major hurricane. Though virtually 100% of the people in the area want this destructive canal closed, no amount of protests and lawsuits have been able to convince the feds to close it and no one except one small business benefitting from it.

Blaming New Orleanians for New Orleans flooding is like blaming the victims of the Trade Towers for being there when the planes hit because they knew it was the prime terrorist target in the world.

Though I have never lived in New Orleans, I have lived in it's suburban area for 61 years and I know New Orleans is far from being a perfect city and has attracted many of the worst class of people over the last half century. The estimated 10,000 looters who looted basically every place in the city, stealing billions of dollars in goods, loading it in their cars, then running away to other cities to hide and do destruction there, have caused the image of New Orleanians to be disgraced throughout the world, and this has caused many to believe that there are nothing here but poor worthless bums and thieves who don't deserve to be helped. But every major city (and minor ones too) have a certain percentage of these types.

And to make matters worse, the news media has only shown the oldest, poorest, part of the flooded areas of the city. The truth is that the oldest, poorest parts of the city did not flood because they were built on the highest ground. All the newest and most expensive subdivisions are the ones that flooded, including the Lakeview area where all the upper-income white people lived who paid 90% of the property taxes that kept the city operating.

The Downtown and French Quarter areas, which are all the tourists ever see, are all back to normal and in full operation for our Mardi Gras season which is in full swing now, so if any of you have been wanting to come down and join the world's largest? celebration and eat the world's best food, the door is open.

EDITED (after last post) IH3444 I was busy writing this lengthy post while you made your last post. No apology is necessary because many just believe what they hear in the media. People who have lived in an area for generations tend to not leave their family, friends and roots to move elsewhere in fear of a calamity hitting. Do people move out of California from fear of earthquakes, or out of the midwest for fear of tornados, or out of New York for fear of blizzards? Yet, these are natural disasters. The thing that sets Katrina apart in the New Orleans area is that 90% of the damage was caused by man-made projects that the local population could not control and they choose to stay and fight for what was theirs and file lawsuits and protest in the hope that these canals could be closed before the Big One.

 

[SPYDERLK]

Quote: Dennis Miller said it best:

If there is a hole in the atmosphere, and heat rises, then the heat should go out through the hole - you can’t have it both ways.


On its surface this appears to be a good explanation to the link in #290.
To think a little deeper - Heat itself does not have any preferential direction other than toward a cooler area. Rise of heat is due to density differences in materials that can move. This natural convection is driven by gravity.

The hole, the ozone one?, would not contribute to heat rise in that way. Interesting tho, it may provide a very clear avenue for Antarctica to radiate heat into space. That might be one of the keys to this seemingly self contradicting puzzle we keep running into.
larry

 

[N80]

However, evacuating is far more difficult than you make it seem.

I really didn't say it was easy. I said it was easier than not evacuating in the face of such a storm in such a place. How could anyone whose home was underwater argue with that logic?

Most of the other places that flooded had never flooded before so we had no way of knowing which areas would flood.

That hardly seems like an excuse. There had been countless models of what would happen to NO in the event of a major hurricane. Mother nature brought no surprises to the table in this one except that it could have _easily_ been much worse than it was. Most models looked worse than what actually happened.

(Though I made sure all the properties I own were well above sea level before I purchased and they were all safe).

Only one in three little pigs builds wisely. You're a wise one. Do you think it impossible for others to exercise the same prudence? If not, then you shouldn't mind them shacking up with you when the big bad wolf comes, which is, in effect, just another form of wealth redistribution, no?

This means 20 million people must evacuate. TO WHERE? There aren't that many motel rooms in the south. There aren't enough highways to handle the traffic.

First off, I live in SC and lived on the SC coast for many years. I lived on the Florida coast for many years too. So I'm intimately familiar with the hurricane drill. Fact is, in any circumstance it is highly improbable that the full 20 million, or even a tenth of that, would need to move at the same time, in the same direction.

Evacuation means you are out of work without pay for a week or more and paying big dollars to evacuate.

I'm not sure I understand your point. At some point the physical and financial threat of a major hurricane trumps one's desire not to risk a week's pay. Death and destruction will do that, you know. And what is the point of dragging out the logistical challenges of evacuation? My family has done it. It sucks. But it is better to complain about the travails of evacuation than to expect someone in a chopper to pull you off a roof or feed you MRE's in a football stadium. I understand that the logistics are enormous, but isn't Katrina the object lesson on the necessity of actually preparing for what everyone in the US knew was coming? And I'm not defending those who cried wolf. But you make your decisions and you live or die by them when in the face of a hurricane

The levee breaks.

History tells us that this is what levees do. Always. There are songs about levees breaking. Why would anyone expect levees to hold in the face of such an onslaught. The levee breaks. Where do you want to be when that happens?

Officials run around like chickens with their heads cut off not knowing what to do and with NO plans.

And that's what officials do. I'm not in any way defending how Katrina was handled in any way, but it starts at home. I remember watching those folks lining up to get in the Super Dome as the rain and wind were starting up and I told my wife at that very moment that none of these people from the poor to the mayor had any vague notion of the seriousness of this storm. It was a goat rope from the day the storm headed that way.

EVACUATION IS NOT AN OPTION! A very rich city would go bankrupt evacuating it's citizens many times a year.[/qoute]

No, its the only option other than what you got, which is a lot worse than bankrupt.

The federal gov't maintaining IT'S levees that it built and has complete power over, IS the only option.

I disagree. The farther from home the responsibility is, the less you can rely on it. Levees break. Super levees break. Expensive levees break and the first levee that some arrogant engineer claims is storm proof will kill more people than some levee built and maintained by some local parish. And let's not get into politics. It is easy to point the finger at Washington, but New Orleans, and the entire state of Louisiana have the richest history of political corruption in the US. It preceded Huey Long by decades and continues at this very moment. Louisiana is a black hole for federal money.

Please forgive me for rambling but Katrina is a sore spot for many of us in the area who have lost so much, friends, relatives, property, neighborhoods and more,

I understand and I don't mean to seem totally unsympathetic. My main point was that Katrina was not and is not a result of global warming in the scope of the damage and death it caused. This was, and still is, a clear and horrible demonstration of the biblical parable about building on a rock or on sinking sand. The natural force of the storm itself isbest illustrated by the French Quarter. The storm hardly damaged it at all. Just a few feet higher and in the right place makes a huge difference. A few blocks away and you get disaster. And none of this was a surprise to anyone anywhere, from doomsday specials on the History Channel to armchair experts like me.

while the news media makes it look like it affected no one but some poor dumb souls on welfare who were too stupid to leave.

Well, in all fairness that is not the picture the media gave to the rest of the world. That picture is best summed up as a government so cold and uncaring that it abandoned its noble poor in time of need, plus the correlation with GW that NO ONE buys. So you can understand why some of us call that particular characterization to task. I'm not suggesting that the storm didn't affect anyone else but the poor (be they ignorant or betrayed). But that's what you heard the most about since most everyone else, like yourself and my family who came down there and got my (rather stupid) uncle out a few days after the storm, who took care of themselves.

But if we beleive that global warming is going to bring this sort of thing at an accelerated rate compared to the past (I don't, but if we did), and the UN report says that if we do everything in our power to slow down the global warming itself, then it will still have its affects for a century or more, then our only option is to learn how to deal with such storms. And if we are prepared to live in places that everyone knows are extremely vulnerable to catastrophic damage from storms of average intensity, then we better find a way to get out of the way, no matter what it costs since the costs of not preparing have been proven to be a lot higher than preparing. Does Katrina give us any more of a basic object lesson than that?

 

[tallyho8]

QUOTE=N80
I really didn't say it was easy. I said it was easier than not evacuating in the face of such a storm in such a place.

65% of the population did evacuate. 35% did not evacuate (I am one) because they could not or would not for various reasons.

Quote
There had been countless models of what would happen to NO in the event of a major hurricane. Mother nature brought no surprises to the table in this one except that it could have _easily_ been much worse than it was. Most models looked worse than what actually happened.

Models depict what will happen to California in an earthquake. Do you expect all of them to move also?

Quote
First off, I live in SC and lived on the SC coast for many years. I lived on the Florida coast for many years too. So I'm intimately familiar with the hurricane drill. Fact is, in any circumstance it is highly improbable that the full 20 million, or even a tenth of that, would need to move at the same time, in the same direction.

So who gets to pick who can go and who has to stay?

Quote
But it is better to complain about the travails of evacuation than to expect someone in a chopper to pull you off a roof or feed you MRE's in a football stadium. But you make your decisions and you live or die by them when in the face of a hurricane

90% of the people killed in Katrina were elderly senior citizens at home or in nursing homes who had no way to evacuate and no one to assist them.

Quote
New Orleans, and the entire state of Louisiana have the richest history of political corruption in the US. It preceded Huey Long by decades and continues at this very moment.

I AGREE.

Quote
Louisiana is a black hole for federal money.

Louisiana is a good excuse for the feds to claim that's where the money is going while 10% of it comes down here and 90% stays in the pockets of Washington Bureaucrats.

Quote
My main point was that Katrina was not and is not a result of global warming in the scope of the damage and death it caused.

I AGREE.

Quote
The natural force of the storm itself isbest illustrated by the French Quarter. The storm hardly damaged it at all.

Winds did not do the damage. The damage was done by the water that flowed from the Gulf to the city up the Federally constructed MRGO canal that none of us wanted in the first place and that we can't get the feds to close down. I DO NOT blame New Orleans Katrina damage on GW. I DO blame New Orleans Katrina damage on the feds for refusing to close their conduit of the floodwaters that caused the damage. (They can not close it down without admitting it was the cause of the damage thus exposing themselves to billions of dollars in lawsuits)

 

[SkyPup]

Seems like the only ones who did good by Katrina were the attorneys? They stand to make billions in profits off of GW over the coming decades...

 

[N80]

65% of the population did evacuate. 35% did not evacuate (I am one) because they could not or would not for various reasons.

And presumably the death toll was highest amongst those who did not evacuate. And presumably most of the human tragedy, and thus media hoopla, centered around those who did not evacuate. The object lesson is for the 35%, not the 65%.

Models depict what will happen to California in an earthquake. Do you expect all of them to move also?

If they had two, three or four days notice then yes I would expect them to move. I don't understand your point. The people who suffer the most and subsequantly 'cost' the most are those who stay.

And if it all comes down to making choices, I'm fine with that, but no one today expects anyone to suffer from making a bad choice. Which is absurd. I've had to make the decision more than once.

So who gets to pick who can go and who has to stay?

I'm not sure what the point of that question is. I'm sure you know how it actually works right? If you think the storm is going to kill you or your family and some elected (or nepotistic appointee) tells you its okay to stay and you do, whose fault is it if you get hurt? If they tell you to leave and you don't, whose fault is it if you are hurt? In my mind both answers are the same.

90% of the people killed in Katrina were elderly senior citizens at home or in nursing homes who had no way to evacuate and no one to assist them.

And we would agree that that is shameful. Who is the current mayor of NO?

Louisiana is a good excuse for the feds to claim that's where the money is going while 10% of it comes down here and 90% stays in the pockets of Washington Bureaucrats.

He says/she says. That's why we need to be more careful who we give our money to.

Winds did not do the damage. The damage was done by the water that flowed from the Gulf

That is precisely my point. I witnessed the aftermath of Hugo. Along highway 17, the Francis Marion National Forest was miles of mature long leaf pines. After Hugo for miles inland, north and south, as far as you could see, those pines were broken off about fifteen feet up. That sort of force could have, and will hit NO one day. The same amount of rain, bigger tidal surge plus wind damage like Hugo. My point is that in the face of that sort of possibility (and Katrina was that strong up until the last minute) people cannot afford to stay. That is the one thing that has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I DO blame New Orleans Katrina damage on the feds for refusing to close their conduit of the floodwaters that caused the damage.

I don't remember the details but I think you know it was not a simple 'wrong' decision. The water has to go somewhere. But regardless, part of my point is that you can't rely on the mayor or Uncle Sam. I think the property damage beef is very different from the loss of life beef. But object lesson number two is that if you rely on the government to protect you or save you from every one of life's situations, you will be disappointed most of the time. And who is the new mayor of New Orleans?

 

[tallyho8]

And presumably the death toll was highest amongst those who did not evacuate. And presumably most of the human tragedy, and thus media hoopla, centered around those who did not evacuate. The object lesson is for the 35%, not the 65%.

Even if 100% of the people had evacuated this would not have diminished the billions of dollars of losses.

WHOA! I just realized that this discussion has turned into an argument and I use TBN for relaxation and discussion with my friends. I think it would be best for me to not try to defend New Orleans anymore and also because it is no longer the New Orleans that I lived by and loved and grew up by and now I am ashamed of defending it anyway. Please excuse me if I refrain from any further discussion on this topic in this forum. Besides, it's time for me to go clean my horse stalls and I can just put up with so much in one day.

 

[N80]

I didn't think we were arguing. In fact, we agreed on more than we disagreed. And I didn't think your points were manure, and I apologize if mine smelled that way. But sometimes manure makes a pretty good fertilizer.