Katrina

New Federal Interference With Oil-Spill Clean-Up: Feds Stop Louisiana From Dredging Needed to Create Protective Sand Berms

by Hans Bader on June 23, 2010 · 2 comments

in Agriculture, Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, Ethanol, Global Warming, International, Labor, Legal, Mobility, Natural Resources, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade, Zeitgeist

A TV station in New Orleans reports that “the federal government is shutting down the dredging that was being done to create protective sand berms in the Gulf of Mexico.”   Louisiana planned to create the sand berms to prevent the massive BP oil spill from polluting its coastline.

Earlier, a federal judge blocked Obama’s drilling ban on offshore drilling, citing deception by Obama administration officials.  The ban applied mostly to oil companies with radically better safety records than BP.  (BP’s executives gave lots of money to Obama and lobbied for his legislation.)

Obama delayed the clean-up of the Gulf of Mexico by blocking foreign crews from operating sophisticated clean-up vessels.  The Jones Act bans foreign vessels and crews from working in U.S. waters, but it gives the President the authority to completely waive that ban if he wishes.  Obama refused to lift the ban, even though American shippers who generally support the ban said they wouldn’t object to lifting it to fight the spill.  As a result of the ban, the U.S. rejected a lot of foreign aid from counties with expertise in fighting oil spills, and accepted only a small amount of foreign equipment to fight the spill.

The federal government has routinely been a thorn in the side of Louisiana as it seeks to fight the huge oil spill.  It recently used red tape to force Louisiana to stop using 16 barges that were cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico by sucking thousands of gallons of oil out of Louisiana’s oil-soaked waters.  Earlier, four oil skimmers needed to clean the Gulf were blocked by EPA officials.

The oil spill has been called “Obama’s Katrina,” but Gulf Coast resident Paul Rubin says this is unfair to George Bush, who was not nearly as incompetent as Obama has been in dealing with the spill at BP’s Deepwater Horizon.  In the Wall Street Journal, Rubin notes that the oil spill occurred in federal waters and thus was a federal responsibility, while Hurricane Katrina occurred mostly on state land and thus was largely a state, not federal, responsibility, enabling incompetent local officials in cities like New Orleans to “interfere” with federal relief efforts:

In many respects, the Deepwater Horizon disaster and Katrina are mirror images of each other. The harm from Katrina was on state land—mainly Louisiana, but also Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. As a result, President George W. Bush and the federal government were limited in what they could do. For example, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff wanted to take command of disaster relief on the day before landfall, but Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco refused. Federal response was hindered because the law gave first authority to state and local authorities.  State and local efforts—particularly in New Orleans, and Louisiana more broadly—interfered with what actions the federal government could actually take. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was late in ordering an evacuation and did not allow the use of school buses for evacuation, which could have saved hundreds of lives. President Bush had no power to change that decision.  The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is on federal offshore territory. The federal government has primary responsibility for handling the situation, while state and local governments remain limited in what they can do. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly changed its mind regarding the chemical dispersants that Louisiana is allowed to use. . . .As opposed to Katrina, state and local attempts to address the oil spill have been hindered by an ineffectual and chaotic federal response.

Obama is now using the BP oil spill to push a corporate-welfare-filled global-warming bill crafted partly by BP’s lobbyists.  Obama’s global warming legislation expands ethanol subsidies, which cause famine, starvation, and food riots in poor countries by shrinking the food supply, and also result in deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution. Subsidies for biofuels like ethanol are a big source of corporate welfare: “BP has lobbied for and profited from subsidies for biofuels . . . that cannot break even without government support.”

The $800 billion stimulus package is using taxpayer subsidies to replace U.S. jobs with foreign green jobs. It is also destroying jobs in America’s export sector.

Policy Peril Segment 3 – Hurricanes (updated 8/19/09)

by Marlo Lewis on July 30, 2009 · 5 comments

in Global Warming, Odds & Ends

Is global warming making hurricanes more destructive? Did global warming contribute to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina? Would Kyoto-style energy rationing help avert future weather-related catastrophes?

Well, just ask Al Gore! In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claims there’s a “strong new emerging consensus” that global warming is increasing the duration and intensity of hurricanes (AIT, p. 81), he depicts New Orleans as a global warming victim (pp. 94-95), and the threat of increasingly powerful storms is a major part of the alleged “climate crisis” that Gore proposes to solve by restricting our access to carbon-based energy. [click to continue…]

Despite lack of warming, alarmists predictably predict warming worse than predicted

by Marlo Lewis on February 24, 2009 · 2 comments

in Global Warming

As you may have heard, there has been no net warming of the planet since 2001, and no subsequent year was a warm as 1998 (admittedly a year with a major El Nino). A recent study by Keenlyside et al. (2008) concludes that “global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade” due to natural oscillations in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

As Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute explained at a recent congressional hearing, the suite of 21 climate models used in the IPCC’s mid-range emissions scenario (A1B) are on the verge of failing to reproduce actual climate data.

During the past 5 to 20 years, the observed trend in the average global temperature has been so low that it is starting to push the lower bounds of the climate models’ range of temperature predictions for that period. If 2009 is as cool as 2008 (with a La Nina brewing in the Pacific Ocean, that is not unlikely), then even the least sensitive of these models will be overestimating the actual amount of warming. And if Keenlyside is correct, and another decade elapses without significant warming, the models will have clearly failed.

The most important point for policymakers and citizens, as Michaels notes, is that if the models predict too much warming, then all model-based assessments of global warming impacts on agriculture, human health, extreme weather, etc. will be similarly overestimated.

So what do you do if you’re a climate alarmist and the world isn’t warming up as much as you said it would? Why, you redefine “climate sensitivity.” You claim that agriculture, health, weather, etc. are more “sensitive” to increases in global temperature than scientists once believed. You say that less warming than the IPCC warned us about will lead to worse impacts than the IPCC warned us about. That’s the gist of a recent IPCC-sponsored study, as summarized here by AP/MSNBC.com.

Well, I’m skeptical! First, the IPCC study claims that a 21st century temperature increase of only 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit and 3.6 degrees could significantly increase the severity of extreme weather. But Knutson et al. (2008), a leading modeling study of global warming and Atlantic tropical cyclones, projects that the same amount of warming will increase the average intensity of Atlantic hurricanes by only 1.7% but decrease hurricane frequency by 18%, producing a cumulative 25% decrease in Atlantic hurricane power. That’s a significant net climate benefit!

The IPCC study reportedly warns that even a wee bit of warming will produce deadly heat waves, suggesting (but not bluntly saying) that the 2003 killer heat wave in Europe was due to the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases. Yet, as Pat Michaels and Robert Balling document in their new book, Climate of Extremes, the European heat wave of 2003 was an atmospheric circulation anomaly–a bubble of hot air trapped in Europe during a summer that was slightly cooler than average worldwide.

The IPCC study, at least as summarized, also ignores research showing that as hot weather becomes more frequent, heat-related mortality declines. Cities with the hottest summer temperatures–Phoenix, AZ and Tampa, FL, for example, which have substantial elderly populations–have almost no heat-related mortality.

AP/MSNBC.Com quotes the researchers as saying: “For example, events such as Hurricane Katrina and the 2003 European heat wave have shown that the capacity to adapt to climate-related extreme events is lower than expected and, as a result, their consequences and associated vulnerabilities are higher than previously thought.”

This is complete rubbish. In 2006, Europe experienced a heat wave of comparable magnitude to the 2003 heat wave, yet you probably read nothing about it, because this time far fewer people died. What’s more, fewer people died than heat-related mortality models predicted (see here and here). Contrary to the IPCC bunch, the capacity to adapt to climate-related extreme events is higher than expected.

As for Katrina, this bespeaks a fundamental confusion on the part of the IPCC researchers. They confuse climate-related risk with climate change risk. Climate-related risk is chiefly determined by where you live and the existing social infrastructure, not by gradual changes in the atmosphere’s CO2 content.

New Orleans has always been in a hurricane corridor, and has always been below sea level. That’s the reason people in New Orleans are at risk, not because of global warming.

For example, a recent study by J.C. Mock finds no trend since 1800 in the frequency of major hurricanes striking Louisiana. The most active hurricane years in the record–1812, 1830, 1860–long predate the modern era of anthropogenic global warming.

Katrina was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history not because of any extra oomph it allegedly got from global warming (it was a category 1 storm by the time it hit New Orleans), but because government officials at all levels failed to provide adequate flood defenses for city that was well known to be vulnerable to hurricane-driven storm surges.