I am as democratic/left as it gets on most issues but I'd argue that its time to defund FEMA Insurance programs and let the private sector free market factor in the cost of impending destruction because of climate change. IMO that would put a hard dollar figure on the 'cost of doing nothing'. Which will (hopefully) translate into some kind or carbon taxes.
Or another alternative would be fund insurance through carbon tax dollars and return the rest as refund.
There are no disaster-free zones. I've looked. They don't exist.
It's a case of "pick your poison." Which disaster is least reprehensible to you?
In the Deep South where I grew up, you can set your watch by the summer afternoon thunderstorms. The last time I lived there, our TV and Wii got fried while turned off and plugged into an uninterupted power supply that was supposed to protect them from any electrical issues. To this day, my mother will say "Can't talk. A storm is coming. Bye!" when I call because the electrical storms are awful in Georgia.
When I lived in Kansas, it was tornadoes.
In California, earthquakes. Worse, California has fire season, not a season I ever want in my life again, ideally.
Etc ad nauseum.
Human development tends to have a strong correlation to flood zones because water is essential to human survival and human civilization. We need to drink to live. We need water for crops and flood plains have rich soils. We use rivers and oceans for transportation of goods. Major cities have a tendency to be coastal and sitting on a natural harbor that has been artificially enhanced.
Sure, floods cause problems. But having no water is generally vastly worse.
Pittsburgh, PA is pretty close to natural disaster free. Some parts of downtown will flood from the rivers, and there have been a couple very small landslides in the last two years from too much rain. But for most of the city, there aren't natural disasters really. No earthquakes, the mountains pretty much prevent tornadoes, no hurricanes, and flooding is not an issue unless you live on the bank of the rivers. Elevation increases pretty quickly as you move away from the river banks.
There are more options than “the current bad system” and “shut it down violently”. The FEMA insurance program can be modified so payouts have a lifetime cap, and/or once they reach a certain level, a buyout is required. It would allow people to relocate and over the long term (i.e. a generation or two), the accounting works out.
As a society who has completely failed addressing climate change, having “all of us” help pay for it is not a completely unfair way to address it.
Areas with high risk of catastrophic natural disaster should be identified and FEMA insurance should not be given to any new residents or new dwellings in these areas.
The problem is that vulnerable populations would be hurt the worst. It's an ugly issue that will be hard to deal with, and I think we need to start looking at more widespread preparedness regulation as well as systems for moving people out of at-risk areas.
Where do you move people out of "at-risk" areas for tornadoes? Essentially, the entirety of the central and eastern US are at risk for significant (EF2+) tornadoes for at least some portion of the year [1]. And then the places that aren't at risk of tornadoes have their own substantial risks for natural disasters-- earthquakes and fires out west, hurricanes and flooding closer to the coasts, blizzards and winter weather up north and into the Rockies, water supply issues in the southwest, etc.
That's why we have FEMA, because "just" displacing people after a natural disaster doesn't work.
if you look at the distribution of folks most opposed to any action on climate change, they are also the most vulnerable to the effects of it (red state + poor). So I am not opposed to them feeling some heat (no pun intended) for their actions. if things get dire then IMO they'll less opposed to a tax on big corp that gives then some relief money. this may be a good way to nudge them into supporting action.
I mean even at a very base consumer level, why does someone buys a big V8 truck that's really bad for environment if they are poor. its because the price of polluting environment is not included in their operating costs. so other values take over their decision. if you change that equation, the people who have least amount of headroom are the ones having hardest time adopting. this is true for any equilibrium. So in short this argument can be used to attack any positive change. IMO it has no bearing & IMHO its better to remedy the effects by another positive change rather than discarding the original well built idea.
This was one of the big arguments I heard against a sugar tax too, I'm sure it's true for raising taxes on gas, consumables, etc. But it seems to me like every regressive tax could be offset with another progressive subsidy like a tax cut, as a potential solution.
Subsidized insurance can maybe still make sense, if it is taking on the role of a deep pocketed reinsurer. Still, it should at least be structured to discourage people from living in the most flood prone areas, and carefully monitored to make sure it is administered as intended (inaccurate maps lead to incorrect rates).
It bothers me they continue to build straw houses in tornado alley. There really needs to be strict regulations for construction methods for buildings in areas prone to tornadoes. I'm talking two feet thick rebar reinforced concrete. We rebuild that area every year using insurance money taken from everybody else.
The average interval between tornadoes for any given point in the most tornado-prone areas is still a couple thousand years. Building all houses to withstand such a rare event doesn’t seem likely to be cost effective.
The problem is showing a direct correlation between disasters and climate change.
I'm in the boat with ppl who think this stuff may be caused by human activity but I think that the science is not exactly clear on this.
There is so much info and dis- info it's hard to find enough clear data to take a side.
Agreed. Let the actuaries at the insurance companies figure it out. Some companies will figure it out, some won't, and the best will flourish and the worst will die and free up resources for better stewards.
I am also incredibly tired of people banging the climate change drum every time there is a weather anomaly (or even a marginally notable event). In a dynamical system "anomalies" are normal.
There is a difference between a philosophy of reason and discovery driving your view of the world and interjecting your chosen "science issues" at every opportunity with zeal.
In more general terms I am sick of the top ten political issues being the only thing of substance anybody seems to care about because I believe the people in power want those discussions to happen as they benefit from the discord and distraction.
No one single instance of an extreme can be used to pinpoint "climate change" , but the absurd statistical deviation from the norm over the last 10 yrs or so is notable and clearly present.
Tornadoes are the perfect example of this nonsense. 2018 was the calmest year recorded in the US (which means very little because we have so few records):
People keep bringing it up because it's a serious existential threat to humanity and large swathes of the population are still completely ignorant and still vote for people who (at least pretend to) also are completely ignorant.
That is because for some people climate change has become a religion or cult (you can read comments of deeply exasperated people right here on HN). This issue is the corner stone of their identity. From psychological point of view it is actually really amazing watching the same patterns unfold today right in front our eyes instead only to be able to read about them in the history books.
So you're saying human-induced climate change isn't increasing the probability of an anomalous (extreme) weather event? I've often seen researchers describe the effect in terms of statistical frequency, e.g. 'once in a hundred years' event becomes 'once in a decade'.
This is true, but over time we should expect fewer and fewer records being broken as the expected ranges slowly expand for extreme outliers. What we actually see is the opposite with records anomalies happening more and more frequently.
Records for damage and such are obviously going to be broken all the time, because we have more and more people jammed in everywhere. If you have a once-in-a-hundred-years storm that doesn't hit anybody directly, nobody cares and it isn't recorded as such.
The other bit is that there is every incentive to magnify the impact of every event, to get a chance to suck some of those sweet, sweet Federal dollars. At this point, when we get a wimpy Noreaster that drops a foot of snow, people are rushing to declare it a disaster emergency.
It's sad that you felt you had to include that first sentence. And ironic that the reason you had to do it is largely because of the behavior you describe in the rest of the sentences.
Federal government weather forecasters logged preliminary reports of more than 500 tornadoes in a 30-day period — a rare figure, if the reports are ultimately verified — after the start of the year proved mercifully quiet.
Monday, Dr. Marsh said, was the 11th consecutive day with at least eight tornado reports, tying the record.
That reads to me more like the exception than the norm.
Tying a record when the records don't really go back that far isn't all that rare. Certainly it's something to take notice of but not something to read too much into, at least not yet.
In recall a time probably 30 years ago or so. A large low pressure system settled in the Pacific northwest at the same time a high settled somewhere in the southeast. The counter rotation pumped moist air in across southern CA or Mexico and up to the northeast. We had rain every day (but not continuously) in Michigan for 29 straight days. It only stopped when a typhoon got sucked in to the apparently stable system. Point being that one unusual series of events doesn't mean anything. Neither did that record hurricane season in 200x that people claimed would be the new normal.
The storm cells are typically many miles wide. Tornadoes not infrequently will cut a swath a mile wide. I could repeat many stories from family and friends who have witnessed such things, but after a bit they all start to sound the same to me after living most of my life in tornado alley.
Listening to the news feed on 167 MHz FM, they say the tornado itself is 1 mile wide, but who knows. Again, maybe more sensationalism. The thread headline is more like baseball statistics.
For those curious about the connection between climate change and the observed trends in tornado behavior (stable year-over-year total count, and stable average intensity, but increased 'clumping' and variability), I would recommend this talk Harold Brooks gave last week: https://youtu.be/Z_1PiixPX3o?t=275
Really great to hear these phone alerts are working as intended and saving lives. When I grew up in Tornado Alley you pretty much listened for the wind and hoped the sirens didn't get knocked over.
I may be younger than you, but our battery NOAA weather radio in the 90s was effective, with the only issue being that we learned to ignore it if we thought it would be buzzing for a severe storm warning instead of a tornado warning.
> Tuesday was the 12th consecutive day with at least eight tornado reports, breaking the record
Is there a list of tornado records? How many consecutive days with four tornados? 16 tornados? Longest stretch of at least one tornado but less than 8?
Readit News
Or another alternative would be fund insurance through carbon tax dollars and return the rest as refund.
It's a case of "pick your poison." Which disaster is least reprehensible to you?
In the Deep South where I grew up, you can set your watch by the summer afternoon thunderstorms. The last time I lived there, our TV and Wii got fried while turned off and plugged into an uninterupted power supply that was supposed to protect them from any electrical issues. To this day, my mother will say "Can't talk. A storm is coming. Bye!" when I call because the electrical storms are awful in Georgia.
When I lived in Kansas, it was tornadoes.
In California, earthquakes. Worse, California has fire season, not a season I ever want in my life again, ideally.
Etc ad nauseum.
Human development tends to have a strong correlation to flood zones because water is essential to human survival and human civilization. We need to drink to live. We need water for crops and flood plains have rich soils. We use rivers and oceans for transportation of goods. Major cities have a tendency to be coastal and sitting on a natural harbor that has been artificially enhanced.
Sure, floods cause problems. But having no water is generally vastly worse.
Life's a bitch. Then you die.
As a society who has completely failed addressing climate change, having “all of us” help pay for it is not a completely unfair way to address it.
That's why we have FEMA, because "just" displacing people after a natural disaster doesn't work.
[1] https://www.spc.noaa.gov/new/SVRclimo/climo.php?parm=sigTorn
I mean even at a very base consumer level, why does someone buys a big V8 truck that's really bad for environment if they are poor. its because the price of polluting environment is not included in their operating costs. so other values take over their decision. if you change that equation, the people who have least amount of headroom are the ones having hardest time adopting. this is true for any equilibrium. So in short this argument can be used to attack any positive change. IMO it has no bearing & IMHO its better to remedy the effects by another positive change rather than discarding the original well built idea.
I'd love to see the hordes of poor people that live on the beach.
https://www.allstate.com/tr/home-insurance/insurance-for-tor...
Subsidized insurance can maybe still make sense, if it is taking on the role of a deep pocketed reinsurer. Still, it should at least be structured to discourage people from living in the most flood prone areas, and carefully monitored to make sure it is administered as intended (inaccurate maps lead to incorrect rates).
It will add political pressure to the discussion too.
Write a letter to your Senator. This is actually a great idea. Could be a great push to help quantify the climate change issue.
Dead Comment
It's really not.
I am also incredibly tired of people banging the climate change drum every time there is a weather anomaly (or even a marginally notable event). In a dynamical system "anomalies" are normal.
There is a difference between a philosophy of reason and discovery driving your view of the world and interjecting your chosen "science issues" at every opportunity with zeal.
In more general terms I am sick of the top ten political issues being the only thing of substance anybody seems to care about because I believe the people in power want those discussions to happen as they benefit from the discord and distraction.
https://www.pnas.org/content/108/44/17905
But sure, lets play devil's advocate.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/24/2018-u-s-tornadoes-on...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2018/12/26/will-be-fi...
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This is true, but over time we should expect fewer and fewer records being broken as the expected ranges slowly expand for extreme outliers. What we actually see is the opposite with records anomalies happening more and more frequently.
The other bit is that there is every incentive to magnify the impact of every event, to get a chance to suck some of those sweet, sweet Federal dollars. At this point, when we get a wimpy Noreaster that drops a foot of snow, people are rushing to declare it a disaster emergency.
https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1132310100222177282/photo/1
As I type this, there is a 1 mile wide one just 20 miles from here.
Federal government weather forecasters logged preliminary reports of more than 500 tornadoes in a 30-day period — a rare figure, if the reports are ultimately verified — after the start of the year proved mercifully quiet.
Monday, Dr. Marsh said, was the 11th consecutive day with at least eight tornado reports, tying the record.
That reads to me more like the exception than the norm.
And it's not about the number of tornados. But the fact that there has been no break between them i.e. 11 consecutive days.
But your second - "as I type this" - supports what the article is saying doesn't it?
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> Approaching ‘Uncharted Territory’
Is there a list of tornado records? How many consecutive days with four tornados? 16 tornados? Longest stretch of at least one tornado but less than 8?
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