It’s Time to Ditch the Concept of ‘100-Year Floods’
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
Perhaps there are costs associated with emergency aid during a crisis. But then the solution is to force people to buy 'crisis cover' from private insurance companies. When a crisis occurs, the government collects the payout from the insurance companies.
> But then the solution is to force people to buy 'crisis cover' from private insurance companies.
I see you are not opposed to government intervention, you just want it in a different form.
That's right - I want it in a reduced, more efficient form.
Personally I don't think the government should bail out property damage of people whose risks go bad and who don't have insurance. But I can accept that maybe this is the minority opinion - but even in this case it's still more efficient for people to be forced to buy private insurance rather than have the government say 'you must pay us $X flood risk premium' or 'you cannot build here'. Private insurance companies (with money on the line) will more accurately assess flood risks than a government official (who has no financial interest in the accuracy of his assessment).
Maybe if the legislature did not have to respond to the populace... is that the more efficient form of government you prefer?
Because the cost ends up showing up in other ways. Maybe it costs more due to social safety nets needing to take care of those who lose their houses without the means to replace them. Maybe it means an increase in crime as those who lost homes/stuff get desperate if they can't recover from such a loss financially.
The US government is in the best position to take on a lot of that risk in part because in most states the flood plains are also actively managed by the government. A lot of flood plains have levees and dams and reservoirs that are at least monitored by the US Army Corps of Engineers, if not built and/or maintained by them as well. In the case of a flood event too, it's the US Government that is supposed to act as the primary active management agency (FEMA and in turn it's delegations to the National Guard), presumably mitigating risks during the course of an event (assuming proper management) or taking direct responsibility for mistakes in crisis.
[1] https://www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program
(Disclosure: Working as a consultant for the USACE on a semi-related project. I do not speak for my government or my employer; any mistakes or opinions are my own.)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v500/n7462/full/nature1...
> A feature of the changes has been a tendency for many regions of low variability to experience increases, which might contribute to the perception of increased climate volatility. The normalization of temperature anomalies creates the impression of larger relative overall increases, but our use of absolute values, which we argue is a more appropriate approach, reveals little change. > Many climate models predict that total variability will ultimately decrease under high greenhouse gas concentrations, possibly associated with reductions in sea-ice cover. Our findings contradict the view that a warming world will automatically be one of more overall climatic variation.
...
“General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (and co-founder of the award winning climate science blog RealClimate.), “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10 seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”
...
U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] report on extreme weather in 2011.
> Global warming, in general, will mean higher temperatures. This causes more heat waves — more extreme weather. But it also causes fewer cold waves — less extreme weather. Many more people die from excessive cold than excessive heat, so fewer people will die from cold and heat in the future. By mid-century, researchers estimated in 2006, that means about 1.4 million fewer deaths per year. In the continental United States, heat waves in the past decade exceeded the norm by 10 percent, but the number of cold waves fell 75 percent.
From the Washington Post https://archive.is/O3lJZ :
> Damage from flooding in the United States has declined from 0.2 percent of gross domestic product in 1940 to less than 0.05 percent today. And U.S. hurricanes have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900.
My argument is using "climate change" as the reason one wants to protect from flooding is a logical fallacy.
Obama's order mentioned in the OP wasn't "impact of flooding legislation" but "response to climate change legislation" and contained more than flood defences.
Legislation to defend from changes to weather the climate change scientists say will not only not happen but reduce.
Less extremes = less flooding = less death
In your original claim (which is not the same as the one in your last post), you go from the specific issue (flooding) to a general one (extreme weather), introduce a point that may be relevant for one aspect of extreme weather but which has nothing to do with flooding (reduced deaths due to cold), and then switch back to the specific issue as if it somehow thereby became subject to the irrelevant argument.
In your latest post, you have dropped this line of argument for one that gets no support from the IPCC report quote that you used in your original claim. It says there will be fewer extreme cold events, but also that there will be more high temperature events: we know the latter are more conducive to flooding. The quoted paragraph takes no position supporting the claim that there will be fewer temperature extremes overall, let alone that it will therefore led to fewer flooding events specifically (another case where you go from the general to the specific with no justification.) You appear to have mistaken an argument about the number of deaths overall for an argument about the number of extreme events overall, and then, in turn, mistaking that for an argument about the number and intensity of floods.
In addition, your latest post is simple ignore-the-evidence denialism. In a single sentence, you dismiss decades of painstaking, quantitative, peer-reviewed research that leads to the expectation that the number of intense North Atlantic hurricanes (i.e. specifically those that are by far the biggest problem for the US) is very likely to increase. And sea-level rise is an established, measured fact (and one that contributes to the damage of coastal flooding), despite what all those latter-day King Cnuts [1] on the hill say.
Finally, I find your attitude, that we should do nothing about flooding because to do so would challenge your delusions about climate change (and apparently also your opinion of Obama), to be distasteful, especially considering the distress it has just caused in and around Houston.
https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/21272815_1015...
You keep calling me a denialist, yet I am saying "climate change won't have the effects the media says, even though the IPCC says different"
If I was a denialist I would be saying "there is no change"
see the difference ?
One of your original claims was that it is right to roll back flood regulations simply because they were justified (in part) as a response to climate change. Putting aside the obvious point that it makes sense to plan for the future, that is moot anyway, because recent events in Houston, NY/NJ and New Orleans have demonstrated that there is a flooding problem right now, with the climate we have now. Your position puts ideology, and preserving the facade of an illusion, over pragmatism.
All but the most dogmatic of climate change deniers have moved away from denying that it is happening at all, to denying that it will have negative consequences, or denying the evidence is good enough to predict anything, or... Eventually, the only thing left for them to deny will be that anything can be done about it, and by then they might finally be right, thanks in part to their efforts.