Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would be “America’s Chernobyl”

You still haven’t addressed the central point! Every disaster has some potential to cause wider damage. But the linked article is making a a specific claim that the Galveston area is far beyond normal levels.

Edit: Why the hell are you getting downvoted so much?

What are the second-order effects of Houston losing a substantial fraction of normal function? Alongside Covid? Now what if something else happens?

Emergency management seems like a far away thing, until it isn't.

Wildfires make the news bc they are inconvenient, but largely impact rural areas.

The idea that wildifires are just "woods burning out in the middle of nowhere" is, if not inaccurate, at least incomplete. There is, in the United States, a substantial amount of what is called "Wildland / Urban Interface" zones where urban areas impinge on adjacent wildland areas. And homes and other structures being built in those interface zones are a huge problem when large scale wildfires break out. And while large-scale loss of life due to wildfires isn't commonplace, massive property damage is at times.

That said, I wouldn't classify wildfires as a "destabilizing" level problem. But the impact of wildfires should not be trivialized either.

Ref:

https://www.usfa.fema.gov/wui/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland%E2%80%93urban_interfa...

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3314

I would agree with that but still think the effects of it can't simply be ignored.

A significant part of people worldwide get their basic understanding of what's going on in the world from news media - and then go on making all kinds of day-to-day descisions with that knowledge - and in the case of US citizens may go on to vote.

News media show a cropped and distorted version of reality, but they can also pull the actual reality closer to their distorted version.

Now that it’s in contention we see white supremacists attempting to destabilize things to maintain/regain said supremacy.

I had to laugh at that. The scale of wildfires between CA and FL is like the difference between a nuclear bomb and a sparkler. The reason that wildfires aren't a big deal in FL is because (a) the air is humid, damping fire growth and generally creating fire-adverse weather conditions like rain, and (b) the fauna is wet, so it doesn't burn as easily, quickly, or as hot. In CA in the summer, the air is dry and hot. Fauna can get so dry that it can be used as kindling, resulting in fires that spread to thousands of acres in under an hour, that burn so hot they can create their own self-reinforcing weather systems and even ignite fauna from a distance.

You're also going to need to support your claim that FL fire crews train in the West, since based on all reporting from the last 4 years of CA fires, all of the crews were from Western states, as far east as Utah. (The last time FL news sources report a crew being sent to assist CA was in 2015.)

At least in most parts of Florida. If you go to a Florida beach on any day of the week, you'll see every race sun tanning or swimming with or next to each other, having fun.

That described my experiences in FL in Orlando and in beach cities. The interior and northern half of the state...was just as racist as I was led to believe it would be.

So yeah, a big ole hurricane smashing the 3rd largest city in the US would be big.

I’m not sure what relation you’re referring to in “relatively.”

I think if you could smooth the trend there would be a trend towards worse hurricanes, but there's huge variations from storm to storm and season to season. There is a slight trend towards more storms, and a trend towards more building on the coast or in vulnerable areas that increases damage. There's also a trend towards more news coverage of extreme weather.

There are so many random factors though. Katrina was terrible because it hit New Orleans rather directly, which is an incredibly vulnerable (and high population) city, and the levees broke in conditions they should have been able to withstand. If that same storm hit Brownsville, TX, or Panama City, FL, people would have paid way less attention. If it hit Veracruz, MX, nobody in the US would remember it.

Category-at-landfall is not a good indicator either. Winds get all the hype, but water does most of the damage - as it did in Katrina. While storm surge as driven by those winds is a factor, it really matters which ways the winds are blowing and how the waters pile up based on local geography. Rain is a huge factor too, so situations where a storm drifts inland and then parks are much worse than a storm that promptly races off. (Such conditions caused bad flooding in Houston recently).

So exact landfall conditions matter, how fast a storm moves, etc. Storms may be a little stronger than they used to be but that says very little. People remember when we get unlucky and a major city gets hit in a very unlucky way, and that's always going to be mostly a random occurrence.

Houston exists as a city because a hurricane destroyed Galveston. It still gets severe flooding from tropical storms, and has in recent memory. Like New Orleans, it's in a bad place (clearing out a swamp to build a city will always have this problem; the water wants to go where it did before). It will almost surely happen again.

It's easy to play fearmonger, and imagine "worst case scenarios", but many of them have played out - Katrina, Sandy, Houston, etc. Even if the odds of those scenarios have increased from 1/100 to 1/50, there's no telling when the next one will happen; we could go 50 years without another one, or Miami could hit by a cat 5 in a month.

It's still a stupid idea to invest in cities built in wetlands in areas vulnerable to hurricanes, but people keep doing it. Sea level rise makes this even stupider (more so than the storms getting stronger), but again, people keep doing it. A lot of people justify it because it hasn't happened in X years where they happen to live, but it is a numbers game, and sooner or later their number will come up.

These two are intimately related, though none of them are related to hurricanes (well, wildfires and unusual hurricane behavior might have a common contributing cause in climate change, but that's pretty weak as a connection between specific individual events.)

> The other large-scale events you mention aren't related to each other at all

They are not directly related by cause, however they are all happening at the same time - so the effects of those events could influence each other.

COVID cannot cause a hurricane, but it could e.g. make evacuation plans more difficult.

Effects of modern industrial society on the planet could be a common cause in an abstract sense: It causes climate change, which could influence the strength and frequency of both hurricanes and wildfires and it seems to be responsible for increased likelihood of zoonotic diseases due to loss if habitat. It's also one (of many) points of contention in the political situation.

Others don't.

Also, did you into account all the indirect effects of radiation?

I really don't understand the exclusive focus on deaths here. Cancer and genetic deformations can make your life hell even if they don't cause death.

They found that keeping testing going this century serves the valuable function of keeping the public at ease and the cost isn't that high (testing is pretty small scale now) so why not keep it.

The primary source of radiation was airborne dust (and therefore precipitation as well). Crops and farm raised animals have been clean for a long time. The primary risk is shooting a buck that ate a berry that had something nasty on it back in 1995 but between the half lives of the radioactive compounds in question and the pattern of events required to get those components to one's dinner plate the risk is beyond minimal at this point.

> The caesium levels of 8 wild boar and 11 roe deer samples exceeded the limit out of the 490 specimens

Now, 19 out of 490 specimens exceeding the Cs-137 concentration level limits is too high a percentage for me, but maybe other people are willing to take more risks in this area compared to me.

[1] https://www.medindia.net/news/wild-boar-meat-in-austrian-sup...

[2] https://www.ages.at/en/topics/radiation-protection/caesium-1...

And the book makes a compelling case for why Chernobyl was so important and so different. I will leave it to experts to tell me whether it’s wrong.

Without Chernobyl, but with Gorbachev's reforms, the Soviet Union would still have collapsed.

Without Gorbachev's reforms, but with Chernobyl, the Soviet Union would still exist, just as PRC did not collapse from Tiananmen Square and DPRK did not collapse from 1990s famine.

long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

What’s more concerning is limiting things to deaths as if that was the only form of harm. People can survive cancer, but not without economic, emotional, etc harm. Further, giant exclusion zones and ongoing mitigation efforts are extremely expensive.

In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified.