Hypocrisy alert: Don't make us pay for Harvey floods sez Eric Worrall at WUWT. We paid for his, though.

Credit: Trudy Lampson

I made a comment the other day about paying for floods. I was remarking about how Roger Pielke Jr likes to view the cost of disasters as a function of GDP. He says that GDP is going up faster worldwide than the big spike in the cost of weather disasters and implies that therefore the world can afford to pay for them.

There are flaws in Roger's GDP argument. One I didn't mention was that the cost of the clean up and restoration is part of GDP. The other is that I think a lot of wealthy people will object to their money being paid to recover from disasters unless they themselves are the victims. Remember how many Republicans voted against aid after Sandy.

We can't say Hurricane Harvey caused climate science deniers but it certainly worsened them

Harvey. Credit: NASA

Science deniers were so put out by the deadly rains from Hurricane Harvey that they lost their sense of sight. Now we can't say that Hurricane Harvey caused climate science deniers, they've existed since we changed climate in a big way. We can say that Hurricane Harvey hasn't improved them.

Joe Bastardi, a science denying weather forecaster, got all excited and wrote a dumb article that was copied and pasted in the deniosphere. Danny Hayes first alerted us here at HotWhopper. It took some time before it was copied and pasted at WUWT (archived here). It was in response to an article in the Guardian, by Professor Michael Mann. The Guardian article had the following:

Hurricane Harvey through the eyes of science deniers

This image of Hurricane Harvey from NOAA and GOES shows water vapour is, in parts, almost off the scale.

The recent 5:00 am CDT statement from the National Hurricane Center includes these tidbits:

A NOAA tide gauge at Port Lavaca, Texas, recently measured a water level of 6.6 feet above Mean Higher High Water.

An automated mesonet rain gauge near Victoria, Texas, is reporting a 24 h precipitation total of 16.43 inches.

From the deniosphere

It's wrong to regard climate science deniers as being harmless idiots. It's not enough for them to deny, lie and play down the dangers of climate change. Not acting on climate change will cause a lot of death and destruction and ruin the livelihoods of many. It will also threaten world food supplies in future.

As can be seen today, climate science deniers are a threat to people in the here and now. In the last day or so, prominent climate disinformers have been playing down the dangers of Hurricane Harvey. Their motive seems to be, as always, because they want people to reject the fact and risks of climate change. Why they would want to downplay an immediate risk for ideology is unfathomable.

Hurricane Harvey - realising the worst

Hurricane Harvey is fulfilling the worst case predictions and is now a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. This is equivalent to a Category 5 cyclone on the Beaufort scale, used to categorise cyclones in Australia.

Hurricane intensity is measured by wind strength. Although winds are hugely destructive, Harvey brings bigger problems. As with all hurricanes, Hurricane Harvey is likely to dump huge amounts of rain and bring storm surges. Harvey will be worse than most because it is expected to hang around for several days. Below is the quantitative prediction forecast from the National Hurricane Center of NOAA as at 4:08 pm Central Daylight Time (USA). It shows horrific rain in Texas. Although the scale goes to 20 plus inches (500 plus mm), see how big that area is. There are warnings that the rainfall may be much higher in parts of that purple area. (I wouldn't want to be in the middle of it.)

Figure 1 | Rainfall potential from Hurricane Harvey: 120-hour Day 1-5 rainfall forecast (inches). Source: National Hurricane Centre, NOAA.

When extreme weather hits these days, it often breaks all records. This prompts science deniers to become more vocal, shrieking their denial of science. They seem to think that if they yell loudly enough, then some idiot will believe them and they'll be able to keep the coal fires burning a bit longer.

I'll write more about this, with despicable examples, shortly. (I am only able to write in short bursts at the moment, as I am dealing with other commitments. This might be a good thing, as some articles in the past have ventured into the TLDR category.)

Meanwhile, you can read more from the Cat6 team at Wunderground.com.

My thoughts are with everyone in the path of the hurricane and its effects, and with all the volunteers and agency workers who will be assisting with response and recovery.

Hurricanes Matthew and Nicole

Hurricane Matthew is dominating weather and climate news at the moment. It is a fierce tropical cyclone, or as it's called in the Atlantic, a hurricane. Currently it is again a Category 3 hurricane after it intensified over warm waters after dropping from a Cat 4 to a Cat 3 then back to a Cat 4. You can get the latest advisory information from NOAA's National Hurricane Centre, and view the current radar images at NWS.

There is another cyclone close by, Hurricane Nicole, which is currently a Cat 2 hurricane and is having an impact on Matthew. The wind image from Earth shows their current positions, with Matthew now affecting Florida:

Nicole is circling in the Atlantic and isn't expected to hit the USA directly.

Stay safe. If you want to help people devastated by the storm, weather.com lists some of the organisations providing assistance.

Denier weirdness: Anthony Watts walks on water in NYC after the seas have risen

More denier weirdness.  Anthony Watts, denier blogger at WUWT, found two photos of New York City that he seems to think proves that rising sea levels are nothing to worry about (archived here). The top one he thinks was probably taken around 1930 and the lower one was taken in 2010 (click to enlarge).

Credit: Fairchild Aerial Surveys Inc.
Source: NOAA

Credit: Gryffindor
Source: Wikipedia

Anthony is on a sea level denial kick with two articles in as many days.  He writes:

While there have been a lot of changes, most notably the mature trees now in Battery Park, one thing is clear – the city has not been inundated by sea level rise even though the NOAA Battery Park tide gauge indicates a rise of about 0.22 meter ( 8 3/4 inches)...

... As always, I remind our readers: Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history

That's good to know.  New York City is 22 cm closer to flooding than it was 80 years ago.  Is Anthony trying to argue that because Battery Park isn't permanently under water yet, that means that New York City will be okay forever?  When seas rise by another meter later this century or early in the next, or when when seas rise by several meters over the next few centuries - well, I guess Anthony and his readers won't be around at the end of this century so that might explain his lack of concern.

I reckon his article comes under the category of denier weirdness.  Is this what "okay" looks like?

FDR Drive, flooded by Hurricane Sandy, October 29, 2012
BuzzFeed

When seas rise half a metre, the edges of lower Manhattan will flood 20 times a year

As the ice melts, seas could be a metre higher within 80 or 90 years - or up to twice that.  From The Wall Street Journal (the New York financial district is one of the areas most at risk) - the future is now and it will get worse as sea levels rise:

While most of New York is above sea level, its subways, telecommunications cables, fiber-optics networks, plumbing and power mains aren't. "There is so much underground," says urban water management consultant Piet Dircke at Arcadis, one of four engineering firms that recently developed concepts for a storm surge barrier here. "The economic impact of flooding could be huge."...

...Under certain conditions, a hurricane now could generate a 30-foot-high storm surge and flood 100 square miles of New York. If ice melts and sea level rises, that risk increases. "If you have 20 inches (0.5 m) of sea level rise, the edges of lower Manhattan would flood 20 times a year," says Douglas Hill, a consulting engineer at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. "It would look like Venice."

Read the full article here.

Click here for a map of how rising seas will affect New York City.  You can choose different levels.

From the WUWT comments

Different people react differently - but not many WUWT-ers are denying outright that New York could be in trouble.  Click here for the archived article and comments.

Greg Goodman says:

September 21, 2013 at 8:05 am
Ya gotta admit the water does kinda look higher ;)

johnmarshall says:

September 21, 2013 at 8:16 am
Comparing those two photographs above it looks like a small sea level fall. There has been some reclamation round Battery Park in the mean time which might confuse the issue but nothing alarming with sea levels.

Darren Potter says:

September 21, 2013 at 8:35 am
Sea level isn’t rising, instead tide gauge is sinking do to anthropological expansion / construction. Which resulted in land subsiding under weight of the numerous and massive buildings crammed full of people.  Setting aside the sinking… The air sure looks a whole lot cleaner now than it did back in 1930s. Appears that increasing CO2 ppm, results in less Smog.

Jimbo says:

September 21, 2013 at 8:35 am
As one commenter mentioned on the other Battery Park thread much of Manhattan is reclaimed land. They asked what effect does millions of tonnes of steel, concrete and other human structures have on subsidence? (I paraphrase.)