Honestly, I do believe that denying climate change, if it results in the deaths of people through official actions, should be criminalized at this point. Pruitt in particular should be jailed for at least 15 years.
Originally shared by John Baez
Just let them drown
First Harvey destroys Houston… now Irma is heading toward Miami. Houston has had three so-called “500-year floods” since 1979.
But Scott Pruitt, the science denier running the EPA, says discussing “the cause and effect of these storms” right now would be “very, very insensitive”.
Right. We wouldn’t want to hurt people’s feelings now, would we?
Just let ’em drown.
Cut funding for research on climate change. Don’t plan for the future. Let the flood maps go out of date. Keep on acting like everything is fine:
Last week, researchers at the University of California, Davis, overlaid FEMA’s flood-zone maps on top of satellite imagery of the devastating flooding around Houston after Harvey poured more than 40 inches of rain across the region.
The preliminary assessment found that two-thirds of the inundation occurred outside the federal agency’s 100-year floodplains, where there should be only a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year. More than half of the deluge happened “outside of any mapped flood zone,” even including 500-year events, in areas that should face only “minimal flood hazard”.
This, in part, underscores the rare severity of the storm that hovered over the Texas coastline for days. But it also arguably highlights inadequacies in our federal flood risk assessments, since by some calculations Harvey “represents the third ‘500-year’ flood in the Houston area in the past three years,” as the UC Davis researchers note.
That “basically refutes suggestions that Houston has just suffered from random ‘bad luck,’” said Nicholas Pinter, associate director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, in an e-mail. “We scientists are ultra-cautious about reading climate change in any single weather event, and that caution is appropriate. But there is a growing suspicion that the U.S. may be creeping over a meteorological tipping point.”
[…]
A few cities, and some engineering firms, have already begun to adopt development standards that incorporate future climate- change threats. Notably, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection conducted a comprehensive assessment, and concluded that some $1 billion in assets were under threat from future sea-level rise and storm surges. The analysis added 30 inches of flooding on top of FEMA’s 100-year flood maps, adopting the high-end forecast from the New York City Panel on Climate Change, and ultimately recommended $315 million in facility upgrades.
Similarly, in 2015, President Obama issued an executive order that established new flood standards for federally funded projects that took into account the rising risks of climate change. It required agencies to either build two or three feet above 100-year flood lines, depending on the project type; base new development on 500-year flood elevations; or otherwise determine appropriate construction standards based on the best available climate science.
Less than two weeks before Hurricane Harvey made landfall, President Trump rescinded that order.
I really don’t know these climate change deniers are thinking. Certainly it has nothing to do with being wise, or thoughtful, or kind, or prudent. Maybe they hope they’ll be dead before things affect them personally? Maybe they don’t care about their children, or grandchildren?
The quote is from the MIT magazine Technology Review:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608800/our-hurricane-risk-models-are-dangerously-out-of-date/
Here is Pruitt claiming that we shouldn’t talk about climate change now:
#climateaction