Elizabeth Kolbert has an article in the New Yorker on everyone’s favorite topic these days, hurricanes and global warming. The article is amazing because even though the data is staring Kolbert right in the face, she apparently cannot bring herself to grasp its implications for her argument.

Kolbert describes the problem: “In June, the Association of British Insurers issued a report forecasting that, owing to climate change, losses from hurricanes in the U.S., typhoons in Japan, and windstorms in Europe were likely to increase by more than sixty per cent in the coming decades. (The report calculated that insured losses from extreme storms—those expected to occur only once every hundred to two hundred and fifty years—could rise to as much as a hundred and fifty billion dollars.) The figures did not take into account the expected increase in the number and wealth of people living in storm-prone areas; correcting for such increases, the losses are likely to be several hundred per cent higher.”

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Thanks to our webmaster extraordinaire, Mark Lohaus, we have a new design for the website of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research.

Please check it out and feedback is appreciated:

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/

Chip Geller and Dave Roberts from Grist have a nice piece in the 11 September 2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Here is an excerpt:

“If we could travel back in time 10 years, even 20, and work to prevent last week’s misery and loss, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would be far down the list of pragmatic preventative strategies. We’d start instead with reinforcement of New Orleans’ levees, restoration of coastal wetlands, upgrades to regional emergency-response programs, maintenance of FEMA’s independence and integrity, meaningful anti-poverty programs and the election of a commander in chief who wasn’t so obviously in over his head. The wind and rain may have been natural, but Katrina was very much a human disaster, rotten with racism, willful neglect and criminal incompetence.”

Paul Recer also has a very nice essay in today’s Slate (Thanks DOK). Here is an excerpt:

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In his column yesterday, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof jumps on the bandwagon suggesting that greenhouse gas policies can be used as a tool to modulate future hurricane behavior. We’ve covered this subject in some detail here, but there are two points worth making on this column.

First, Kristof goes out of his way to avoid the obvious issue of societal vulnerability. He quoted Kerry Emanuel as follows: “My results suggest that future warming may lead to … a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century.” Kristof’s ellipses significantly change the meaning of Emanuel’s statement. Here is the full quote from Emanuel’s paper (PDF), including the information replaced by Kristof with ellipses, “My results suggest that future warming may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone destructive potential, and-taking into account an increasing coastal population- a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the twenty- first century.” This is playing a bit fast and loose with Emanuel’s statement, given that Emanuel says elsewhere, “For U.S.-centric concerns over the next 30-50 years, by far the most important hurricane problem we face is demographic and political.” Of course, as we’ve documented here, for at least the next half century and probably longer, societal vulnerability to hurricanes dominates any projected greenhouse gas effects, so in an essay advocating greenhouse gases as a tool of disaster management, it is obvious why Kristof would want to pretend that this issue doesn’t exist.

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The Washington Post’s Spencer Hsu reports that “Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001.” The Post continues, “Patronage appointments to the crisis-response agency are nothing new to Washington administrations. But inexperience in FEMA’s top ranks is emerging as a key concern of local, state and federal leaders as investigators begin to sift through what the government has admitted was a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.”

Before this report becomes another dividing line between ‘Bush bashers’ and ‘Bush defenders’, we need to take a close look at what kind of leadership is necessary to run an emergency agency and whether political patronage has a place in such agencies. My answer is that both experienced emergency responders and political appointees are necessary, but ideally, those top leaders should be both.

First question: does emergency response require ‘different’ leadership skills than, say, leadership of other departments such as USDA, HUD, EPA, etc.? I argue yes. A large component of effective leadership (some may say all) is making good decisions. A lot of decision making at agencies occurs in the framework of formal processes: identify the problem, gather information, allow for public comment, explore options, make decision, etc. Obviously the process is not perfect, linear or surgical as some who read this will be quick to note. My point, however, is that there tends to be an unfolding of the decision process that is radically different from the decision making process, hence leadership, required in emergency and emergency response situations, particularly on a temporal scale. Decision making process become truncated, intelligence may be incomplete, and multiple problems demand solutions almost simultaneously. The importance of situational leadership (well articulate by Hershey) and the leaders’ ability to make decisions given the requirements of the particular emergency context cannot be overstated. Effective leadership in ‘crisis’ situations often requires years of training and experience to hone those qualities that separate capable leaders from those who are out of their league.

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[Note: See the bottom of this post for links to further reading from the peer-reviewed literature]

In purely economic terms, Katrina is certain to be among the costliest disasters in history. As Part I of this series observed, understanding the magnitude of disaster losses is important for a wide range of decisions, including evaluating the effectiveness of disaster mitigation and understanding trends in vulnerability. This post describes the historical record of hurricane damages and seeks to place Katrina’s economic impact, at least given what is presently known, into historical context.

Current estimates for the losses associated with Katrina are in the range of $100-$150 billion. For reasons discussed below, this may be an oranges to apples comparison with the longer term historical record on hurricanes. But lets set this aside for the moment and use $125 billion as the total impact of Katrina. (read to the end for a discussion of why these estimates may not be a good comparison with past events.)

Katrina represents, by far, the single largest hurricane disaster in U.S. history. Based on data (PDF) available from the National Hurricane Center (NHC), here are the top 5 storms ranked by total damage in 2004 dollars:

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There is a very interesting article in today’s New York Times on the notion of “theodicy” a term “coined in the 18th century by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, derives from Greek roots invoking the “justice of the gods.” A theodicy is an attempt to show that such justice exists, to prove that we really do live in what Leibniz insisted was the “best of all possible worlds.”"

Here is an excerpt:

“Recently, the philosopher Susan Neiman argued in “Evil in Modern Thought” that the Lisbon earthquake also destroyed an ancient idea that nature could itself be evil. After Lisbon, she argued, moral evil was distinguished from natural disaster. Earthquakes and floods could no longer be fitted into traditional religious theodicies.

But this did not mean, of course, that theodicies faded away. Ms. Neiman argued that for philosophers theology had been replaced by history. The fates of peoples and nations reflected other forces, and disruptions were given other forms of explanation. Hegel saw history as an evolutionary series of transformations in which destruction was as inevitable as birth. Marx believed other kinds of economic and human laws accounted for destruction and evolution. This mostly left natural disasters for the growing realm of science: if they couldn’t be prevented, at least their origins could be understood.

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For you local folks:

Dr. Edward E. David, Jr., science adviser to former President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973, will speak on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus next Monday, Sept. 12 as part of the Center’s year-long “Policy, Politics and Science in the White House: Conversations with Presidential Science Advisers” series.

David held the White House post for three years before Nixon abolished it due to political disagreements between the administration and other scientific advisers over the Antiballistic Missile program and Supersonic Transport, although the position was reinstated in 1976. The public talk, which is free and open to the public, will start at 7 p.m. in Old Main Chapel located on the CU-Boulder campus. For directions, see the Web site.

The event will include an interview with David conducted by the center’s director, Roger Pielke, Jr., focusing on topics such as how the role of science in the Nixon administration compares with its role in the current Bush administration. It also will include a question-and-answer session with the audience.

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Richard Monastersky has a lengthy article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses at length our forthcoming paper in BAMS on hurricanes and global warming. Monasterky’s article includes some very good reporting, particularly at the end, but it also contains some very significant errors and mischaracterizations in the early sections that I address below. The article is most accurate beginning with the Section titled “Hot Air.” My main complaint with the article is that it seeks to create the appearance of a conflict where, at least from the text of our BAMS paper, one does not exist.

1. Monastersky starts the article by saying, “When it came to global warming and hurricanes, Kerry A. Emanuel used to be a skeptic.” This is an odd choice of words. Emanuel, in his own words is outside the current scientific consensus on this subject, writing of his recent study, “It is not surprising, therefore, that what I have come to believe is at odds with any reasonable consensus.” It seems to me that the term “skeptic” should be reserved for those who are challenging a current consensus, rather than as Monastersky would have it, anyone who doesn’t believe that global warming affects (fill in the blank). Otherwise, the term “skeptic” becomes a political label. On hurricanes and global warming it is Emanuel who has described himself skeptical of the current consensus.

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The editors of the American Journal of Bioethics report that Leon Kass, current chair of the President’s Bioethics Council, will be replaced by Edmund Pellegrino. They offer a very positive reaction to the news, and a clear slap at Kass:

“It is possible to gush about the White House’s decision – a rare opportunity these days – in part because Pellegrino is a good, honest and kind person, but also because Pellegrino is not afraid to engage his academic peers and will not operate like a cheerleader for the administration, nor will he treat the Council like an oversized ethics seminar for neoconservatives. So, for example, I do not expect to hear that the American Enterprise Institute is going to be selling the products of the deliberations by the Council in the future. The sun will never rise on a day where Edmund Pellegrino lobbies Congress as a “private Citizen” for a “second term bioethics agenda,” or writes Op Eds defending Presidential stem cell policy while sitting as Chair during a Presidential election year.”

We discussed Leon Kass several times over the past year (here and here). It will be interesting to see what role the Council will play in advising the President under Pellegrino.