Global Warming Making Hurricanes More Ferocious?

Study Links Hurricanes to Global Warming: Fiercer storms may be due to greenhouses gases, but more data needed, scientists say

Global Warming and Hurricanes

...the hurricanes that do occur near the end of the 21st century are expected to be stronger and have significantly more intense rainfall than under present day climate conditions.

From last week:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/dispatches/050901.html
NOVA weighs in.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/8/31/173242.shtml
Downplays idea pretty straightforwardly, after an overaggressive opening.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1099102,00.html
Superficial analysis of how warming could create stronger hurricanes, comes down in the "maybe" department. (Pump more energy in, put or keep temperature gradients in the hurricane-creating zone more often.)

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/09/01/katrina.warming.ap/
Brief descriptions of the discussion space: warming as cause v. 'normal' multi-decade cycle.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,372179,00.html
Paints a very politicized picture of what different German papers are saying.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,372176,00.html
Includes link to the paper by Kerry Emanuel, "Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years", published in Nature, and which is not a hard read. Only 3 pages.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/8/29/12237/4650
Points out there will never be a "smoking-gun" type link between global warming and any particular disaster, which is well worth remembering.

Bush Admin looking to blame anyone, everyone, but themselves

E-mail suggests government seeking to blame groups

Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys' offices: "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."

Whoever is behind the e-mail may have spotted the Sept. 8 issue of National Review Online that chastised the Sierra Club and other environmental groups for suing to halt the corps' 1996 plan to raise and fortify 303 miles of Mississippi River levees in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas.

The corps settled the litigation in 1997, agreeing to hold off on some work until an environmental impact could be completed. The National Review article concluded: "Whether this delay directly affected the levees that broke in New Orleans is difficult to ascertain."

The problem with that conclusion?

The levees that broke causing New Orleans to flood weren't Mississippi River levees. They were levees that protected the city from Lake Pontchartrain levees on the other side of the city.[Emphasis added --sid]

When Katrina struck, the hurricane pushed tons of water from the Gulf of Mexico into Lake Pontchartrain, which borders the city to the north. Corps officials say the water from the lake cleared the levees by 3 feet. It was those floodwaters, they say, that caused the levees to degrade until they ruptured, causing 80 percent of New Orleans to flood.

[Sierra Club Attorney David] Bookbinder said the purpose of the litigation by the Sierra Club and others in 1996 was where the corps got the dirt for the project. "We had no objections to levees," he said. "We said, 'Just don't dig film materials out of the wetlands. Get the dirt from somewhere else.' "

Nibbling Away at the Doctrine of State Sovereignty?

UN ‘must never again be found wanting on genocide’

This promise, part of a new doctrine called the responsibility to protect, reflects a profound shift in international law, whereby a growing sense of global responsibility for atrocities is increasingly encroaching upon the formerly sanctified concept of state sovereignty.

The Responsibility to Protect

From the summary:

Throughout the humanitarian crises of the 1990s, the international community failed to come up with rules on how and when to intervene, and under whose authority. Despite the new focus on terrorism, these debates will not go away. The issue must be reframed as an argument not about the "right to intervene" but about the "reponsibility to protect" that all sovereign states owe to their citizens.

Responsibility to Protect: Engaging Civil Society Project

THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

WTF

Holy Crap. Karl Rove in charge of the New Orleans reconstruction effort?

Who's in Charge? Karl Rove!

Conyers Resolution re: Valerie Plame

Conyers Statement on Valerie Plame Resolution

Landfill in New Orleans

Love Canal-type landfill submerged in New Orleans floodwaters

Katrina Quotes, Compiled

Did They Really Say That?

Yes, yes, they did.

Oh, look, there's history, repeating itself

Republicans block efforts to amend relief bill, hold vote without providing copy of bill

Democrats said no one had even seen a copy of the legislation.

Voting along party lines, Republicans denied a measure that would have allowed for two hours of discussion and opened up the measure to be amended.

Well, that's just great. The PATRIOT Act was the same damn way. Can we not learn from our mistakes? Maybe just once?

Congress takes up $51.8 billion Katrina relief bill

The bulk of the money would go into a Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief fund that is offering the debit cards. FEMA anticipates handing out 320,000 cards, at a cost of $640 million, to help displaced residents buy clothing, pay for transportation and other "emergency supplies they need," Director Michael Brown said.

Now that article is from the 8th of September, but if they're not going to do the debit cards after all, where will the money go, and how?[*]

FEMA, Red Cross Programs Confusing

The plan to give displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina instant financial help by issuing debit cards seemed, to many, like a good idea at the time."

[*] Evacuees Grow Anxious in Houston Mentions FEMA stopping distribution of cards, but from other news-googling it's not clear if that's a temporary halt in that locale, or discontinuing the program entirely.

National Response Plan, or lack thereof

Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy

On the DHS's "National Response Plan":

The National Response Plan set out a lofty goal in its preface: "The end result is vastly improved coordination among federal, state, local and tribal organizations to help save lives and protect America's communities by increasing the speed, effectiveness and efficiency of incident management."

I think we can all agree that it failed to meet that goal, eh? The upsetting thing is that -- wait, let me rephrase that. One of many upsetting things is that --

Mr. Knocke, the homeland security spokesman, said the department realizes it must learn from its mistakes, and the department's inspector general has been given $15 million in the emergency supplemental appropriated by Congress to study the flawed rescue and recovery operation.

I thought we did that already. Studied, I mean. And that's why the Department of Homeland Security got created, and plans like this one established. Because of the lessons of September 11, 2001.

No?

Well, then, what was the point?

Al Gore & FasterCures Airlift New Orleans Victims

Al Gore helps airlift New Orleans victims

The FasterCures Airlift from New Orleans

What was I saying about needing a can-do President?


And, just to pull something out of the play-by-play (the FasterCures article),

At this point Catherine Berger pulled up a story from the DOD saying they had two medical teams evacuating people from the hospitals and the airport and that the ship COMFORT was sailing to New Orleans from Baltimore. That did not sound like it was going to help that many people for at least another day or two. We carried on. (As it happens, the COMFORT never reached New Orleans).

Why didn't the Comfort reach New Orleans?

And more,

We were now desperate to find a contact on the ground at the New Orleans airport to help triage ambulatory medical patients into these planes. FEMA in Washington was non responsive. We spoke to the aide to one of the deputies at FEMA and was told they did not need or want our help since the hospital evacuation was going fine. We looked at the reports from CNN about the conditions at the field hospital at the airport and discounted that opinion immediately. [Emphasis added -- sid]

...Gore said that on the second trip to New Orleans, the doctors at the airport told him that the evacuation of the first 90 ambulatory patients had been the tipping point in their ability to adequately care for the other bedridden patients. They also noted that the military evacuations did not really pick up steam until after we “motivated” them with our private effort.

Of note:

Throughout the entire operation in Tennessee, EMS operations in Chicago had stayed prepared to handle patients or evacuees. None ever arrived because the military did not want us to use Chicago. The volunteers in Chicago were amazing in their desire to help. Mayor Daly had been rebuffed earlier when he offered a complete mobile hospital unit for the airport and a tent city as well. Sen. Barack Obama called Gore and asked how had Gore managed to land in New Orleans when the Senator had been refused landing rights to help.

None of the airlines involved required a contract or any written guarantee of payment before sending their planes and volunteer crews – the first time Steve Davison had ever witnessed that in 15 years of chartering planes for political campaigns and other events. One official said if Gore promised to pay, that was good enough for them.

I know who the real Americans are in this story.

Downing Street Update

Rep. Lee Introduces Resolution of Inquiry into Iraq War Planning

Great article on computer security

The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security

Around the time I was learning to walk, Donn Parker was researching the behavioral aspects of hacking and computer security. He says it better than I ever could:

"Remote computing freed criminals from the historic requirement of proximity to their crimes. Anonymity and freedom from personal victim confrontation increased the emotional ease of crime, i.e., the victim was only an inanimate computer, not a real person or enterprise. Timid people could become criminals. [Emphasis added -- sid.] The proliferation of identical systems and means of use and the automation of business made possible and improved the economics of automating crimes and constructing powerful criminal tools and scripts with great leverage."

Hidden in Parker's observation is the awareness that hacking is a social problem. It's not a technology problem, at all. "Timid people could become criminals." The Internet has given a whole new form of elbow-room to the badly socialized borderline personality.

Beautiful. That's *so* incredibly accurate. Absolutely brilliant.

Needing a Leader

Fuck yeah. I agree with every single word. Where's my "can-do" President?

My problem with Bush -- and here, I do indeed address Bush individually, as a guy -- is that during the time that the crisis was developing, from Monday to Friday, he never seemed to experience any actual sense of urgency as a result of the simple fact that people were, minute by minute and hour by hour, dying.

Let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he was being prevented from acting by bureaucracy and the sheer magnitude of the situation. Where are the stories of how he was in his office freaking the fuck out because there were tens of thousands of Americans trapped without food and water? Where's the story of how he ripped a strip off of somebody, demanding to know what the holy hell the holdup is getting water and food to those people?

I want to hear about how he was demanding that extraordinary steps be taken. I want to hear about how he sent his lawyers into a room -- he had four days, you know -- and demanded that they come back in an hour with a plan for him to send the Marines into New Orleans with 100 trucks of food and water, posse comitatus or not.

Say what you want about the mayor and governor -- those people were in pain. They saw people suffering and dying and took it as a given that it couldn't go on that way, and that if it did, government's response would be a failure. The mayor cried at the top of his lungs for help. I want to hear that Bush cried at the top of his lungs for help. I want to hear that he called every corporate hotshot he's befriended in the last twenty years and told them that if they ever wanted another invitation to the White House for dinner, they were going to pony up a fat wad of cash to the Red Cross, and they were going to do it yesterday.

No matter whose fault the slow relief effort was, the fact of the matter is that these are Americans, and this is their president, and the fact that they were homeless, starving, dying
of thirst, and deprived of medication never once seemed to actually bother him.

Read the whole thing.

President Oblivious and CYA

Dems Assail White House on Katrina Effort

At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency had "absolutely no credentials."

She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.

"He said 'Why would I do that?'" Pelosi said.

"'I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'"

"Oblivious, in denial, dangerous," she added.

Great Scott.

The press are being banned from New Orleans. Why? What national security interest is threatened here?

Bush banning media from New Orleans

It's censorship, it is. DON'T LET IT HAPPEN.

FEMA accused of censorship

When U.S. officials asked the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs said on Wednesday.

The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with the Bush administration's ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said in separate telephone interviews.

Katrina Timeline

Katrina Timeline

Note that the Gov of La declared a state of emergency on Aug 26th, and a federal state of emergency was declared on Aug 27th.