7 thoughts on “Kerry Emanuel”

  2. The confluence of rising sea levels and stronger and wetter hurricanes with increasing coastal population and unwise government interference in insurance markets portends ever increasing hurricane disasters.

    At least, he’s acknowledging the problems of public flood insurance though not acknowledging it dominates rising sea levels. Rising sea levels and flood insurance provided well below cost gets you expensive natural disasters just like rising sea levels and $5 gets you a fast food meal.

  3. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and wildfires are part of nature, and the natural world has long ago adapted to them. Disasters occur when we move to risky places and build inadequate infrastructure.

    It’s the old if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one for it to fall on, does the tree really fall? There are precious few places on Earth we can live where we are not affected by nature. In fact, there are none. In order to avoid living in places affected by nature, we need to cease to exist.

    As a consequence of these subsidies, coastal populations are rising much faster than the general population.

    Living along the coast has always been risky and yet that is where humans have lived for pretty much ever. It is true that as there are more people, the chance of getting hit with a falling tree increases but that doesn’t mean the tree wouldn’t fall if no people were there. Damage would still be done to the environment regardless of the presence of humans.

    permitting more intense storms like Irma to develop, and observations show that this cap is indeed rising. … We are beginning to see trends in hurricane observations.

    We had a huge dry spell in hurricanes. Nothing we have witnessed over the last 20 years is outside the norms of natural variation.

    Naysayers point out that most trends in the noisy hurricane database do not rise to the high bar of 95 percent certainty that we scientists place on signal detection, implying that no action should be taken

    Uh, no action? And action on what? There is no policy that will prevent hurricanes from happening. Removing people from existence isn’t a solution either. Flood insurance can distort things but perhaps there are solutions going overlooked by the anti-human nature deniers.

  4. Well, people like living in picturesque places and those quite often are near flood zones. At least here in Europe there are regulations regarding construction in the actual flood zones, I expect the US has similar regulations, people can ignore those at their own peril.
    Still there is the human disaster aspect of this at stake here. Also, things like ensuring the water supply and roads are fixed or that public services become online again falls squarely on the public domain side of things and the government needs to take care of that.

    As for actual reconstruction. You guys pay property taxes right? I think it’s for the government to decide (AFAIK you’re a Republic) if they want to help with reconstruction or not assuming they have the means to do so.

  5. Nature has been plotting to kill every living thing on Earth since life got here. In one way or another it has been batting 1.000 the whole time.

    In the long run, the precautionary principle hasn’t saved even one life.

    1. The naturalistic fallacy. People fear change, so they assume natural is better than artificial. But, nature is trying to kill us. That’s her job.

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