Re: Is New Orleans finished ?

Jim Thompson wrote...
>
> John Larkin wrote:
>
>> Winfield Hill wrote:
>>> Dirk Bruere at Neopax wrote...
>>>> bill.sloman@xxxxxxxx wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> New Orleans is fixable.
>>>>>
>>>>> Most of the western side of the Netherlans is below sea level, and
>>>>> a chunk of it flooded in 1953. They fixed the dykes and pumped the
>>>>> water out - so can you.

I read that the cost to have built the levees to cat-5 level, as opposed
to the cat-3 level it was built to, would have been only $2.5B, which is
about 1/10 of what's going to be spent now by insurers, government, etc.

>>>> How would Holland fare if subjected to huge hurricanes periodically?
>>>
>>> That's a good point, but so is Bill's point. New Orleans wasn't done
>>> in by the Hurricane, per se, but rather by a 20-foot-high storm surge
>>> in Lake Pontchartrain, and by a dike or levee that structurally failed,
>>> even tho the water was below its top. It's speculated that the levee's
>>> base failed. We need ways to test these issues. That's something the
>>> Dutch know a lot about, and we could learn from them. And if we do,
>>> perhaps we could save 100's of billions of dollars of property loss
>>> the next time. And, given Bush and our heavy oil-burning CO2 scene,
>>> there *will* be a next time. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
>>
>> Geez Win, do you blame Bush for everything, including a couple
>> thousand years of C02 creation?

You know I don't blame Bush for a hundred years of high industrial
energy consumption and pollution, but I strongly blame him for being
on the WRONG side of the solutions, and for that I have a long list
of specifics.

>> You sure are sticking to it.
>>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/national/30cycle.html?ei=5065&en=9e0e24b0c5ee1d90&ex=1125979200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

I recognize that any one storm may be more part of a natural cycle
then a trend, because I have to respect the scientists who say that.
One was this fellow, who I have heard in several long interviews:
To quote from your reference, "In an article this month in the journal
Nature, Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at MIT, wrote that global
warming might have already had some effect. The total power dissipated
by tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic and North Pacific increased
70 to 80 percent in the last 30 years, he wrote."

But in his interviews, Emanuel says that, based on his research, he is
a strong believer in global warming. He asserted that the increased
CO2 has had a HUGE effect, easily seen in the decades of measurements
he's accumulated, as a steady global increase in total integrated power
dissipated by all the tropical storms, and seen in individual seasons
by stronger swings and specific more powerful storms. Such as Katrina,
we can now add. How anyone can read "increased 70 to 80 percent in the
last 30 years" and argue this is natural beats me. Anyway, John, please
go read the Nature article. Given its importance, I'll take the liberty
of posting it to s.e.d., where it will have a short life in the servers.

Getting back to Bush, again I do strongly blame him and his party for
being on the wrong side of the equation, for completely letting off
the hook a multitude of the responsible parties (some of whom are now
messing up Massachusetts), for diverting our country's resources to
Iraq, for draining more in tax cuts, for taking money and critical
resources from the Army Corps of Engineers for Iraq, and for taking
critical resources from the National Guard for Iraq instead of using
it here at home. He has his own agenda, and he does *not* cared about
us, of that I'm convinced.

> As for repatriating the "homeless", I vote we send 'em to
> Massachusetts. They'd fit right into Roxbury ;-)

You are certainly making out like a redneck ***.


--
Thanks,
- Win
.