Matt Davies for September 05, 2017

ZING!! It’s worth noting, for those who think it’s all a hoax, that reinsurance companies (who insure insurance companies against massive payouts such as those in the wake of Harvey) have had to adjust their policies due to climate change. Remember that insurance companies use statistical patterns to balance money paid in and money paid out, and reinsurance companies do one level great complexity. See, for example, Swiss Re’s statement below:

http://www.swissre.com/eca/our_climate_change_strategy.html

Nice article motive:The smart money knows that AGW is real. And is planning for the future.

NASA worries about it’s expensive facilities:http://gizmodo.com/the-biggest-threat-to-nasas-future-is-the-ocean-1786443954

So does the US Navy:

https://hbr.org/2017/07/managing-climate-change

And if you are reading this with a cup of coffee close by:

Starbucks is developing coffee plants and testing coffee-growing practices to make crops more resistant to new pests and diseases, such as leaf rust, that spread with warmer temperatures. Its early results have produced plants that are more resistant—but lower-yielding and slower-growing. This is a bets strategy that will have a favorable outcome only if temperature trends in the coffee-growing regions that are already experiencing declining yields continue, as scientists are forecasting, and are not simply a short-term anomaly.

The fact is, that botanists and other naturalists are consistently seeing changes related to a warming climate. They receive no money from climate research, so stuff the denier claims about greedy researchers. But inevitably, the climate affects what they do research, and they report it. Plants and animals on the move are not being paid to do so.

And I will point out that some large corporations in the US continue, despite Trump idiocy, to move forward on climate issues. Of course, a few of them are hypocrites, as this article notes. Note that the title implies that all the corporations are hypocrites, in line with conservative thinking. Not true, as the article shows.

https://newrepublic.com/article/141779/corporations-defying-trump-climate-change-not-heroes

David Horsey has a zinger of an article relating to the above:

Hurricane Harvey has exposed the weakness of the three shibboleths that have been the guiding political philosophy for two generations of Republicans. Those three shaky imperatives are that 1) lowering taxes is always a good idea, 2) government programs can always be cut and 3) economic growth must always be given priority over environmental concerns.

Now, reality has set in and the GOP congressmen realize there is a reason government needs to set money aside for disaster relief: Disasters always happen.

Another lesson from Hurricane Harvey is that allowing decades of sprawling growth to pave over the landscape and subvert natural processes will, sooner or later, produce dire consequences. In Texas, folks do not like regulations. They do not like government telling them where to build a housing subdivision or a chemical plant or a highway. Houston has famously grown to be the fourth-largest city in the United States by dispensing with zoning laws as the metropolis expanded across the flat, clay soil plain with little regard for wetlands and bayous. You can see the result of those policies in all the photographs of Houston neighborhoods drowned in a vast lake of brown water.

Link to Horsey comment:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-hurricane-lessons-20170903-story.html

And to add insult to injury…https://www.yahoo.com/news/landlords-demand-rent-flooded-homes-082310305.html

Maybe that guy on the left should have planned for the disaster. It is harder to be prepared when you don’t believe in science, and cheep out on insurance. That guy on the right’s job is to take as much advantage of the situation as he can and pay as little as possible to help. This is made easier by the people that guy on the left puts in office. Is it great yet?

The gutting of the EPA has also significantly reduced the ability to clean up superfund sites. Texas has toxic waste sites in the area of flooding.

www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/04/548490643/in-texas-concerns-about-damage-to-flooded-toxic-waste-sites.

Great comments above! Just hope certain people are listening.

Also there’s the problem of building crucial processing chemical plants in highly populated areas. When you have large installations that needs a large labor force you have to have a population to draw from. And they need some place to live close by so they can get to and from work in a reasonable time frame….. By the same token these plants are poisonous in a catastrophe situation as is being shown by this situation of the hurricane called Harvey. Insurance isn’t going to cover this and Trump cut into EPA recovery systems two weeks before Harvey. Good luck getting recovery programs going quickly.

Well, sometimes plants are there before the housing that springs up around them. Same thing happens with airports. Trouble is, that developers are allowed to build near these plants, instead of having the plants surrounded by parkland or some other low density land use. And of course, the plants will always declare themselves to be “safe.”

Only 15% of those affected by the storm in Texas have flood insurance. That’s also about how many would have car insurance if it wasn’t required by law.

Homeowner’s insurance does NOT cover flooding from external sources. NFIP is the only flood insurance that exists.

There was a “Miss Peach” strip by Mel Lazarus that got relevant again during the Obamacare discussions, when people were lamenting the loss of their cheap-ass, do-nothing insurance plans.

The strip had the ethically shady Freddy selling insurance to his classmates, who discover that it has no protection, no payout, nothing. Freddy, having put a CLOSED sign on his booth, is cramming pennies into his bank as he exits, stage right: “It gives you ‘peace of mind’! What more do you want for three cents?”

I would like to hear any one of those “Climate Change” deniers argue against the fact that the warmer the Climate the stronger and more destructive hurricanes are.