Warming the planet's oceans and other large bodies of water seems like a very bad idea, at this juncture.
Warming the planet's oceans and other large bodies of water seems like a very bad idea, at this juncture. It makes a lot of weather events much worse.
By inference, this is also a reasonable explanation of why Houston was not evacuated.
- Harvey did not track in the direction of Houston,
- Allison (2001) had given them experience with exactly this sort of rain event,
- not mentioned here but Rita (2005) missed altogether and the attempted evacuation caused deaths because millions of people stuck on the roads.
Thus, a body of logic and experience suggested staying put for Houston. It's just that this was incomprehensibly worse. Plus, while meteorologists are right a tremendously high percentage of the time, sometimes, like with Rita, they are not. So if the only reference they could give officials was "like Allison, but worse", it's unlikely most people would understand what that could mean, and even the weather folk saying they knew it all along are being a bit see, I told you so without a perfect basis.
I also find it rich that Abbott, who is a climate change skeptic, is the one who suggested evacuating publicly, without getting on the same page as the Mayor of Houston, and without making it an order, which would have opened all the evacuation roads to traffic going out of Houston, only.
Meanwhile, I seriously doubt that the entire metropolitan Houston area could have been safely evacuated starting on Friday, which is when he said something. This was a no win situation by Friday's announcement.
I just hope the rescue and evacuation efforts are successful, now.
#toolate #fakescience
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/climate/how-hurricane-harvey-became-so-destructive.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/climate/how-hurricane-harvey-became-so-destructive.html
By inference, this is also a reasonable explanation of why Houston was not evacuated.
- Harvey did not track in the direction of Houston,
- Allison (2001) had given them experience with exactly this sort of rain event,
- not mentioned here but Rita (2005) missed altogether and the attempted evacuation caused deaths because millions of people stuck on the roads.
Thus, a body of logic and experience suggested staying put for Houston. It's just that this was incomprehensibly worse. Plus, while meteorologists are right a tremendously high percentage of the time, sometimes, like with Rita, they are not. So if the only reference they could give officials was "like Allison, but worse", it's unlikely most people would understand what that could mean, and even the weather folk saying they knew it all along are being a bit see, I told you so without a perfect basis.
I also find it rich that Abbott, who is a climate change skeptic, is the one who suggested evacuating publicly, without getting on the same page as the Mayor of Houston, and without making it an order, which would have opened all the evacuation roads to traffic going out of Houston, only.
Meanwhile, I seriously doubt that the entire metropolitan Houston area could have been safely evacuated starting on Friday, which is when he said something. This was a no win situation by Friday's announcement.
I just hope the rescue and evacuation efforts are successful, now.
#toolate #fakescience
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/climate/how-hurricane-harvey-became-so-destructive.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/climate/how-hurricane-harvey-became-so-destructive.html
This is a really good thread on how Houston's infrastructure works and therefore why evacuation would have been very, very bad. Essentially, the highways are part of the drainage.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/CorbettMatt/status/901959336850804737
You can see that in many many pictures — many roads are flooded to the bottom of the overhead traffic lights.
ReplyDelete