Two words for those who're flinging shade at Houston municipal officials: Hurricane Rita

[AtheistCrusader]

64. I read that. Some problems with it.

Thursday morning into Friday afternoon, it transitioned from a tropical storm with winds of 45 miles per hour to a Category 3 major hurricane with winds of 125 miles per hour in only 36 hours.
Rapid intensification isn't necessarily rare, but it is very hard to forecast. When all the conditions come together just right, a storm can really "blow up" and intensify very quickly.

This establishes no climate change link. The link between rising surface temperatures, acceleration and total wind speeds is not entirely understood. A large part of why it is hard to forecast. You can't just scale up what we knew 40 years ago by X% to account for a factor like surface temps. It's more complex than that.

Harvey was downgraded to a tropical storm over the weekend and expected to make a third landfall.
It is rare for a storm to move inland and then back out again over the same body of water it came from. Excessive rainfall has caused flooding more devastating than the impact of Harvey's initial landfall itself.
Inland flooding is often one of the worst impacts for storms making landfall. With the stalling of the storm over land, the flood threat has become Harvey's lasting impression.
CNN meteorologist Dave Hennen labeled Harvey a "one-in-1,000-years type of event."

These are WEATHER systems. There are three high-pressure weather systems pinning Harvey over that region. The ground flooding is almost entirely due to irresponsible human development, and they are going to pay in spades for it. There's a hell of a lot less of a link between global temperatures and those weather systems, than there are for simple surface temp boosting of a storm, and even that's a murky link.

Yes, climate change is likely a factor for Harvey, but it's not the driving or central issue. It's a mistake to focus on it in this context. It's no better than when the far right goes 'herp derp it's snowing in New Jersey in May!' because again, the relationship between climate and weather is more complex than that. (And because climate chance CAN introduce cold weather in summer too, again, super complex to model.)


https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/8/28/16213268/harvey-climate-change
If I had to pick a single thing that could have made this whole event less tragic, building codes. Runoff, impermeable surface development. Simple, raw, human greed. That's where we dropped it. This was a big hurricane, but we own most of the devastation.