I haven't been blogging much on Katrina on Winds of Change, in large part because I've been too angry to express myself coherently. Angry at the federal government, angry at the state government, angry at the municipal government, angry at the press, angry at the political opportunists, angry at the race-baiting, angry at the people who turned New Orleans into a combination of Waterworld and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and overall just plain angry at the situation in general.
I'm so angry right now that I'm probably well on my way to giving into the dark side of the Force, so rather than air my thoughts on the subject, let me proceed by quoting a number of Winds of Change commenters and other bloggers - so that they can speak for me, as it were.
Lurker's Opener
First and most importantly, lurker:
There's plenty of governemnt failure to point fingers for this disaster; and it it's about equally shared between both parties. Anyone trying to lay this solely on the Bush administration is being unseriously partisan, likewise the ones saying that they are blameless.
It is granted that the federal goverment had assumed authority for controlling Mississippi river flooding, having vested it to the Army Corps of Engineers. Seriously though. Would the Corps of Engineers have turned down extra funding from the City of New Orleans or the State of Louisiana dedicated to improving huricane survivability? Obviously, the Corps would have happily accepted it and done a good job. No money was provided. Why?
New Orleans and Louisiana obviously had priorities that were more important than huricane and flood protection... like building a new basketball arena and luring the NBA Charlotte Hornets to town with huge subsidies.
EVERYONE knew that this was a disaster waiting to happen, anyone that has watched any TV news during the last couple of Gulf huricanes at least. Sorry if the Feds didn't take the problem anymore seriously than the locals, whose very own lives and fortunes were at stake.
Let's all move along now. And don't forget to whistle past the graveyard.
John J. Reilly
Next, my mentor and blog-father John J. Reilly, the man I was avidly reading long before I had heard of Instapundit or blogosphere. Writing on his own blog on the subject, he makes a number of points I want to highlight in what he has termed in the past my "Talmudic" style of making a commentary on a commentary.
First of all, on the issue of Mayor Nagin and the rest of the local officials:
Evils must come, Jesus tells us, but woe to the man through whom they come. In that spirit, a national lynch mob has formed to find a suitable scapegoat.
There is, of course, Mayor Ray Nagin, who has reacted so badly to his sudden transformation into the Mayor of Atlantis (360 times). We should cut the man some slack. His unprecedented order on Sunday to evacuate the city saved tens of thousands of lives. On Monday, when Katrina had declined from a category 5 to a category 4 storm and had veered slightly to the east, it looked as if he had overreacted.
Once the levees broke, however, pretty much everything that he did has been disheartening. It is as if, on 911, Rudolph Giuliani had fled to Albany (the capital of New York State) and railed against the failure of the federal government to keep order in the city he had just abandoned. Of course, the New Orleans Chief of Police seems to have been even worse. The governor of Louisiana is a nice lady with a philosophical disposition. She may even be doing sterling job of disaster administration, but she is not doing the essential thing: appearing to be in charge, even if all the phones on her desk are dead and she has no idea how much of the state government survived 50 miles south of her office.
The initial point about finding a national scapegoat for the tragedy is rather apt. I think that part of the problem for this is that the chance of having any kind of a productive debate on this issue failed very early on when the more serious afflictees of the Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) initially attempted to blame the hurricane on global warming and the administration's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocols. As it now stands, neither side is terribly interested in answers as much as they are in executions (political or otherwise) either of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress or of Mayor Nagin and various Louisiana state officials including Governor Blanco. The problem is that neither of these sides is terribly interested in hearing of faults of anyone except the people they desire to rail against. As lurker noted, anyone who says that this is solely the fault of the administration is only demonstrating their monomaniacal partisanship, as are the people who are asserting that they're blameless. While I'm very dubious of specific reports of finger-pointing now that both sides have thrown down the gauntlet, by the end of the day I'm quite certain that there is going to be more than enough guilt and blame to go around, but that it is going to have to be countered by the fact that the same people who have been right accused of inaction, negligence, or incompetence are also the ones whose actions are now saving thousands upon thousands of lives. So if anybody is going to come up with a balance scale from which to judge Bush, Blanco, or Nagin, be sure to measure all of the lives that were saved as well as those that were lost by their actions.
Reilly then turns his attention to the Mogadishu on the Mississippi that was created in the post-Katrina New Orleans.
To what shall we compare New Orleans in the days after the canal broke? Certainly not to Florida during the administration of News Anchor Jeb. Certainly not to Manhattan after 911: in the latter case, you could walk from the site of the disaster to places were drinkable water was on tap and the lights were still on. To Haiti, perhaps, except that, in Haiti, people generally don’t shoot at hospital helicopters. Odd as it may seem, and without wishing to give aid and comfort to the people who want to blame Katrina on the Iraq War, the best analogy really is to Baghdad in the spring of 2003. In both cases, the state disintegrated. As soon as that was apparent, a predatory and dysfunctional underclass began to loot the place to the ground.
New Orleans dry was not like the flooded version. In this, perhaps, the city differed from Baghdad, where all that was necessary for chaos was for the cops to go off duty. New Orleans’ nasty underclass was normally restrained by the police; by middle-class conventions; for that matter, by the respectable lower class. Most of the people who did not follow the evacuation order were hardly members of the pathological dregs of society; they were just too poor or too stubborn to leave. (Some people not-at-all destitute remained in favored spots with generators and shot guns.) Nonetheless, the flooded city exploded, or boiled, because so much of the non-toxic part of society had evaporated and gone north to Baton Rouge and Memphis.
Is there a racial issue in the fall of New Orleans? Well, yes, but not in the way one might suppose ... The problem is that America has been willing to tolerate the sort of underclass, both helpless and dangerous, that simmered under the crust of New Orleans society. America made the same calculation about that underclass as about the levees that protect New Orleans. Yes, if there is a breach, there will be chaos; but at any given time, there probably won’t be a breach, so we can put off the fixing the problem today. When a breach occurs, though, the result is catastrophe.
One of the things I suspect is going to come out of the hurricane is that the apparently (as this was news to me when Katrina hit) notoriously corrupt political environment of New Orleans and its police department (somewhat ironically acronymned the "NOPD") is going to be put under the microscope. As noted by the notoriously right-wing Human Rights Watch: (via Ace of Spades)
As astutely noted by police abuse expert Prof. James Fyfe, some cities' police departments have reputations for being brutal, like Los Angeles, or corrupt, like New York, and still others are considered incompetent. New Orleans has accomplished the rare feat of leading nationally in all categories.
My own suspicion is that the behavior of the police, ranging from the loss of 2/3 of the police force to innumerable reports of the off-duty police taking part in the looting and other outrageous behavior (highlighted in a "positive story" about the formation of "tribes" among the city's survivors - wasn't this how Lord of the Flies started?) are going to be put under extremely close scrutiny in any major government investigation and likely exacerbated the city's degeneration into Mogadishu - paid vacations to Vegas should be the least of municipal officials' concern. That said, one must take great care in criticism of the police, however, to note that even if 2/3 went bad, that still means that 1/3 stayed at their jobs - such as the ones who likely saved the lives of those contractors the other day by opening fire on a group of gunmen.
Reilly's point concerning the acceptance of the existence of a large underclass in a lot of major US cities also bears some notice, especially since the political class and many of the underclass's self-proclaimed spokesmen have been kicking it down the road for about as long as they did the issue of flooding in New Orleans. I can easily see the chaos and anarchy that followed the breakdown of society in New Orleans taking place in Los Angeles following a major earthquake or Washington DC or Detroit. If there's one thing that's come out of Katrina, however, it's that maybe, just maybe, having these burnt-out cores in our inner cities and leaving them to rot isn't a good thing.
As for the international reaction and implications to Katrina, Reilly notes some the inevitable problems that very few have yet noted:
Katrina was a greater blow to American prestige than a massive and successful terrorist attack would be. America’s reputation for logistical competence has been gravely undermined. That is a more serious matter than the increased doubts about America’s compassion. Many people around the world are unshakably convinced that America is callous, but even anti-Americans thought that we could move stuff. It is not relevant that the Katrina Zone is the size of a European country, or that, in retrospect, we may see that the emergency services and military relief were delivered with miraculous efficiency. The federal government in particular now seems ineffective and unpopular. This comes on top of the continuing war in Iraq. That, too, may in retrospect appear low-cost and highly effective, but such an assessment in the future does not change the fact that America is widely seen as losing. The new feature is that America is now seen as losing at home and abroad.
Reilly then proceeds to make some predictions for what this holds for the future. While I by all means recommend that you read them, I want to focus on this part since one of the major things that we've learned since the 1990s is that perceptions have consequences to them. In case you hadn't heard, Zarqawi seized al-Qaim in northwestern Iraq. This is strategically stupid for a whole host of reasons, since anyone who's studied guerrilla warfare can tell you that guerrillas always lose big when they start acting like a conventional military and try to take and hold territory, but I suspect at least part of this new approach is due to Katrina in that either Zarqawi believes that the US is so hamstrung that it lacks the resources to retaliate against him or because he and his charges believe that Katrina was an omen from Allah and that they should press their advantage now - a speculation not to be discounted off-hand when one deals with some of the wierder mysticism and numerology that occurs in Islamist circles.
Jim Rockford's Posts
I also want to enter the very intelligent commenter Jim Rockford's thoughts into the record on this as I've found that as least as interesting and inciteful on the situation as anything I've seen to date in the press.
From just as this all started:
I'll have to defend the folks I lived with and knew.
The really, really poor and paycheck to paycheck folks white or black had very little and were reluctant to leave it to looters. Same in Mississippi and New Orleans. I understand that. I also understand the total, grinding poverty that afflicts the really, really poor. They had no transportation and it was the City's duty to take care of them. THAT is why we have government, to take care of the poorest and more helpless.
They are without blame. The African American working class folks who took their boats out to rescue people? The word you are looking for is heroes.
The Levees? THE SAME DISCUSSION took place in 1995, and nothing was done. Just like in prior to 9/11, there was no political will and courage to take costly steps to do things that were unpopular. Fixing the Levees to withstand a Cat 4-5 would cost just too much money. Too much political capital that could be used for $200 million on the Canal Street streetcar system.
From September 3:
Let me add there was a massive and notable flood in 1994 during which there was about 8 inches of rain in a little over two hours which flooded out the entire city and overwhelmed the pumps.
Flooding of this sort was experienced at a lower level only 11 years ago. So New Orleans had some warning.
Partial evacuation was possible of all these very poor folks up through Friday.
However New Orleans had so many near misses that it was felt throughout the city that the Hurricane would once again like Ivan and Georges take a turn and spare them. Note that Bush had to personally issue a plea to Gov Blanco to get Nagin to issue a mandatory evacuation order on late Saturday, just one day prior to the Hurricane's arrival. Blanco had to interrupt Nagin at dinner to get this done.
Once most of New Orlean's poor folk who don't own cars and have all their relatives in the city were stuck in the City it was going to get ugly. I'll note that there was NO stockpiling of portable toilets, water, food, generators, fuel etc at either the Convention Center or Superdome.
Nagin deserves about 80% of the blame.
By late Tuesday it was clear that things were ugly and a disaster, Blanco should have declared Martial Law, asked for federal help, and mobilized a massive citizen convoy to take as many people as possible at least to Baton Rouge where there was power and sewage. No sewage means deplorable conditions. While not all could have been rescued at least 10-15 thousand would have been evacuated the first day from each site which is better than nothing.
Blanco deserves about 15% of the blame.
Bush could have kicked things into gear more, however the failure on the ground of the local folks was only really clear by late Wed. So he deserves 5% of the blame (I cut him slack because he pressed for evac which saved lots of people).
On Mayor Nagin:
Mayor Nagin is a smart man. As a Comcast Cable exec he led the company in growth, new services, and customer satisfaction. He wasn't just some figurehead. He was about as good as it gets, in Louisiana, and is personally incorruptible (rare in Louisiana) and during his first year or so as Mayor attacked corruption in the Morial Regime, cleared out City Hall, and tried to reform the NOPD to dump the bad/corrupt/brutal cops.
Ray Nagin was drafted by the small business leaders who still cared about the city and the benevolent associations that dated from the 19th Century and sill helped the working class and middle class African Americans in Mid City and East New Orleans. These are good, decent, hard working people who basically held the city together when the white elite fled or ignored, the white middle class fled, and the major businesses moved to Houston.
New Orleans has been dying in slow motion, made worse by the Projects around 1950, since at least 1920 or so. Corruption and violence drove off the business community and prevented enterpeneurial efforts. Wasn't always so, in the 19th Century New Orleans was the commercial and intellectual capital of the South. But the highest leadership just abandoned the notion of continued economic development and sought rent-seeking.
The problem is that New Orleans despite the efforts of small businesses and benevolent societies and good, decent smart guys like Ray Nagin has a completely dysfunctional culture. The projects have been a breeding ground for violence, despair, and poverty for generations but nothing was done. NOPD was understaffed and essentially broken but nothing was done. The true magnitude of the crisis impending seems to have put forward ennui mixed with desperation instead of heroic measures to at least minimize the crisis.
There is no objective reason so many in New Orleans were poor; New Orleans has a unique geographical advantage in shipping, so light manufacturing and transit jobs (Morial tried to develop a fresh-cut-flower commercial air express at Louis Armstrong Airport with links to Latin America but nothing happened) that paid enough to lift people out of poverty should have been a no brainer, but the political culture did not support it.
Poverty kills and the absolute poverty of New Orleans killed absolutely. THAT is the true tragedy of decades of bad leadership uninterested in the drudgery of economic development.
And again:
as a defender of Ray Nagin (somewhat) I am going to have to explain what's what in New Orleans as far as geography and culture. I lived there in 1995-98. Disclaimer: I met Ray Nagin once and was very impressed. The man has a lot of charisma and was a very good executive at Comcast. He supported Bobby Jindal over Blanco and gave to Bush in 2000.
However, he did indeed fail. Once he failed to evacuate about 100-200,000 desperately poor people in New Orleans, they would be stuck in a city without power, water, sewage, and food and they would start to die. Period. Even if the Feds had moved heaven and earth people would have died in the horrific Louisiana heat, under filthy and squalid conditions. This is just reality.
Next: in 1994 August a freak rainstorm dumped 18 inches in a couple of hours, flooding the city and overwhelming the pumps. Nagin had only to look back to see measures needed: move every city vehicle to the neutral ground (what New Orleans natives call the median) on St. Charles and other streets around the Riverbend and Uptown areas (highest in the city). Even I KNEW this and was told repeatedly as a new arrival by longtime residents, when it starts to really pour move you car there so it's not flooded. This alone would have preserved buses and allowed evac of the Convention Center over to the West Bank across the Crescent City bridge where there was power, water, sewage, and food. It would have saved hundreds of lives no doubt.
Also: New Orleans had a lot of near misses, most notably Ivan and 1998's Hurrican Georges. Which people in New Orleans found to be a "bust" and led to the idea of being blessed by God and no danger from the Hurrican. I can well understand who Bush (who knew that hurricanes require evac) would beg Blanco to force Nagin to issue a Mandatory Evacuation order late Saturday Night when it was too late for most of the desperately poor.
In Contrast Mississippi and Alabama issued Mandatory Evac orders on FRIDAY giving folks 48 hours notice. The logistics were clear, evacing about 100-200 people is a MASSIVE undertaking so you need as much time and heroic effort as possible. If you need to fight with the teamsters or whoever, do it because every person you evac is a life saved. Period.
Ray Nagin who I've defended in the Past and will continue to do so, simply failed in this, and deserves the blame of putting about 100,000 plus people in this mess. He failed in his duty to get them out and once it all came apart basically forted up in his office and didn't go out. Rudy and Haley Barbour and Alabama's Gov. went out and PERSONALLY smacked heads to get things going. BOBBY JINDAL told Fox that he was holding "come to Jesus" meeting with the National Guard and FEMA to force them to throw out the rule book and just save people. Properly, this is Nagin's job.
As it was to prepare both the Convention Center and Superdome with lots of water, food, emergency generators, portable toilets, and enough armed security to deter violence in the locations. Nagin failed here too.
Once the Hurricane passed through, most lines of transport were just GONE. The main roads from Kenner's Louis Armstrong Airport are gone. Metarie is gone. St. Bernard Parish is gone. Plaquemines and St. Tammany are gone. There's still many people there who are also probably dying on their rooftops or are trapped in attics. I-10 is just GONE. It's the main route to New Orleans, particularly from the West which is untouched and has power, food, sewage, and water. Trucking food, water, medical supplies, to the trapped city has to go south first, then up to New Orleans from the south. Same for evacuation.
This makes pre-positioning assets and moving them into staging areas quickly a must. This is Blanco's job and wasn't done. Helicopters, trucks, food, water, comm equipment were way out of place and not close to New Orleans where they needed to be. Blanco failed there.
By late Tuesday or early Wed it should have been obvious that Nagin had lost control of the city and that tens of thousands at the Superdome, Convention Center, and overpasses needed rescuing immediately. Blanco waited for the Feds to basically take charge, instead of working with what she had and organizing a citizen convoy to get people out at least from the Convention Center to Baton Rouge. Even 2,000 SUVs going round-trip from Baton Rouge to the Convention Center would have been able to evacuate somewhere southwards of 10,000 people which is better than nothing, particularly since many were elderly, handicapped, or infants. Would have required on the fly logistics to get gas stops set up on the routes, and a call to fellow citizens, but could have been done. It SHOULD have been done. Blanco just sat around crying on TV; until late Thursday night when it was too late.
Bush gets credit from me for prodding Blanco and Nagin (who simply seems to have not believed New Orleans would get hit or the risk was real, believe me you can't understand that until you've lived in New Orleans then it makes sense, New Orleans is not in America or even the 20th Century, much less the 21st). Where he deserves some blame is for not realizing on Wed that the entire political leadership in Louisiana had failed and needed his personal touch.
Bush on Wed should have flown to Baton Rouge, asked Blanco to step aside and personally taken charge of the situation, drafting either Tommy Franks or Norman Schwarzkopf to assist him with logistics and ask Congress to declare martial law in New Orleans. This would have allowed him to insert the 82nd Airborne early, by Thursday, to provide security that would have saved hundreds of lives. By taking that personally and with the help of a logistics expert, Bush would have blown away much as Rudy did on 9/11 the battling jurisdiction and paralysis by rulebook that seems to have stymied the rescue effort. He probably would have set up some sort of massive convoy to evac all of New Orleans, run it day and night.
However, this failure to take over completely, is understandable. Bush dealt with Mike Foster not Blanco as Governor, and Foster though somewhat a neanderthal conservative, at least got things done. I've seen folks who detested Foster write that they wished he was still Governor because he would have drafted anyone he could to come down and stop the horrible violence in New Orleans that preyed on the weak and helpless. Foster gave the illusion that Louisiana politicians were somewhat competent which we can see they are not.
This situation is unique to Louisiana. Last year we had something like five major hurricanes and favorable geography (essentially, redundant interstates which do not exist in Louisiana) and competent government made them not horrors as we've seen in New Orleans. Unless you've lived there you have no idea of the incompetence and failure of the political class.
Profiles in Courage
As Michelle Malkin notes, as New Orleans spiraled into anarchy and unrest, a number of heroes stepped to the fore in the finest tradition of America and I think they deserve every bit as much credit and publicity as anyone who ends up getting blamed for this disaster. These include Jabbar Gibson and Ronald Miller and God knows how many others. Times of crisis and destruction may bring out the worst in human nature, but they also create heroes and we would do well to protect them. I say this especially in the case of Gibson, who may face prosecution for his valiant actions (and if he does, somebody needs to form a legal defense team) in the face of this tragedy.
There, I've said my piece, but I'm still mad.
Mr Reilly is very correct in saying there is plenty of blame to go around on both sides politically right up to the approach of the hurricane. After Aug 26 the buck stops at the Presidents desk.
On Aug 26th the Bush II issued this statement http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050827-1.html
The federal government(Bush II) took responsibility. On Mon 29 Aug the President flew over the disaster sites on the Gulf Coast. I do not know how low Air Force 1 flew but someone had to have given the President an overview of the geography prior to the hurricane so he could understand what he was observing. It had to have included New Orleans and its immediate area where water was still standing in land because it had been pushed into the river delta. On Tues 30 Aug it was known the levee's had broken. The President did not act, nor did any of his staff.
Another way to articulate what happened is a scene from Major Dundee starring Charleston Heston(I watched this on Sat morning 3 Sept on AMC channel for a break) Major Dundee has taken an arrow in the leg and needs medical attention. He leaves his command and goes into town incognito to have a doctor treat the wound. He know he will have to stay in town longer than he wants and without any help. While there he bascially goes on a bender. He looks up one night and there are members of his command. They essentially drag him back to his command. When he wakes up in the morning he calls over his LT. He says to him:
Maj Dundee: I gave you a specific order and you failed to carry it out.
Lt Graham: No sir. You gave me a command. I gave the orders from then on.
Maj Dundee: That you did.
On Aug 26 Bush gave the command. no one can say they they gave the orders.
The proof is look at the response from Thurs 1 Sep on after the Bush II gives the command again.
The blame lies with the President.
A complete fabrication Robert. Louisiana never turned over the evacuation to the Federal government.
Its a fabrication too to claim that the President "didn't act".
If this had been a terrorist attack - and we will have another terrorist attack sometime in the future - our enemies have been well advised that all they need to do is kick us once and we will all turn on our leaders like a wolf pack.
I'm pissed too. I'm a Louisiana native who left almost 20 years ago because of the backward and corrupt leadership in the state and the disasterous impact it had on the economy. This is the same state that elected Edwin Edwards as governor so many times I lost count. What does that tell you?
Anyone blaming President Bush first has obviously never lived in Louisiana. Nothing about the failure of the local leadership should surprise anyone. I give the feds a C- for their part in the effort, but the local leadership gets an F. As I would expect.
Anyone who expects a Louisiana politician to take care of them when something bad happens is just asking for trouble. And if the current situation looks like something from the third world, remember that Louisiana is basically our own slice of the third world right here in the US.
And before anyone from down there gets offended, I should point out that my Louisiana credentials are pretty solid: degree from LSU, Cajun ancestry, family going back generations in the state. I had relatives that grew up speaking French, not English. New Orleans was where my wife and I honeymooned. This is criticism from family, not an outsider. And it hurts to have to write it.
Everything you've seen on the news this week is the result.
"Anyone trying to lay this solely on the Bush administration is being unseriously partisan, likewise the ones saying that they are blameless."
OK, fine, now that these unrealistic extremes have been defined, and dismissed, by you very partisan folks, what's next?
How much blaim does George Bush deserve? (I somehow thought a large portion of your support for him was his alleged "leadership"?)
What if this were a terrorist attack? Would your response be so complacent?
How do you feel about the way the policies you've supported have played themselves out? Keep the thousands of poor black folk dying right now in NO in mind while you craft your justification, er, response.
And thanks for giving us a Third World nation where a mighty superpower once stood.
What kind of position has the current administration put us in if another disaster, or terrosist strike, occurs RIGHT NOW?
Please, god, send us some REAL CONSERVATIVES and depose the fascists and their minions that have led us to the edge of this precipice.
Is there a reason you've spammed that comment here twice?
Uh Uh, Duh:
Thanks for finding the right thread this time, it's appreciated by those of us who still value that quaint concept of coherent argumentation.
OK, fine, now that these unrealistic extremes have been defined, and dismissed, by you very partisan folks, what's next?
First of all, Bush, Blanco, and Nagin need to stop being a circular firing squad. The immediate priority right now is to help the people still trapped in New Orleans and get them to safety, which I think is being undercut by the mutual games of "gotcha" on all sides. There's still another year until the Congressional elections and 2 years to the next presidential election, which is more than enough to time a 9/11 commission-style affair if that's what people want. Any number of people need to be canned (and I think a whole host of people need to be in both FEMA/DHS and the NOPD), there's more than enough time to worry about that.
How much blaim does George Bush deserve? (I somehow thought a large portion of your support for him was his alleged "leadership"?)
Beats me, and any personal exoneration or condemnation on my part doesn't help him or anyone else save people in New Orleans any faster. You want to roast him over this, we can wait till they're all safe.
As for my support for him, it's due more to policies rather than aesthetic traits like leadership if you're talking about me personally. But then I don't really think you are or you would have bothered to read what I wrote and comment on it rather than posting this screed in an unrelated thread before coming here.
What if this were a terrorist attack? Would your response be so complacent?
That's actually addressed above by Reilly and it concludes that New Orleans after Katrina was worse than New York City after 9/11, something you might well want to factor into your response. As for me being complacent, I've been donating money and volunteering help for the refugees who have ended up in KC, so I really don't want to hear it.
How do you feel about the way the policies you've supported have played themselves out? Keep the thousands of poor black folk dying right now in NO in mind while you craft your justification, er, response.
What the hell are you talking about? I haven't expressed any policies online about FEMA, New Orleans levees, DHS, or any of the other federal policies that are alleged to have brought about this situation online and certainly not WoC. And do I take it from your response that any Caucasians who died in this tragedy are unimportant to your calculation? The problem is that people died in this tragedy rather than their race or socio-economic status. If New Orleans were 67% white would that make what happened there any less of a tragedy? I sure as hell hope not.
Well it was the inevitable result of that whole Cold War. But what does the current state of Russia have to do with any of this?
Not sure, but then I'm not and have never claimed to be a disaster specialist. Neither a lot of the people who are playing them online, incidentally, which is one of my problems with how these debates are acting out. I imagine it would depend on the scale of such a thing.
You're showing your ignorance if you're bemoaning the lack of government response to this disaster while simultaneously labeling the US a fascist state. Fascism is supposed to result in a more centralized system of governance, that's one of the alleged benefits of the system. You might have read that in my response to your comments in the Daily Demarche thread were you interested in rationale discussion rather than spam.
You might also try reading the whole post next time, as it addresses many of the points you are attempting to articulate.
Robin: Louisiana never turned over the evacuation to the Federal government.
In fact they have still not turned over the Louisiana National Guard to federal control, and other state guard units seem to be still operating under the Lousiana NG's overall command.
Still, you hear little appreciation for some yeoman efforts. The Coast Guard alone has rescued 18,000 people in less than a week, including 7000 by helicopter.
FEMA will get no credit for anything they accomplish, since everybody has decided to pile on them. The last time I heard this much abuse against FEMA was back in the 80s, when leftists accused them of being a right-wing plot to suppress dissent.
FEMA also appears rather prominently in many 1980s-era Evangelical conspiracy theories in which they solidify control over the US for the Antichrist.
In any event, I think it's clear that a good number of people need to be cashiered on both the state and the federal level. But before people start bashing organizations in toto, they might well want to stop and figure in all the lives these organizations saved in their measure.
Uh Huh raves: Keep the thousands of poor black folk dying right now in NO in mind while you craft your justification, er, response.
Something that has come to my mind several times over the past few days is the yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in 1793. It killed 5000 people (a proportionately far greater disaster than the current one - in 1793 that was 10% of Philadelphia) and is probably the major reason why the capital was moved to Washington.
As the death toll mounted, the city turned to the black community for help. It was (mistakenly) believed at the time that blacks are resistant to yellow fever. Hundreds of blacks served as nurses during the epidemic, many of them traveling there from Boston or the south. They died in droves alongside their patients.
After the epidemic, Mathew Carey (an early American version of Lyndon LaRouche) spread the theory that yellow fever was a Negro plot to exterminate the white race and take over the Americas. He accused the black volunteers (most of whom were dead) of profiteering during the epidemic.
Two black organizers of the relief effort, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, published a response: A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793 and a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown upon them in some late Publications. It was the first black publication in American history (I think - unless somebody can cite something earlier).
Kanye West, BTW, who was shooting off his mouth on MSNBC, is also a proponent of the "AIDS is a man-made disease" libel. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And Marx was wrong: History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as more tragedy.
Joseph Conrad got it right: "Man does not soar like an eagle; he flies like a beetle."
Well, I gave local, state, and federal govt an A+ on handling this disaster from the get-go. Grandma nature, that old battle-axe, is going to exact her toll and turn the usual deaf ear to our bawlings afterwards.
I felt nothing but a great swell of pride, and a little bit of pique at my fellow man for their irreverance. In olden times, there were no superdomes, with or sans working plumbing. No ice. No bottled water or meals ready to eat to drop out of helicopters.
If it had been a cat five direct hit, that superdome's roof would have been ripped clean off, and the people inside sucked up into the stratosphere, just like the wild indians of yore.
Reading the various spoilt-child reactions from our greatest thinkers, it perhaps would have been better for them if it had.
Anywho, sheets of carbon nanotubes inculcated in concrete oughta wreck any hurricane on earth, I'm thinking.
Great post and insightful comments, mostly. Though the #7 response an the aptly-named commenter does recall the warning about feeding and trolls.
Former New Orleans resident Jim Rockford is quoted as saying:
Wow! I've been tuning in to NBC and reading the NYT and Baltimore Sun (most, not all days for both). Lots and lots of blame for Bush, his appointees, and his federal government. This is the first I've heard of that story.
Google gives this Free Republic mirror of a Sat Aug 28 CNN story, stating
Is there a more complete source for the story?
I also saw "Meet the Press" on Sunday morning, where Tim Russert gave former N.O. Mayor Marc Morial a podium to blame Bush and the federal government for all that has befallen the city he led for many years. Only the dopiest of viewers would have imagined that the emoting local and state politicians that Russert showcased might bear some tiny sliver of responsibility for the unfolding calamity.
AMac -
After Katrina hit, CNN allegedly edited the story by removing the sentence "Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said that President Bush had called and urged the state to order the evacuation." Discarded Lies has a link to the revised version.
You be the judge. I pay no heed to CNN, but Roger Simon was complaining mightily about their coverage.
As noted, the Washington Post got burned today by a "senior Bush official" who told them that Gov. Blanco of Louisiana had never declared a state of emergency in the site -- a claim the Post printed as fact. Yet the claim was demonstrably false and by late afternoon the Post had been compelled to print a correction.
This week's Newsweek contains the same false claim -- and though their recital of the anecdote is unsourced, common sense suggests that someone or some operation fed them both the same line, which neither organization checked out before running.
Monday's Times, not surprisingly, confirms that the White House damage control operation is being run by Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett.
Add it up.
Haven't you learned that they are only good at one thing- lieing.
Max #14,
Without a hyperlink to follow, it's hard for me to comment specifically on the WaPo story you refer to. One thing that's clear is that there are no generic local, State, and Federal Declarations. A given declaration might concern allowing release of funds post-hurricane, or greater power for local officials to move unwilling people or commandeer property, or the imposition of martial law.
It might--or might not--have been the prescribed declaration that was needed to enable Federal authorities to allow active-duty troops to operate inside a state.
So hazy wording or a reporter's or official's unclear understanding of the Declaration under discussion could mean that Blanco, Bush's spinmeisters, and the WaPo are all correct in their seemingly-contradictory assertions. There is a lot of this going around already, and there will be much more by the time the Katrina Commission has made its final report.
Provisional Katrina/N.O. timeline here.
Perhaps you meant lying? At any rate, thanks for the novel insight.
I don't know anything about this whole mess, which opens me up to direct attack. It seems as though local authorities were to blame for the intial setup, but at this point in time I'm less concerned about what happened in the past.
It is obvious by now that when everything went wrong the federal goverment reacted slowly, taking almost a full week to get materials needed for the final evacuation. The comparison to a biological or nuclear attack is chilling: imagine if the city is still at full population and a nuclear attack occurs. Instead of 100,000 people, there are millions doing anything to get out of the city. There's not just looting, but killing each other just to get out of the city.
We're now arranging busses for MILLIONs of people, as well as getting doctors and nurses to drop-off point outside the city, doctors and nurses biohazard expertise, evacuating the sick and elderly from hospitals immediately, as well as determining the cause and culprit of the attack.
It should not take the goverment 5 days to realize the situation is not under control and bring the first response, preparation should begin immediately. After all a WMD terrorist attack needs no warning, and who-asked-who-when-and-why should not interfere with immediate aid from Homeland security. These systems should be on alert at all times, with connections to grant the first wave of food, water, medicine and evacuation within 24 hours. Anytime, anywhere, no exception.
I'm not saying that they are to blame for this fiasco, but they obviously were not prepared for sudden action. It will take months for all these systems to be online again(if they were in the first place). Next time, they will be in the spotlight.
Laguna Dave has posted a supplemental timeline focused on the National Guard, FEMA, and the DoD at his blog Virtue of Necessity. On the timeline post referenced above (#15), he commented:
So the correct blame-game questions to Govs. Blanco and Barbour might turn out to be, "when did you make the statutorily-mandated requests, and to whom did you make them?"
The first question to ask of Bush, Homeland Security, FEMA, and DoD would be, "How quickly and completely did you respond to those requests?"
The second line of questioning would be, "given the magnitude of the impending disaster, to what extent did you anticipate requests, and prod (sometimes-incompetent) local and state officials to ask for the help you had available?" At this early date, it seems the Feds did quite poorly in that regard. Or as Alchemist said immediately prior, even after all the post-9-11 funds spent on Preparedness, "I'm not saying that they are to blame for this fiasco, but they obviously were not prepared for sudden action."
You guys don't know the half of it. The police department is but one facet of this story. The entire state is run/managed poorly. Corruption, incompetence and fraud are rampant. Just look at former Governor Edwards. All of our insurance commisioners going back 4 or 5 deep have been indicted for various crimes. It's an antequated, inefficient and broken system that many politicians have a vested intrest in seeing furthered. I sincerely hope that this event will force a lot of ugliness out into the light.
This is turning into another forged memo style attack on Bush. When the facts are finally sorted out, and Nagin and Blanco are seen for the criminals they are, those who are honest enough to continue sifting through the facts will feel like hanging those two Louisiana liars.
Amac,
These are all good questions. It is necessary that they be asked and answered seriously. The time is not now.
And everyone should remember unitl that time: just because something isn't on TV news doesn't mean it's not happening.
Downside of Politics as Usual and Fascinating Role Blogos is Playing in Rescue Ops
Dan,
OK, now take a deep breath and exhale slowly . . . :--)
I've posted some thoughts as this relates to our domestic response re the GWOT at Roger L. Simon's.
It's worth a read because unfortunately we are not immuned from natural or manmade disasters. Be sure to read the comments from a truck driver that made a run to the area to deliver heavy equipment.
We might as well learn from our mistakes, as surely our enemy will!
Here's an except of a comment I posted there:
[...]
I posted several comments re this topic in one of the your threads below that are worth mentioning again for those who don't come here daily.
The first was on what you already suspect. Much has to do with the culture of allowing/tolerating political corruption.
Lay the Blame where it Belongs
[...]
The second noteworthy item is how the Blogosphere became a vital link in this rescue effort never seen before. It's now coming to light that a number of "connected" folks saved themselves and many others by not following "official" directives on 9/11. It's a matter of how info/ communications/ ops are handled during the immediate crisis and coordinating available resources
BLOGOS BRINGS ORDER TO NOLA RESCUE OPS
[...]
Read More
RLS Link
To make some clarifications as to who has responsibility in a disaster situation you would have to read both the Posse Comitatus Act, it's subsequent amendments/codiciles giving specific authority for the President to act with troops within a state (mainly insurrection and times/acts of war) and you'd have to read the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (hey...and don't forget the constitution which says that rights and responsibilities not specifically allocated to the federal government belong to the state).
These together, along with the timeline for the post hurricane fiasco, will make you understand that those who continually rail against the President's lack of action do not know that there are laws that govern what a President can do and there are laws that specifically spell out the responsibilities of the state, up to and including asking for specific assistance from federal agencies, not just FEMA, but obtaining federal troops and assistance from the DoD.
These safe guards are to insure that the state's rights are not arbitrarily abrogated, that a president cannot just call a national emergency on any pretext in order to consolidate power over a state, enforce his rule and use the active military to do so.
It would have been a lovely scene to see the President ignore 200 years of law and rush in with assistance, ignoring the state and rescuing many with the coordinated efforts, command and control structure and resources of the military. It would have saved many lives, I'm sure, but, cold comfort as it is to the victims, it was simply against the law and, had he done so, his critics and political enemies would have had a real hay day because the punishment for doing just what they call for is two years in prison and a stiff fine; president or no.
Further, again cold comfort, it would have set a very bad precendent for future presidents; a low threshold, for declaring such an emergency. While everyone is lambasting him, none are thanking him for not doing it because it is much easier to ruminate about the thousands of lives damaged today then the millions of lives and our democracy that would be at risk in a future where this precedent had been set.
Ray Nagin, in his CNN interview said that the President and the Governor of Louisiana met in private for a few moments and that the President gave Governor Blanco two options, which Nagin did not elaborate on, but based on the R. T. Stafford Act, can be clearly ascertained:
1) The governor could save face and "waive or modify" her authority, handing it to the federal emergency management officer selected for her area, who could then coordinate and make agreements with the DoD on use of material, equipment and personnel (ie, active military) enact the inter-state emergency compact to obtain more NG from other states to assist, and coordinate all state and federal efforts, or..
2) The President could declare the emergency such a catastrophe as would be a danger to the continuing security of the United States and declare it a national emergency, TAKING the power from her and giving it to the federal authorities which would allow him to call in federal troops to help with the rescue, etc, etc, etc without her permission.
I believe that the Governor asked for 24 hours most likely because she was exploring, legally and politically, if she had any other choices. Unfortunately, the state response was so degraded by then that she really didn't.
Please note that shortly after this meeting, the inter-state compact for additional National Guard was enacted (NG from my home state went down) and the active military were dispatched to assist and rescue efforts began in earnest and were well orchestrated. Shortly after that we find that the federal government, which under the R. T. Stafford Act is only obligated to pay 75% of the costs and the state would have to pay 25% and for the use of the DoD items, issued a press release stating that the President had authorized 100% of the relief and rescue costs would be covered by the federal government.
Whichever option the governor chose, the results were the same. The cost issue was probably part of the short negotiations. The governor gives up her authority and the feds will pick up the tab, she saves face. I think that's why you don't hear her denouncing the president everywhere after thursday. She doesn't have to. Her butt is being covered by all those who are blaming the President.
The irony is, those who already claim that the government is full of jackboot fascists who want to take away their rights are the very ones who are demanding and damning the president for not doing just that: throwing out the laws and acting without request or authorization from the state.
ONe other point to a question above, both Ray Nagin and Governor Blanco indicate that the President was on the phone with them several times a day, every day starting before the hurricane and after, so it seems to me that he was urging them to take actions and informing them of their options.
What else was he supposed to do? Send the Marines to surround her office at gun point and demand she waive her authority?
Kat, I've seen BDS sufferers claim almost exactly that.
OK, you guys are big fans of claiming that liberals want to accuse George Bush of being responsible for the disaster itself. Let me oblige you with the following alternate-history scenario.
[I've laid my personal bets on which of you will responsibly pick apart the assumptions behind my scenario, and which will run in circles, barking and foaming at the mouth.]
Here goes ...
A plausible case can be made that responsibility for the New Orleans disaster is shared by every President since the 1953 Netherlands flood that led to their great dikes. Those dikes are not designed to protect against just a 100-year flood, like the New Orleans levees, but against a 10,000-year flood. The US failed to learn from the Netherlands' experience, failed to build really substantial levees, and thus allowed Hurrican Katrina to cause the enormous human disaster it did. On this basis alone, George Bush has about 10% responsibility for the New Orleans disaster (years as President since 1953).
But suppose Al Gore had been elected President in 2000. Would he have fixed the levees in New Orleans and prevented the Katrina disaster?
I can make a pretty good case that he would have, based on assumptions that should be bipartisan views of Gore, whether you agree with his policies or not.
Gore is a policy wonk. New Orleans' vulnerability to a hurricane was well documented as one of the major risks facing the USA, and he would have known that.
Gore is a dedicated environmentalist. He certainly would have signed the Kyoto Accords (which would not have had time to affect Katrina). But he also would have been personally aware of the threat of hurricanes in the Gulf.
Gore would certainly not have proposed a major tax cut at the beginning of his administration, or sent out a tax rebate that would deplete the budget surplus inherited from the Clinton administration. Assume that the economic downturn came along anyway, and 9-11 happened. Assume that he would have attacked Afghanistan after 9-11 just as George Bush did, but he would not have attacked Iraq. He would have had funds available to fix the levees, even to Netherlands standards.
A major public works project in a mostly-Democratic Southern city, providing huge numbers of jobs and increasing environmental safety for a large underclass in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas? This would have been a very attractive project for a new administration.
Even starting in 2001, they couldn't have finished Netherlands-quality levees by 2005, but with preliminary work started, and crews in place, they could have prevented the collapse of the levees after Katrina's departure that actually doomed New Orleans.
[I'm still trying to find out whether Gore is on record as promising this, but even so, it is a very logical course of action for him.]
If this is so, then we can say that George Bush is responsible for the fact that the New Orleans disaster happened in the first place, since he prevented Al Gore from becoming President and fixing the levees. That responsibility is shared by William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, and the other Supreme Court justices who made George Bush President. In much smaller shares, the responsibility belongs to everyone who voted for Bush in 2000.
If Al Gore had been elected President in 2000, this would have been another "run of the mill" disaster, ignored after 72 hours, instead of the greatest natural disaster the USA has ever suffered.
This argument is totally separate from the federal, state, and local shares of the incompetence of the response, once the disaster was upon us.
Admittedly, alternative history is ultimately an unsatisfying business, but it sheds useful light on our political choices.
Absurd. President Al Gore would have spent all his time in Europe hobnobbing with Chirac and Schroeder. He probably would not have bothered to return to the States after 9/11, merely phoning in an order of cruise missiles over Afghanistan. Gore was intensely interested in Global Warming and parties with Europeans. Anything else slipped right off the radar screen. Pathetic man.
I'm hopeful that one of the lower rungs of Hell is reserved for those moonbat idiots on the left who are trying to make political hay out of this disaster.
Beard: Gore is a dedicated environmentalist. He certainly would have signed the Kyoto Accords (which would not have had time to affect Katrina).
Oh, yes it could have.
President Gore, pondering the possibility of a future hurricane threat to New Orleans while waltzing at his inaugural ball, would have immediately realized the potential of time travel.
Bidding a hasty farewell to the adoring public, Gore sprints to the Oval Office, coat-tails fluttering behind him like a bat cape. A couple hours of hard work produces workable solutions to the various paradoxes of time travel (which would have totally stumped Chimpy McSmirk, let me tell you). Gore then returns to the ball and surprises the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers by handing him a huge stack of blueprints.
In no time at all, President Gore travels to the year 1864! With Carville and Blumenthal in tow, he wrests the Democratic nomination away from the hapless cheese-eating McClellan and handily defeats Lincoln in the election.
After ordering the implementation of the Kyoto protocols (in ample time to prevent future bad weather) and negotiating a peaceful settlement to the Civil War, Gore orders General Benjamin Butler, the Union commander in New Orleans, to drop everything and build some levees.
Problem solved.
"He certainly would have signed the Kyoto Accords (which would not have had time to affect Katrina). But he also would have been personally aware of the threat of hurricanes in the Gulf."
Newsflash: it doesn't matter if a president signs a treaty if the Senate won't ratify it, and the Senate gave Kyoto the boot.
Please...Gore would have but Clinton didn't?
that is the most absurd comment I've heard yet.
crack smoker
Mariana makes a good point. Gore actually did sign the Kyoto Protocol back in 1998. The Senate had previously (1997) passed Senate Resolution 98 opposing any agreement that failed to meet certain conditions. Neither Clinton nor Bush has presented the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for ratification.
In this alternate-history scenario, the point about the Kyoto Protocol is to support my claim about what Gore would do as President. Whether you agree with him or not, and whether you like him or his policies or not, it is clear that he is deeply interested in the problem of Global Climate Change, and he was surely aware of the serious threat to New Orleans.
There is no science establishing any link between hurricanes and global warming.
Hurricanes actually are powered by temperature differentials between the surface and the troposhere. In theory, global warming should result in a greater temperature increase in the upper troposphere. Such would if it occurred actually reduce the temperature differential that powers hurricanes.
"There is no science establishing any link between hurricanes and global warming"
This statement is blatantly untrue. Many scientific articles have been published predicting a link between global warming and hurricane intensity. To debate their conclusions is legitimate, but to deny their existence is to deny reality.
See Real Climate
Some of the "no science" can be found at
"References:
Delworth, T.L., Mann, M.E., Observed and Simulated Multidecadal Variability in the Northern Hemisphere, Climate Dynamics, 16, 661-676, 2000.
Emanuel, K. (2005), Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years, Nature, online publication; published online 31 July 2005 | doi: 10.1038/nature03906
Goldenberg, S.B., C.W. Landsea, A.M. Mestas-Nuñez, and W.M. Gray. The recent increase in Atlantic hurricane activity. Causes and implications. Science, 293:474-479 (2001).
Kerr, R.A., 2000, A North Atlantic climate pacemaker for the centuries: Science, v. 288, p. 1984-1986.
Knutson, T. K., and R. E. Tuleya, 2004: Impact of CO2-induced warming on simulated hurricane intensity and precipitation: Sensitivity to the choice of climate model and convective parameterization. Journal of Climate, 17(18), 3477-3495.
"
There are cyclic variations in tropical cyclone strength and hurricane strength, yes. Global warming doesn't signify. The pathetic attempt to link global warming to every climatic phenomenon to occur is the mark of feeble minds. Lots of feeble minds, mind you, quite a few in media.
1. Busiest Hurricane Season Ever for the U.S.: The 1886 hurricane season has been analyzed to be the busiest on record for the continental United States. Seven hurricanes were recorded to have hit the U.S.: a Saffir- Simpson Hurricane Scale Category 2 hurricane into Texas and Louisiana in June, two Category 2 hurricanes into northwest Florida in June, a Category 1 hurricane into northwest Florida in July, the Category 4 "Indianola" hurricane into Texas in August, a Category 1 hurricane into Texas in September, and a Category 3 hurricane into Louisiana in October. The previous busiest hurricane season for the United States was 1985 with six landfalling hurricanes.
...
3. Cycles of hurricane activity: These records reflect the existence of cycles of hurricane activity, rather than trends toward more frequent or stronger hurricanes. In general, the period of the 1850s to the mid-1860s was quiet, the late 1860s through the 1890s were busy and the first decade of the 1900s were quiet. (There were five hurricane seasons with at least 10 hurricanes per year in the active period of the late 1860s to the 1890s and none in the quiet periods.) Earlier work had linked these cycles of busy and quiet hurricane period in the 20th Century to natural changes in Atlantic Ocean temperatures.
Comment shamelessly stolen from the Daily DeMarche comment for a posting on the same topic. More interesting references at that website.
Tom Rockhausen,
Apparently you did not bother to read my link, since it was from those "feeble minds" in academia, but it discusses exactly cyclical hurricane activity relative to climate change
"Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming - and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate...
In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.
The key connection is that between sea surface temperatures (we abbreviate this as SST) and the power of hurricanes. Without going into technical details about the dynamics and thermodynamics involved in tropical storms and hurricanes (an excellent discussion of this can be found here), the basic connection between the two is actually fairly simple: warm water, and the instability in the lower atmosphere that is created by it, is the energy source of hurricanes. This is why they only arise in the tropics and during the season when SSTs are highest (June to November in the tropical North Atlantic).
SST is not the only influence on hurricane formation. Strong shear in atmospheric winds (that is, changes in wind strength and direction with height in the atmosphere above the surface), for example, inhibits development of the highly organized structure that is required for a hurricane to form. In the case of Atlantic hurricanes, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation tends to influence the vertical wind shear, and thus, in turn, the number of hurricanes that tend to form in a given year. Many other features of the process of hurricane development and strengthening, however, are closely linked to SST.
Hurricane forecast models (the same ones that were used to predict Katrina's path) indicate a tendency for more intense (but not overall more frequent) hurricanes when they are run for climate change scenarios (Fig. 1).
In the particular simulation shown above, the frequency of the strongest (category 5) hurricanes roughly triples in the anthropogenic climate change scenario relative to the control. This suggests that hurricanes may indeed become more destructive (1) as tropical SSTs warm due to anthropogenic impacts.
But what about the past? What do the observations of the last century actually show? Some past studies (e.g. Goldenberg et al, 2001) assert that there is no evidence of any long-term increase in statistical measures of tropical Atlantic hurricane activity, despite the ongoing global warming. These studies, however, have focused on the frequency of all tropical storms and hurricanes (lumping the weak ones in with the strong ones) rather than a measure of changes in the intensity of the storms. As we have discussed elsewhere on this site, statistical measures that focus on trends in the strongest category storms, maximum hurricane winds, and changes in minimum central pressures, suggest a systematic increase in the intensities of those storms that form. This finding is consistent with the model simulations.
A recent study in Nature by Emanuel (2005) examined, for the first time, a statistical measure of the power dissipation associated with past hurricane activity (i.e., the "Power Dissipation Index" or "PDI"--Fig. 2). Emanuel found a close correlation between increases in this measure of hurricane activity (which is likely a better measure of the destructive potential of the storms than previously used measures) and rising tropical North Atlantic SST, consistent with basic theoretical expectations. As tropical SSTs have increased in past decades, so has the intrinsic destructive potential of hurricanes.
The key question then becomes this: Why has SST increased in the tropics? Is this increase due to global warming (which is almost certainly in large part due to human impacts on climate)? Or is this increase part of a natural cycle?
It has been asserted (for example, by the NOAA National Hurricane Center) that the recent upturn in hurricane activity is due to a natural cycle, e.g. the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation ("AMO"). The new results by Emanuel (Fig. 2) argue against this hypothesis being the sole explanation: the recent increase in SST (at least for September as shown in the Figure) is well outside the range of any past oscillations. Emanuel therefore concludes in his paper that "the large upswing in the last decade is unprecedented, and probably reflects the effect of global warming." However, caution is always warranted with very new scientific results until they have been thoroughly discussed by the community and either supported or challenged by further analyses. Previous analysis of the AMO and natural oscillation modes in the Atlantic (Delworth and Mann, 2000; Kerr, 2000) suggest that the amplitude of natural SST variations averaged over the tropics is about 0.1-0.2 ºC, so a swing from the coldest to warmest phase could explain up to ~0.4 ºC warming.
What about the alternative hypothesis: the contribution of anthropogenic greenhouse gases to tropical SST warming? How strong do we expect this to be? One way to estimate this is to use climate models. Driven by anthropogenic forcings, these show a warming of tropical SST in the Atlantic of about 0.2 - 0.5 ºC. Globally, SST has increased by ~0.6 ºC in the past hundred years. This mostly reflects the response to global radiative forcings, which are dominated by anthropogenic forcing over the 20th Century. Regional modes of variability, such as the AMO, largely cancel out and make a very small contribution in the global mean SST changes.
Thus, we can conclude that both a natural cycle (the AMO) and anthropogenic forcing could have made roughly equally large contributions to the warming of the tropical Atlantic over the past decades, with an exact attribution impossible so far. The observed warming is likely the result of a combined effect: data strongly suggest that the AMO has been in a warming phase for the past two or three decades, and we also know that at the same time anthropogenic global warming is ongoing.
"
So say the "feeble minds".
Amusingly, Tom, you appear to not realize that Chris Landsea who is among the citations you list, actually resigned from the IPCC because the IPCC was falsely claiming that there was conclusive proof that hurricanes were more destructive as a result of global warming.
Personally, I don't trust anything on the RealClimate website since the authors of it have been implicated in some very suspicious "science".
Here you will find the full link to Chris Landsea's letter of resignation from IPCC.
I always thought that the claim was obviously absurd, given that hurricane cycles vary widely in intensity over short periods of time, while temperature change occurs in very slow increments.
20th century hurricane activity peaked in the early 1910s and early 1940s. Obviously, hurricanes are caused either by World Wars or by Democratic presidential administrations. Maybe both. I say we take no chances.
Claiming either that Katrina or recent hurricane intensities are a consequence of global warming is scientifically indefensible, as the RealClimate link notes. Landsea made an honorable decision in resigning from the IPCC, given that his work was misrepresented.
However, all climate models which I have seen predict that increased sea surface temperatures will contribute to hurricane intensity. The scientific question is the magnitude of the intensity increase and how it compares with natural intensity variation.
Even in Landsea's linked resignation letter he mentions simulations predicting 5% intensity increase and recent models predicting even smaller increases. Other models (referenced in RealClimate) predict a 50% intensity increase.
Not being a climate scientist, I have no idea which predictions will prove accurate. What I disputed was the assertion that "there is no science" linking global warming and hurricane intensity. A more accurate description would be that there is substantial disagreement in the scientific community on this subject.
On the other hand, every climate change model I am aware of predicts sea level increases with global warming, based on water's coefficient of thermal expansion and melting icecaps. Even if hurricane intensity increases prove negligible, sea level increases could displace millions of coastal dwellers and exacerbate storm impacts.