Thursday, November 1, 2012

The EPA Warned About Climate Change Flooding Since Bush - - 2003

Experts are saying in the post-Hurricane Sandy America that planning and the built environment must change in response to climate change - - and the alarm has been raised for years.

Here's something I posted four years ago about what the US EPA was saying back when George W. Bush was President:

Sunday, June 8, 2008

In 2003, EPA Predicted Heavier Rain Events

Then-Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist and I attended a conference in Chicago in 2003, hosted by Mayor Richard Daley, where officials from the EPA told Midwestern elected leaders that climate change models predicted heavier rain events.

The EPA officials were urging the Midwestern leaders to adapt their planning and spending to more aggressively confront storm water and related services because heavier, intense rains were going to be come more frequent.

Part of the message was: forget the notion of the "100-year-storm." They'll come more often than that in the Midwest as the atmosphere warms.

Again - - this wasn't advocacy science or partisan scare tactics.

This was basic municipal planning/dollars-and-sense advice from people in the George W. Bush administration to Midwestern mayors offered as an inter-governmental service because climate change was going to hit cities' budgets and constituents in difficult new ways.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is simply nothing new about never being adequately prepared to handle natural disasters which have always occurred. It is simply too expensive, at this time, to build homes and cities which are totally hurricane proof. The idea that hurricanes are recent phenomena caused by carbon dioxide is as goofy as thinking that past unfavorable weather patterns where caused by not tossing enough virgins into volcanoes. This is why they are called “natural” disasters.

It is amazing how easily people abandon science for beliefs and then call it science.

Anonymous said...

The main problems in the aftermath of the storm revolve around restoring electrical power and obtaining diesel fuel and gasoline, both items being targeted for intentionally becoming more expensive and less available by the Obama administration. If it were up to Obama’s EPA these shortages and outages would not need a hurricane to have them occur. What we are seeing as the result of a natural disaster would be the common occurrence throughout the nation due to the political disaster of another Obama term.

Telemaque said...

THe problems in New York City have nothing to do with how diesel fuel and gasoline are taxed, and everything to do with storm damage forcing refineries, pipelines, piers, roads, and railways to shut down.

And the extent of the damage is very much driven by the added heat in the water just offshore of the Northeast, giving the storm far more power and far more of a storm surge.