Saturday, October 03, 2009
'Katrina shorthand' strikes at Harper's
This is may be the proper province of Ray Lang's blog
On Levee Failures and a Weather Event, but I thought I'd help out in regards to the October issue of
Harper's.In it, there's a massively unhelpful
article titled "Disaster Aversion: the quest to control hurricanes". It's really something of a personal essay with a sprinkling of a few scientific morsels on weather modification. There's plenty of mentions of hurricane "Katrina" and "New Orleans" without a single attempt to distinguish between the weather event that devastated much of the Gulf Coast and the catastrophically engineered levees that flooded the Crescent City. The city of New Orleans was cited by the author as one of the reasons she became interested in hurricane modification, yet the false story of New Orleans' destruction at the hands of Hurricane Katrina is an abiding assumption throughout the article.
Worst of all was this passage, where the author speaks to Dr. Daniel Rosenfeld of Hebrew University at a conference. Rosenfeld claims his modification models show that salting the base of a hurricane with a silver iodide aerosol might cool it substantially, slow it down, and diminish its eye. Unfortunately, the models showed that the hurricane wind speeds were not weakened. Nevertheless:
Regarding his own work, [Rosenfeld] took pains to point out that even without decreased wind speed, a smaller eye might still mean a less calamitous storm, because the highest wind speeds would be covering a smaller area. The storm surge-- rising seas caused by the wind and pressure changes of a hurricane-- would be reduced, which certainly would have helped with Hurricane Katrina. "According to our calculations, we could have saved New Orleans. But still," as if to ensure that I wouldn't have to say it, "simulation and reality are far apart.
The author offers no correction to this scientist's wild claim that his models show that seeding Hurricane Katrina and reducing its eyewall could have "saved New Orleans". Again:
New Orleans was flooded by a catastrophic engineering failure that had everything to do with weak floodwall designs and nothing to do with the dimensions of Katrina's inner eyewall.Labels: Cons, flood protection, science, weather
8 Comments:
Thank you, big Molluski you are such a Bad Ass!
Wittgenstein taught us that Hitler taught us that Semantics Matter!
Hahahahahahaha...whew!
My biggest problem with the Flood of '05 is that it could have happened earlier that summer while a tropical storm sat on top of the city like Satan's Anus.
It could have happened during Gustav, now THAT was dodging a Full Metal Jacket.
That is the biggest difference between Weather Events and Catastrophic Engineering Failures.
The former happens, like, well, you know, while the latter took considerable asce'fucking bad engineering on the part of the New Orleans District of the Corps of Engineers.
Let's face it, we aren't going anywhere until we sew that one up like a rat bag.
As I read that cool guy's blog, the Bruce Sterling novel "Heavy Weather" just wouldn't leave my pallet.
Yes, we may be in for some Heavy Weather in South Louisiana, real city-dismissing super-storms, but that doesn't mean that we just hand it over to the very outfit who tried to gimp us down 8/29/05... and continues to try to shove it to us over our Outfall Canals.
Indeed, such a future of Dancing As Fast As We Can dictates that we drag all those Nameless Exquisite Corps Bitches out into the Neutral Ground for some Gauntlet Entertainment. Grrrrr...
Otherwise, the next time we face Mother Nature she just gonna think we are a bunch of punks who don't know how to dance.
Jeez Louie!
Nice post! Consider yer'self One Well Hung Oyster!
Keep hammering that point Darlin'. The only times I say Katrina is when "The Federal Flood" is in the same sentence.
The Nation must keep this in their minds... we were failed by the Corpse of Engineers, not almost destroyed by a Natural event.
" I thought I'd help out in regards to the October issue of Harper's."
The correcting the myth effort needs all the help it can get. Thanks for today's post.
Dr. Rosenfeld could have saved New Orleans? No way - not unless he worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers and had specified the outfall canal floodwall supporting sheet-piles were to be driven another 40 or 50 feet below sea level. How can a researcher make such a claim when it is evident he doesn't even understand what happened. Harper must be staffed with morons for editors.
crescentCityRay
What created the flood waters, again?
GO said...
What created the flood waters, again?
hey go the answer is god you douche bag.
who created the i wall levee's that flooded new orleans you fucking prick.
looking forward to your reply.
Here's what the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, a branch of NOAA, has to say about silver iodide and hurricanes:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5a.html
They tried it and it doesn't work!
Peace,
Tim
No special claim on raising awareness, Oyster. I'm happy to see folks joining in the effort -- 'specially wrt monthlies (I don't get to those). It's disappointing to see Harper's go w/ such blatant avoidance of a major aspect of the flood.
i ditched harper's recently anyway. hadn't read it in a year. irrelevant.
