Live data from Hacker News

The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

bloomberg.com

51–60 of 128 posts

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets say you lose 10000 dollars worth of paper clips. Big deal, buy more. But if you lose 10000 dollars worth of photos, computers, files, etc, it is a big deal because they are harder to replace.

People are harder to replace than houses.

People are self replicating, houses are not. Give them sufficient food and time, and there will soon be too many of them.

It would be more accurate to say 'People are more emotionally attached to people than houses'.

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#52
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy. All those oil companies forcing you to buy stuff that gets transported by trucks that use oil. You’re blaming the drug dealers for people choosing to shoot heroin. Feel free to stop consuming oil. Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil and uses power generated using oil. If you buy a single thing made in China, you are buying products generally made using coal-fired electricity. Unless you live in a grass…

The rest of the argument seemed kinda valid, but one nitpick: > Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil I think nearly all plastics are made out of natural gas, not oil.

> I think nearly all plastics are made out of natural gas, not oil.

Fracking monster

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#53
post #13

Interesting. So it's like a real-life version of the trolley problem, but with property damage instead of human lives.

Had a damn failed there would have been far more loss of human life. Army corps definitely made the right call. They were getting sued either way.

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#54
It's really disturbing reading comments cheering the destruction because the victims are rich, or because they work for energy companies.

If hate is a necessary part of believing in climate change I'm not surprised people want nothing to do with that.

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#55
post #6

> total damages claimed could reach $10 billion or more, especially if the big energy and oil companies—whose presence in one section of West Houston gave it the nickname the Energy Corridor—sue over their flooded headquarters. the irony that the home neighborhood of many of the worlds largest oil companies would want to sue because the global warming they're at the core of causing contributed towards the damage of t…

Crazy. All those oil companies forcing you to buy stuff that gets transported by trucks that use oil. You’re blaming the drug dealers for people choosing to shoot heroin. Feel free to stop consuming oil. Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil and uses power generated using oil. If you buy a single thing made in China, you are buying products generally made using coal-fired electricity. Unless you live in a grass…

> You’re blaming the drug dealers for people choosing to shoot heroin.

Grade-school libertarianism doesn't apply here. I'm blaming them for using their billions of dollars to pack my government with people like James Inhofe who willingly spread lies and misinformation about a regulatory subject they know nothing about:

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/234026-sen-inho...

> Take a look at Inhofe's campaign funding. The major source, contributing half a million dollars over the past five years, has been the oil and gas industry... If Inhofe were to change his position on man-made global warming, is it credible that he would retain all this funding? No. He receives money from fossil fuel companies because he articulates the views to which these funders subscribe, and because he advances their interests in the Senate. Given that keeping your seat means spending a fortune on television advertising and other forms of campaigning, changing your views on a matter of great interest to your sponsors is likely to be political suicide.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/a...

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#56
post #9

I find this article beautifully ironic. Climate change denying executives have homes and offices flooded by climate changed storm water.

Why? Houston was been flooded several times before. Particularly in 1929 and 1935 when the county finally decided to form a flood control agency. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_County_Flood_Control_... Climate change is real, but if every time we get bad weather you call it that it’s a little like crying wolf.

Governments are starting to realize that “500 year floods” or “100 year floods” are happening a lot more often than anticipated.

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are harder to replace than houses.

There are more people born each day (400,000 a day) than there are houses built each day (4,657 a day). So I'd say no, houses are harder to replace than people.

I'm pretty sure more than 1.7M houses get built every year worldwide.

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the argument isn't about the frequency of storms nor the occurrence of a severe storm, but the increase in frequency of severe storms. Essentially, if we put more energy into the system, then we shouldn't be surprised if more energy is outputted as a result of the same system. > A sustained upward trend is found between the global proportion of Cat 4–5 hurricanes and ACCI (Fig. 4), balanced by a similar decrea…

Harvey was the first cat3+ hurricane to hit the US in 12 years. Your comment is already grey, I just wanted you to know why. EDIT: Could I not get downvoted for stating a fact. That'd be great. I guess it was actually only 11 years and 10 months, is that the problem here?

And that's pretty pointless, because it is clear that while there is seasonable variation in the frequency of occurrence of storms; the shift in the frequency of intensity is a phenomena that's a global event happening at scale. The global weather system goes through a series of cold and warm cycles, but the mean has been shifting for a while that has had a global shift in the frequencies of different storm strengths being seen around the world;

Here's a graph demonstrating this phenomena; https://imgur.com/a/97x7d

I've taken this from this study; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chih_Yuan_Yang/publicat...

That arrives at this conclusion,

> However, storm frequencies during the current warm phase (since 1995) have also been much higher than during the previous warm phases in the middle of the last century. The difference can no longer be explained by natural fluctuation; rather, this difference must be attributed to global warming.

After making this rather thorough argument (reproduced here in its entirety because it is important to pay attention to the nuances of the science);

> In addition, for climate variables, recent studies (e.g. Lehmiller et al. 1997; Bove et al. 1998; Maloney and Hartmann 2000; Elsner, Jagger, and Niu 2000; Goldenberg et al. 2001; Landsea 2005; Sutton and Hodson 2005) have attributed Atlantic hurricane activity increases to a natural climate cycle, termed the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In recent decades, Geo Risks Research has undertaken hurricane frequency analyses that account for the AMO. The AMO index is a detrended (anomaly) measure of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) (e.g. Knight et al. 2005) and is believed to be capable of explaining the recently elevated levels of hurricane activity. Because it is a measure of SST anomalies, which are correlated with hurricane activity, the AMO index has been used to predict near-term hurricane activity. Therefore, warm phases in the AMO (positive AMO index) are theorized to lead to higher SSTs and above long-term average hurricane activity in the Atlantic. Conversely, cool phases in the AMO (negative AMO index) are theorized to lead to lower SSTs and below long-term average hurricane activity.

> One of the most important recent papers on this topic is the article by Elsner et al. (2008), who consider a time-series model to forecast the average hurricane-season Atlantic SST and then use a linear Poisson regression model to forecast North Atlantic hurricane intensity given the predicted coefficients of the Atlantic SST model.

> However, some studies (Knutson and Tuleya 2004; Barnett et al. 2005; Emanuel 2005; Webster et al. 2005, 2006) indicate that global climate change (rather than natural climate cycles) may play the dominant role. In addition, the fourth status report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007) highlights the significant link between human-induced global warming and the greater frequency and intensity of unanticipated tropical cyclone events.

> Figure 1 clearly shows that the average number of destructive major hurricanes is significantly higher in the warm phases of the AMO than in the cold phases. This finding supports the theory that hurricanes form over warm sea surfaces. However, storm frequencies during the current warm phase (since 1995) have also been much higher than during the previous warm phases in the middle of the last century. The difference can no longer be explained by natural fluctuation; rather, this difference must be attributed to global warming. Based on these U.S. Hurricane Risk Measurement 3 opinions, the modeling of hurricane activity should have the ability to additionally capture the time trend of hurricane activity to illustrate the phenomenon that hurricane activity increases with time because of global warming.

Texas isn't the only place on Earth where this phenomena is playing out. And you may downvote me, but that doesn't change the data nor the facts.

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#59

People are cheering at this, but what if we raise the stakes a little: The government lined up 50 random people and executed them, to appease a foreign government that was holding 500x people captive. We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? Scape goat. Since it is property, the engineers probably assumed they'd be sued, and I bet they knew exactly what they were doing,…

You could say it serves them right (rich people) for building in a flood plain - it's normally the newer less nice areas that get flooded in the UK - as in the past they where considered to risky

One thing not mentioned in this article is that there has been a lot of new housing development inside of the reservoir (upstream). So they had to start releasing water earlier because they couldn’t let it fill up as much as originally planned when the reservoir was built.

Re: The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else

#60

The only real problem is that this was a decision made ad hoc. People whose neighborhoods are likely to be flooded by such a decision should know years in advance that they are designated for it.

>> The only real problem is that this was a decision made ad hoc.

>> People whose neighborhoods are likely to be flooded by such a decision should know years in advance that they are designated for it.

From the Article: "This land and many of the homes to the north and west of the dams are located in what’s known as the flood pool — the upstream portion of the reservoirs. [...] Many homeowners west of the Barker dam claim they didn’t know they were in a flood pool, that they hadn’t spotted the fine print on the bottom of some of their subdivision maps. (“Who looks at a subdivision map?” one resident asks.) The text of one such map reads, “This subdivision is adjacent to Barker Reservoir and is subject to extended controlled inundation under the management of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.” "

Sounds like they were told, but didn't care enough. Other parts of the article state that many lawyers are refusing to take a lot of these lawsuits b/c they were in regions that are marked for exactly this scenario.

Post reply on HN