> This particular storm, of course, is very notable for
> monstrous economic damage. But economic damages in heavily populated
> and poorly sited areas is hardly a proxy for storm intensity or climate
> change.
The taking offline of just one building in NYC had a massive effect on
the telecommunications infrastructure during Hurricane Sandy. It
affected tens of millions of people. Can you blame that on Global
Warming (Climate Change) or on inadequate engineering?
Prior to Global Warming (Climate Change) such an outage didn't occur
in NYC so it's easy to blame the storm and the climate change affects
that caused the storm to aim where one hasn't been in many years at
high tide. The reality is that wide-spread telecommunications outages
have occured since the beginning of telecommunications. As always,
we've found the root cause to be inadequate engineering to protect
against something that hadn't been considered before. Remember that
doors used to open inwards until too many people died in fires.
The fact that we place cities in hard to protect locations isn't fault
of the climate. If New Orleans wasn't below sea level, it wouldn't
have been flooded. If a nuclear power plant hadn't placed it's
electrical switches and backup generators in a spot to get flooded by
a tsunami, it wouldn't have done what it did.
We humans are idiots to think that a) we can control the climate, and
b) that we can build in a bad spot and the climate (or geology) will
respect our decision. Is climate change causing earthquakes?
--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
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