"Storms like Helene and Milton [and cyclones like Gabrielle] ought to drive us to recommit to and expand the very institutions that have made natural disasters more survivable for so many, not to abandon them out of some false hope that bad weather can be eliminated. ...
"A world without dangerous weather is an imaginary ideal. Press even the most ardent climate activists, and they’ll admit as much. ... But a world with marginally better weather would still have hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, and all the other maladies we’re so often led to believe only plague us because we burn fossil fuels. So, if we’re serious about tackling the problems caused by dangerous storms and other natural disasters, the solution lies in better adapting to bad weather, not pretending we can eliminate it.
"Fortunately, humans are very good at adapting to bad weather. And, while we have been for most of our history, we have become incredibly good at it in the last two hundred years thanks primarily to one thing—the economic growth that resulted from the Industrial Revolution.
"Economic growth is not just some metric for measuring business activity. It reflects the creation of the wealth that has allowed humans to not only survive but live comfortably in nearly every region on earth. Thanks to a robust energy industry and modern HVAC systems, there are bustling cities all the way from arid deserts to the frigid taiga. ...
"This is all to say that the problems often ascribed to climate change are fundamentally problems of poverty.
"Fortunately, we already know what solves poverty: market institutions grounded in a private property norm. Unfortunately, those are the very institutions the so-called environmentalist movement has set its sights on."~ Connor O'Keefe from his post 'Hurricanes Are Not Going Away; We Must Double Down on What’s Making Them More Survivable'
Thursday 10 October 2024
'Hurricanes Are Not Going Away; We Must Double Down on What’s Making Them More Survivable'
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Other than earthquakes, the biggest disaster likely to hit NZ housing stocks is a tsunami from a big earthquake on the Rig of Fire. All those low- lying beachfront properties (think Papamoa) will be severely damaged if not destroyed. And it is more likely to happen than a big cyclone hitting NZ. Yet what is being done about that?
Until the middle of last century, few lived in Florida coastal communities because the hurricanes that regularly hit it. Now it is boom cities. So when they do hit, lots of human disaster stories.
Survivability means things like not building on floodplains or swamps and some distance back from seafronts. With our earthquakes, the design standards for that do a lot to make them survivable from wind damage. It would need people's mindsets to change though. But there is little hope of that. Society has a deathwish at the best of times.
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