29 August 2017, Climate Home, Hurricane Harvey: lawyers warn of climate lawsuits over damages. Hurricane Harvey is wreaking unprecedented damage on Texas. Should city planners, government agencies and businesses have seen it coming? Could they have prevented death and disruption by acting differently? Increasingly, such questions will be litigated in courtrooms and rely on climate science to answer, three environmental lawyers wrote in the journal Nature on Monday. Advances in the science of linking weather extremes to global warming has the potential to change the legal landscape, they write. The more clearly scientists can demonstrate an event was foreseeable, the more victims can – and will – seek redress from negligent authorities. “In a world where events like Hurricane Harvey are predicted to increase, and predicted confidently by scientists… courts will be called upon more and more to disentangle these issues,” co-author Sophie Marjanac, an Australian-qualified lawyer with Client Earth, told Climate Home. Marjanac give examples of potential targets for lawsuits. In Houston, Texas, developers were allowed to build on wetlands that otherwise would have helped to drain floodwaters. If it can be shown those decisions endangered people and property – and failed to anticipate known climate risks – the relevant authorities could be on the hook for payouts, she said. Read more here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
28 August 2017, VOX, The “500-year” flood, explained: why Houston was so under prepared for Hurricane Harvey. It’s the city’s third “500-year” flood in the past three years. It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of the flooding and devastation that Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath are wreaking on the Houston area. Weather experts call the storm unprecedented, and note that it’s gone beyond even the most pessimistic forecasts. In the final reckoning, it’s certain that Harvey will be classified a 500-year flood — and maybe even a 1,000-year flood. But those terms can be a bit misleading — especially when high-profile people, like the president of the United States, confuse the issue by calling Harvey “a once in 500 year flood.” In theory, a 500-year flood is something that has a 1-in-500 shot of happening in any given year — in other words, the sort of event that’s so rare that it might not make sense to plan around the possibility of it happening. The problem is that 500-year floods are happening more often than probability predicts — especially in Houston. And, especially in Houston, prevention planning hasn’t evolved to acknowledge that a “500-year” flood isn’t really a 1-in-500 chance anymore. “500-year” floods are based not on history, but on probability. The severity of floods tends to get put in terms of years: a 100-year flood, a 500-year flood, a 1,000-year flood. But this isn’t an assessment of “the worst flood in” that time — places like Houston don’t actually have detailed weather records going back to 1017 AD, after all. Read More here
28 August 2017, Climate Home, Link between Hurricane Harvey and climate change is unclear. Reports the devastating storm was made worse by humanity’s carbon emissions fail to grasp climate change is not just about warming. The unprecedented amount of rainfall accompanying Hurricane Harvey immediately raised the question whether and to what extent climate change is to blame. In a warming world the vapour capacity of the atmosphere increases, and more extreme rainfall, like Texas is witnessing right now, is to be expected as a result. This leads many to conclude that climate change exacerbated the impacts of hurricane Harvey. It is very appropriate to highlight that this is the kind of event we expect to see more of in a warming world. However, to apply this argument directly and attribute (and quantify) the impacts from Harvey itself to human-induced climate change, neglects that climate change is not just about warming. In a changing climate, two effects come together: not only does the atmosphere warm up (thermodynamic effect) but the atmospheric circulation, which determine where, when, and how weather systems develop, can change as well (dynamic effect). Changes in the atmospheric circulation can increase the thermodynamic effect (as we saw during floods Louisiana in 2016) or act in the opposite direction to the thermodynamic effect, leading to locally decreasing the risk of extreme rainfall or canceling the effect of the warming alone (examples here). Dynamical factors and thermodynamic aspects of climate change can interact in complex ways and there are many examples where the circulation is as important as the thermodynamics. Read More here
24 August 2017, DESMOG, Retired General: ‘Our Bases and Stations on the Coast Are Going Underwater’. This past July, in a Congressional hearing on “The Status and Outlook for U.S. and North American Energy and Resource Security,” retired Marine Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney offered a dire warning for many current military bases in coastal locations.“From the tactical side our bases and stations on the coast are going underwater. Norfolk [in Virginia] is the prime example. It’s closed dozens of times a year now because of flooding both from rain and sea level rise,” Cheney explained. “We’re going to have to talk about relocation of our bases and stations that are on the coast.” Cheney also made it clear that he believes in climate change.“Climate change is already affecting security both at home and around the world, so we must make sure that we take the greenhouse gas emissions from energy into account, lest we trade increased energy security today for a warmer, more unstable world in the future.” General Cheney certainly isn’t the first to warn of the security implications of climate change. Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis admitted as much in written testimony to Democratic Senators, writing, “Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today.” An article in Navy Times last year noted that 128 military bases are at risk from sea level rise. Sea level rise and coastal flooding represent a well-documented threat to national security. Yet less than a month after General Cheney’s testimony in Congress, the Trump administration rolled back an Obama-era regulation designed to “improve the resilience of communities and federal assets against the impacts of flooding.” Rafael Lemaitre was the the public affairs director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the Obama administration and criticized this latest regulatory rollback in comments to The Hill. “Eliminating this requirement is self-defeating,” Lemaitre said. “We can either build smarter now, or put taxpayers on the hook to pay exponentially more when it floods. And it will.” Read More here