"Harvey is a devastating reminder to Houston that nature will have its due. The Category 4 hurricane that hung around as a stationary tropical storm punished greater Houston with rainfall measured in feet, not inches. No city could have withstood Harvey without serious harm, but Houston made itself more vulnerable than necessary. Paving over the saw-grass prairie reduced the ground's capacity to absorb rainfall. Flood-control reservoirs were too small. Building codes were inadequate.
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Attitude is partly to blame. Michael Talbott spent 35 years with the Harris County Flood Control District trying to protect Houston, mainly by seeking funds for widening drainage channels and bayous. But he resisted the notion that more drastic measures such as preserving green space and managing growth were required. Shortly before retiring as executive director in 2016, Talbott gave an interview to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in which he disputed the effect of global warming and said conservationists were antidevelopment. "They have an agenda?...?their agenda to protect the environment overrides common sense," he said. Talbott, now retired, couldn't be reached for comment."
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However important it was in the past to come to grips with flood control and construction codes, it's essential in this era of climate change. For Houston, the cruel irony is that the greenhouse gases that contribute to superstorms are intimately connected to the oil and petrochemical economy on which the city built its fortune.
The contribution from global warming is the result of what meteorologists call the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, which says the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases about 7 percent for each 1 degree Celsius increase in the temperature. (That's 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.) So: warmer air, more water, bigger storms. The temperature of the oceans is rising, too. Heat from the Gulf of Mexico is what fueled Harvey."
Houston exulted in sprawling, hands-off growth. That's no way to prepare for natural catastrophes.
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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill