Friday, August 13, 2010

Pakistan's infrastructure

The deluge, which was many times the usual monsoon and fell farther north and west than usual, has exposed the lack of investment in water infrastructure, including big dams, much of which was built in the 1960s. The removal of forest cover may also have allowed rainwater to drain faster into the rivers.
- Swamped, Bruised and Resentful

Global warming may have contributed to the disaster in Pakistan. But then again it may not have. Spending money on essential infrastructure now is going to save more lives than pronouncing certainty about things that are not certain. For a more informed perspective than mine see Pielke snr:
Follow Up On Weather Channel Interview Of Kevin Trenberth and Roger Pielke Sr
A Way Forward In Climate Science Based On A Bottom-Up Resourse-Based Perspective
Extract:
The IPCC, unfortunately, ignored this bottom-up, resource-based focus, and instead completed an inappropriately narrow top-down CO2-centric viewpoint based on multi-decadal global climate model predictions; e.g. see the movement from WG1 to the WG2 reports, which culminated in the WG3 report

and Pielke jnr:
Catastrophe Catnip
Journalists are drawn to the notion that greenhouse gas emissions increase the human toll from extreme events like Ulysses was drawn to the sirens. The connection between the two is made despite a robust scientific consensus -- and lack of evidence to the contrary -- that no signal beyond increasing societal vulnerability has been detected in increasing disaster losses, much less attributed to the effects of accumulating greenhouse gases

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