The Wonk Room

Global Boiling: One Year Later, Iowa Still Devastated By Extreme Floods

As the White House releases a report on the devastating impacts of global warming to the United States today, Iowans are still struggling to rebuild from the extreme floods that ravaged their state one year ago. This kind of terrible flood was predicted in the 2000 edition of the U.S. Global Change Research Program report as a consequence of the warming climate in the Midwest. Cedar Rapids took the brunt of the floods, suffering over $5 billion dollars in damage:

Iowa sustained $8 billion to $10 billion in statewide damage from the floods and tornadoes that struck in 2008, according to state estimates. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced $517 million in new community block grants for Iowa last week as part of a $3.7 billion package for 11 states. Iowa’s share will help pay for home buyouts, public works projects, business aid and new flood safeguards as well as other needs. The federal government has now sent more than $3 billion to Iowa since the disasters, Gov. Chet Culver said last week in Cedar Rapids. Culver’s $830 million I-JOBS bonding plan, an effort to create new jobs and upgrade state infrastructure, includes nearly $300 million for flood-related projects that include housing assistance and building repairs at the University of Iowa. Culver also signed a $56 million aid package in February that includes forgivable loans, grants and other assistance for home and business owners. — USA Today

Thousands of flood-damaged homes lie vacant in the core of Cedar Rapids, a city of 120,000 hard hit by June 2008 flooding that inundated towns and farms across the Midwestern United States. “Are we satisfied with that progress? No, clearly not,” Cedar Rapids City Manager Jim Prosser said. “A lot of people whose lives aren’t even close to being whole yet have a lot of unanswered questions, bills to pay, and don’t have the resources to recover.” . . . Some 1,300 property owners in neighborhoods that resemble war zones have asked the government to buy them out, but the city cannot act until funding arrives. — Reuters

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shawn Donovan, who was in Cedar Rapids this week, promised that the Obama administration would work to streamline the bureaucratic process. He also announced $500 million in new federal flood recovery funds for Iowa. Some of that money will go toward the long-awaited buyouts. But local officials say much more federal funding is needed, and it may take 10 years or more for Cedar Rapids to fully recover. — NPR

Even as some of Iowa’s elected officials, including Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA) and Rep. Steve King (R-IA), still question the need for strong legislation to halt global warming, their state is dealing with the catastrophic costs of weather gone out of control.

Global Boiling: Climate Activists Call For Response To Extreme Weather

The We Campaign’s action alert sent yesterday to activists about the U.S. Climate Change Science Program report on global warming’s effects on extreme weather.

As the Wonk Room has reported in our Global Boiling series, scientists have warned for well over a decade that global warming will make extreme weather events like the Midwest floods and California wildfires that are ravaging the nation commonplace. However, the Bush administration has failed to mobilize the nation, instead suppressing the research and letting polluters control policymaking. Now, spurred by activists, major environmental organizations are calling for action.

On June 19, Friends of the Earth led the clarion call:

The warming climate has made more extreme precipitation inevitable, and in response, the U.S. must dramatically refashion its failed flood control policies.

The world’s largest grassroots environmental organization noted that U.S. flood control policy has been misguided for decades, pointing to government panels from 1966 and 1973 that recommended “more attention be paid to relocation out of flood zones and called for greater emphasis on non-engineering solutions.” Instead, due to pork barrel spending “totally unnecessary and often environmentally destructive projects are built while those of higher priority go unaddressed,” destroying up to 95% of the wetlands of Iowa and Illinois. With global warming, policies that were once problematic are now disastrous.

Yesterday, National Wildlife Federation head Larry Schweiger called on Congress to hold immediate hearings to revise the National Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act. The accompanying report from the largest environmental organization in the United States, “Heavy Rainfall and Increased Flooding Risk: Global Warming’s Wake-Up Call for the Central United States,” recommends the U.S. stop its levee-larded strategy for flood control and begin aggressive reductions in global warming pollution. Offering her thoughts and prayers to those grappling with the “catastrophic flooding in the central United States,” NWF climate scientist Amanda Staudt connected the dots:

The big picture is that global warming is making tragedies like these more frequent and more intense. Global warming is happening now. Our dependency on fossil fuels like oil and coal is causing the problem, and people and wildlife are witnessing the effects.

Also yesterday, the We Campaign alerted its million-person list about last month’s U.S. Climate Change Science Program report on global warming’s effects on extreme weather.

Unfortunately, not all leaders are recognizing the severity of this crisis. Major news networks employ global warming deniers and industry apologists in senior positions, The Wall Street Journal publishes right-wing extremists who think climate science is a “sick-souled religion,” and the New York Times publishes stories on the future of the Everglades and the effects of extreme floods on Midwest agriculture without even mentioning climate change once.

Digg It!

Report: Global Warming Has Changed Our Weather — Worse Heat Waves, Floods, Hurricanes, Storms To Come »

The traditional media rarely discusses extreme weather events in the context of global warming. However, as the Wonk Room Global Boiling series has documented, scientists have been warning us for years that climate change will increase catastrophic weather events like the California wildfires, the East Coast heatwave, and the Midwest floods that have been taking lives and causing billions in damage in recent days.

Today, the federal government has released a report that assembles this knowledge in stark and unequivocal terms. “Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate,” by the multi-agency U.S. Climate Change Science Program with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the lead, warns that changes in extreme weather are “among the most serious challenges to society” in dealing with global warming. After reporting that heat waves, severe rainfall, and intense hurricanes have been on the rise — all linked to manmade global warming — the authors deliver this warning about the future:

In the future, with continued global warming, heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity. Hurricane wind speeds, rainfall intensity, and storm surge levels are likely to increase. The strongest cold season storms are likely to become more frequent, with stronger winds and more extreme wave heights.

Unfortunately, some of the cautions in this long-delayed report have come too late for the victims of the Midwest Flood:

Some short-term actions taken to lessen the risk from extreme events can lead to increases in vulnerability to even larger extremes. For example, moderate flood control measures on a river can stimulate development in a now “safe” floodplain, only to see those new structures damaged when a very large flood occurs.

Climate change is threatening our health, our lives, our economy, and our security already. Now the only question is when our media will take notice, and when our leaders will respond. Our future depends on it.

From the accompanying brochure comes this chart summarizing the findings: More »« Less

Limbaugh Compares Midwest Flood To Katrina: ‘I Want To See The Murders’

On Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh went on a blatantly racist rant comparing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to that of the Midwest floods, saying, “I look at Iowa, I look at Illinois — I want to see the murders. I want to see the looting. I want to see all the stuff that happened in New Orleans.” He continued:

I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property . . . I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people doing everything they can . . . whining and moaning, “Where’s FEMA, where’s Bush?” I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.

Listen to the audio at Crooks & Liars.

Limbaugh also claimed “we all know why” we didn’t see “Shepard Smith or Geraldo or anybody else” in Mississippi following Katrina:

This was an excellent opportunity to bash Republicans and conservatives under the time-honored and old-hat cliche that they are racists and that they are sexists and that they are bigots and that they are homophobes, and when a flood happens to minorities, “Republicans don’t care. Bush doesn’t care. I mean, Bush might have even steered the hurricane right in there! Bush wanted half the residents of New Orleans to leave so that the Republicans could win the state in future elections,” da-da-da-da-da.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the five deadliest hurricanes and the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, displacing more than half a million people, killing over 1700, and causing $81.2 billion in direct damage.

FEMA has admitted it is applying lessons learned from its abysmal response to Katrina to the present disaster. Sadly, as the Iowa City Press Citizen reports, “Unfortunately for public safety officials, crime and fires don’t take a break during a natural disaster” — even in the heartland of America. Although the Midwest floods are responsible for a much smaller loss of life, their economic impact will likewise be tremendous — unlike Rush, deadly weather does not care about party, race, or media coverage.

UPDATE: At the Ethicurean, Elanor asks, “Will people survive the flood, loss of cropland, and waterlogged houses just to be poisoned by their drinking water?” She notes that the Bush administration has steadily cut funding to stream and river gauges, the National Water Quality Assessment program, the Toxic Substances Hydrology Program, the Agricultural Chemical Use Survey, the National Stream Water Quality Accounting Network, and NASA’s climate satellites.

As the Wonk Room has previously noted, the Bush administration also shuttered regional EPA libraries, reopening them years later in starkly reduced capacity. The EPA’s Midwest Regional Administrator, Mary Gade, was fired after trying to get Dow Chemical to clean up riparian pollution.

Global Boiling: Midwest Climate Disaster Predicted in 2000

The extreme storms and record-breaking floods that have devastated the Midwest, killing dozens, disrupting the nation’s infrastructure, causing billions of dollars in damage, and sending food prices skyrocketing, are consistent with the effects of global warming on the region predicted eight years ago.

In 2000, the National Assessment Synthesis Team of the US Global Change Research Program published “The Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change,” with regional overviews of possible and likely changes due to global warming.

In the Midwest overview, the authors noted the effects of climate change that were already evident in the region:

Annual precipitation has increased, with many of the changes quite substantial, including as much as 10 to 20% increases over the 20th century. Much of the precipitation has resulted from an increased rise in the number of days with heavy and very heavy precipitation events. There have been moderate to very large increases in the number of days with excessive moisture in the eastern portion of the basin.

The Midwest, models predicted, would suffer from both extreme precipitation and increased drought, as the region warms:

Despite the increases in precipitation, increases in temperature and other meteorological factors are likely to lead to a substantial increase in evaporation, causing a soil moisture deficit, reduction in lake and river levels, and more drought-like conditions in much of the region. In addition, increases in the proportion of precipitation coming from heavy and extreme precipitation are very likely.

This year’s floods come only two years after a drought gripped the region.

The report called special attention to the effects of the 1988 drought and 1993 flood on the critical transportation infrastructure of the region:

Climate extremes in the Midwest can drastically impede the highly weather-sensitive transportation systems that serve not only the region, but the entire nation. Chicago is the nation’s rail hub handling much of the nation freight traffic. Barges operating on the Mississippi River system, that includes the Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers, handle a large fraction of the country’s bulk commodities, such as grain and coal.

Prolonged heavy rainfall in the spring and summer of 1993 produced extensive flooding across nine states in the upper Midwest. The flood waters poured over and through many levees and inundated numerous floodplains that many of the key rail lines cross. The flood waters became an absolute barrier to surface transportation in the region for more than six weeks. Train traffic had to be rerouted around the flood area, resulting in long delays and large costs to manufacturing. River barge traffic suffered a similar fate with the additional costs to shipping and manufacturing approaching $2 billion.

A week ago, Gov. Chet Culver (D-IA) told reporters:

Very few people could anticipate or prepare for that type of event.

Unfortunately, just as with the Iraq debacle, Katrina, housing bubble, and September 11 attacks, experts warned against this type of disaster — but they have been ignored by the press and blackballed by this administration.

UPDATE: At Climate Progress, Bill Becker makes some excellent policy recommendations, and concludes:

Our sense of community now must come not from sharing disaster, but from the common effort to evolve past the carbon era. We need to pay attention to what scientists tell us we can expect from climate change, including extreme weather events. It should be obvious by now that we ignore their warnings at our own peril.

UPDATE II: In line with Becker’s post, Friends of the Earth is calling on the United States to “prepare and safeguard Midwest by changing flood control policy.”