View 689 Sunday, August 28, 2011
Civil Defense and FEMA
Tropical Storm/Hurricane Irene seems to have done its worst without too much damage. Last reports are of perhaps a dozen killed, perhaps more, but that number will be offset by fewer traffic fatalities for a summer weekend: fewer people out driving during a hurricane.
The lesson as I see it is that we need to restore the old Civil Defense structure, and fold FEMA into it. The whole notion of a Federal Emergency Management Agency is wrong. There isn’t really much that Washington can do to prepare for this kind of emergency. Emergencies tend to be state or regional, and each state/region has a different set of likelihoods for different emergencies. Deciding what preparations are appropriate is best left to those who live there and probably have been through that kind of disaster and know best what the local people do to cope. Organizing local civil defense requires some appreciation of just what is likely to happen, and who is likely to be there to cope as opposed to those who will absorb all the funds they can get, then leave school busses in the flood plain rather than use them. Civil Defense requires a military sort of organization, with officials who have titles but no powers until an emergency happens: then their commissions become real with the declaration of an emergency. Those who want to see how this can work can find considerable history on the subjet, including strengths and weaknesses. Back when I was looking at Strategic Defense and writing Strategy of Technology I used to pay attention to how Civil Defense worked. Civil Defense emergency preparedness teams were concerned with fallout shelters and the like as part of strategic defense, but of course the plans for coping with natural disasters, and actual performance during those disasters is pretty good education for planning for the destruction of war.
Local Civil Defense is pretty cheap, too, since most of the officials will work for peanuts plus titles and commissions – many tend to be retired military and first responders anyway. Our Emergency Preparedness merit badge counselors for the Scout troop I was involved in while my sons were growing up were all people who knew what they were doing.
FEMA was a very bad idea, and it ought to be dismantled in favor of rebuilding local Civil Defense. The Republicans can do that, and there is no real reason why the Democrats should oppose it, although some will simply because it encourages local activities and control structures not under the thumb of the Federal government. FEMA bureaucrats will be vigorous in opposition, of course. The Iron Law always applies…
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Climate Change and storms
For those who want to read more into the news storm about the storm, I show this, but do understand, I don’t subscribe to anything sinister about the coverage. In California we tend to cover the things that rarely happen to us, but we tend to gloss past our routine semi-disasters. We get 75 mph winds in Los Angeles at least once a year during Santa Anna conditions, but since that happens pretty often most of the trees that are going to blow down have done so, and people who have been through it once tend to close their patio umbrellas before the wind or sheepishly remove them from the pool or the neighbors roof if they forget; it’s not news.
A Reality Check on Hurricane Hype….
Friends,
I think this one is going to be interesting. Once again, but more so this time, it seems we have a much overhyped-storm warning. Scaring people has been the trend for years, and some are okay with that (saying “It’s for their own good.”). Still, truth is truth, and the truth is that climate science has now become politicized, and climate alarmism has become an integral plank of the progressive/socialist political agenda, especially since Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for his book and special-effects-based movie. Remember Obama’s rhetoric of how he, as Supreme Leader, was going to “Slow the rise of the seas and heal the planet?”
Here are some early reports of what has actually been happening with Hurricane Irene. It’s definitely a tropical storm, and there has definitely been damage and a few deaths. But there is a major difference between the NOAA reports, the News (including Fox) and what was measured by actual stations on the ground. Does this make you more or less inclined to trust the News Media and our “Never waste a crisis” Maximum Leader? You decide.
Of the links below, the two that I suggest as “keepers” is the second one, published by Forbes and written my friend Pat Michaels, who was the State Climate Scientist for Virginia, and is now with the CATO Institute. The other is the last link, the “weather underground link,” which is not Obama’s mentor Bill Ayers, but, rather, to a data-feed for local stations, a feed that is NOT under the control (so far) of the Obama Administration or NASA.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/aug/26/irene-is-obamas-punishment/
http://news.yahoo.com/real-hurricane-irene-renamed-hurricane-hype-021402485.html
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/noaas-phony-hurricane-coming-on-shore-with-33-mph-winds/
http://www.wunderground.com/
My guess is that we’ll see more about this weather “reality gap” in coming weeks and months. Gore is about to re-launch his Global Warming Alarmism campaign, big time. He had a profanity-laced meltdown at a major conference a few weeks ago because people dared to question him skeptically, and someone even dared to point out that there has been NO global warming for ten years. That upset him.
Best,
John D. Trudel
I am not endorsing the conspiracy view. However, I do expect to see a lot more about Climate Change in the near future. The evidence that the major climate models have serious errors is surfacing everywhere. See also a critique of the model of sea temperature. The primary data for warming in the last few years tend to ambiguity: in places where the data are easy to obtain the trend seems to be toward “not so much”, but in places like Central Africa and Siberia we have reports of the warmest temperatures in history. The reliability of those data may be questioned, and how much weight one gives to reports from unreliable sources is worth debating although I have seen few such debates.
Apparently there remains at least a real (how large I won’t guess) possibility that we have entered a global cooling phase. There are periodic melts and freezes in sea ice in the high latitudes. One thing I would think we can all agree on is that a new Ice Age would be a far worse disaster than more increases in CO2. But the conventional view seems to be that Anthropological Global Warming is very real. What if that’s true?
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Green Dreams
Suppose that the Global Warming/Climate Change fears are all well grounded. Increases in CO2 will doom civilization and threatens the stability of global climate, and the ability of the Earth to sustain civilization. What is it that we – by we I mean the people of the United States – should do, and what is the meaning for the rest of the world?
What will happen to us if it’s all true? Presume it is…
First, it means that we have hit the high point of world consumption and the good life (at least in the material sense) for the people of the world. No more countries like the United States in which the goods of fortune are possessed in moderation by most of the population, and lots of goods of fortune are enjoyed by everyone, even the wretched of the earth. That is all gone. We will return to the normal conditions of history in which most of the population possess very little – in good times enough to eat one good meal a day, have two sets of clothing, enjoy a few holidays – and a very small elite lives in comparative luxury. As for example in Roman times, or the High Middle Ages, or the England of the Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels (although in Dickens’ time the wretched were more wretched, and there was more of a middle class than in Austen’s day). That will be the fate of the world. For that story see A Farewell to Alms (review here). It won’t get any better.
India and China will continue to exploit the earth until Mother Nature takes her revenge, then they too will collapse and learn to live with the new Malthusian realities. Production falls. There is less to distribute. We will distribute what we have as well as we can given the realities of human nature, but the human condition returns to its natural state: A thin aristocracy atop a vast sea of people who live at the edge of poverty, and can more easily slip into poverty than rise out of it. There will be some who heroically escape into the ruling class, and a few like the Gracchi who come from the nobility and try to spread the wealth about, but there won’t be that much wealth to spread. There is state money for the military – think Napoleon – but underneath that the population is not a great deal above peasantry, and Pournelle’s Iron Law tends to make the governing classes better off at the expense of everyone else. That was the condition of mankind from pre-history until the Industrial Revolution, and the fear of Climate Change/Global Warming will push us to dismantle the roaring furnaces and widespread consumption and runaway manufacture of ticky tacky by installing a planned economy that will insist that the first criterion is that we don’t pollute the atmosphere with CO2. We have seen the outcome of planned economies. Nomenklatura, The New Class, the Iron Law; Oriental Despotism, The Oriental Means of Production as fearfully skirted by Marx and described so well by Wittfogel.
There will be continuing wars on pollution and polluters. Since large scale animal farming pollutes with CO2 that needs to be cut back also: steaks and chicken every Sunday are for the fortunate. We can’t have any widespread production of such meat resources. And so forth.
As to the Green Economy, there really isn’t one. The Green Jobs are not self sustaining. In the US the major Green Jobs are the installation of solar panels made in China with energy from high polluting coal and shipped over here to be installed: the last American solar panel plants are closing. Wind energy is barely self-sustaining in the places where it works, and the mills are made elsewhere and not from Green Energy. We can burn corn instead of eating it, and grow corn instead of wheat; the result is a rise in food prices that already affects much of the world.
China, India, Brazil may be able to escape all this, but by the time they have economies matching anything like what the US had in its glory days before we discovered the necessity of being Green (and learned its limits and costs) they will collapse and by then the Earth will be so damaged that it will take a substantial part of its production just to get things back to sustainable levels.
You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game: this is a picture of the future if we take seriously what is being said and done by the Government of the United States of America and the UN science/political reports on Climate Change/Global Warming.
Of course we heard all this before, back before I wrote A STEP FARTHER OUT. The professional futurists had articles headlined with such titles as “Why we have to get poor quick”, and the press was filled with articles about The Limits to Growth, and why we had to take a “soft path” to energy, and much else that we now hear and accept routinely. Of course in those times the great fear was that we were headed for a new Ice Age, and the Models of Doom showed other ways of death than Global Warming, but the news was the same: the Industrial Revolution was over, and it had been a pretty bad idea in the first place. We have to get back to a sustainable environment. Get rid of all this nuclear power. Have bicycle powered home energy generators. There were exhibits of such things at annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and I recall in one of them Larry Niven suggested we ought to dress a black colleague in rags and have him pumping away on the bicycle while someone in jackboots stood by with a pistol and whip. But that was considered politically incorrect. Niven’s point was the same as mine: dismantle the means of high energy production, cut back to that kind of Green economy, and you may be certain that there will be more people pumping on the bicycles while a few have the jackboots. And the schools won’t teach you how to make your own generator, either….
The alternative, as I point out in A STEP FARTHER OUT, is to continue what the Industrial Revolution started. True, it won’t go the way it did. The trend is toward more high-tech jobs and fewer jobs for those who don’t know how to participate in high-tech high-touch industries. Education has to be revised, and the first revision is to understand that this is not Lake Wobegon: half the population is below average in IQ, and the high tech industries don’t really need even the top half of the population. We have to find ways for those less gifted – note I do NOT say stupid, because IQ 90 is not stupid, but it is about the 25 percentile: that is, a quarter of the population is IQ 90 and below, and I do not think any of those reading this know many people of IQ 90 and below. They aren’t stupid but you are not likely meet them at work unless you have certain jobs including some bureaucratic jobs.
IQ 85 is the 15th percentile. Few of you are likely to spend much time with anyone IQ 85 or below, and not all many more are on speaking terms with someone of that condition. It isn’t snobbery. You just have so very little in common with them.
There are industrial jobs for IQ 85 and below, but they tend to be repetitive, what most of us would consider mind stultifying – the very kind of jobs that robots can often do, and when they can do them, do them much better, more tirelessly, and with fewer mistakes.
These are realities that our civilization must deal with. These are realities that our education system must deal with. These are realities that our political system insists that we ignore.
A sufficiently wealthy society can ignore these realities. A long time ago we provided agricultural jobs for those with strong backs and uneducated minds. There was some tragedy here when an educable mind was trapped in peasant situation, but in some cultures there were paths out of there, through parish schools which could take a farmhand and teach him to be an overseer, or a manor house that could find bright peasant lads and bring them into the household a junior footmen, apprenticed to become household servants. Some, the most capable, managed to find their way to universities or into the Army or Navy. Diocles became Diocletian. We know many of those stories. However, the vast majority of those born peasants lived and died as peasants. They farmed all their lives.
But over time the agricultural jobs vanished. Tractors, harvesters, cotton gins and cotton choppers and cotton pickers, International Harvester corn huskers: the number needed for agriculture plummeted from 70% in 1900 to under 5% in 2000. There just wasn’t enough work for peasants. They had to find other jobs.
The Industrial Society still had factory jobs for the unskilled, but the Computer Revolution takes away all the jobs that can be done by robots. Now what? What can they do? Can they be trained to do something useful? We tried that for a long time, but the moral objections to supporting people in a life of indolence (wanted or not, deserving poor or undeserving poor) faltered, weakened, and politically died. We found a simple solution after that. A wealthy enough society can simply divert some of the excess productivity to entitlements. That produces problems. An entitlement welfare state is not stable – but it can last a while.
Alas, that much wealth can only be produced by an energy using society. You have to be rich to support the undeserving poor – and we have decided, or at least our Masters have decided, that we cannot continue to be a energy using – read energy wasting polluting climate changing — society, so there goes the wealth. Without that wealth we can’t feed the poor. Government needs more. Borrow money, but eventually we have to raise taxes. Those that pay the taxes resist. There grows a tax collecting bureaucracy that exists to feed itself – the Iron Law applies to all bureaucracies – and it goes where the money is, but along a path of least resistance, meaning that it will seek revenue where it can get it. That usually means from the middle classes. They have the money and it isn’t concentrated enough to let them hire mercenaries to defend them. It’s harder to despoil Warren Buffet than it is the local dentist or dry goods merchant. (And for those interested in a Marxist view of the the growth of bureaucracy, see Djilas The New Class.)
As A Farewell to Alms shows, for almost all human history that we know, including pre-history as we understand it, from the times of the Babylonians and Ur of the Chaldees, from the Mycenaeans to the Romans, from the Early Dynasties to the Ming and Ching, from the Norman Conquest to Disraeli, most of the populations of the world lived at the edge of subsistence. Sometimes things got better. The Black Death produced a period of relative prosperity for the common family because labor got scarce – but they generally settled back to usual, with the vast majority having barely enough to eat, a change of clothing, a roof, and a life that was full of works and days, of toil that ceased not unto the grave, and was relatively short, particularly after one could no longer work. Of course there existed a class who had much better; the novels of Jane Austen will tell you a great deal about that – but they were really a rather small part of the population. That’s all rigorously documented in A Farewell to Alms.
The Industrial Revolution changed all that, but it has brought us Global Warming and Climate Change, and we must dismantle this evil lest we all perish. We must change our ways, and fast.
If the climate prediction models are correct, then China and India and Brazil will someday realize that and cut back, perhaps joining the US in imposing the Green Revolution on all the other up and coming developing nations that don’t understand that burning coal, feeding animals, and consuming beyond sustainable means, is fatal for the world.
If the climate models are not correct, then China, Brazil, and India will continue to raise production. Perhaps they will have enough surplus to allow them to take pity on the United States and send us their scraps.
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I was looking for material on Wittfogel to link to, and tried my own web site, where I found http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view148.html which has a very small remark about Karl, but is interesting as a world view taken before September 11, 2001. At one point I remark about China policy and US options on what we might do with, to, or about China. One may note that those options are not so available as they used to be. All in all, I find I wasn’t all that wrong in my views of the world way back then when the nation was rich and not deep in debt. There’s also a short speculation about the causes of schizophrenia which is still unrefuted…
See also http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view148.html#loony and why you might not want to hang around with crazy people.
While we are reminiscing on old essays, you may find amusing the 2009 comments on President Obama and the continuing campaign, and what his program looked like back then.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q1/view562.html#Friday
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fabuloussmooth@yahoo.com is an account that no longer exists. Please send me your change of address.
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