Water, Water Everywhere . . . Except in the Places Where It Was Wanted and Expected

Here’s a shot my colleague Alex Seitz-Wald took this morning of the intersection of Rhode Island Avenue and T Street in Washington DC:

It turns out, you see, that the infrastructure of Washington DC was built with certain expectations about weather patterns in mind. But “outlier” events occur that exceed the limits of the infrastructure. This creates problems for the people who live here. Meanwhile, relatively small shifts in the average state of the weather lead to extremely large increases in the quantity of outlier events. The United States is a very wealthy country, so we have plenty of resources to dedicate to trying to deal with these kind of problems as they arise. Nevertheless, diversion of resources to adapting to increases in the frequency of outlier events reducing the quantity of resources that would otherwise be available for other purposes. What’s more, part of being a wealthy country is that we already have a huge amount of fixed investment in infrastructure and buildings that becomes less valuable as weather patterns shift away from what was expected.

And of course in the scheme of things, that was a relatively mild flood this morning. Twenty percent of Pakistan is currently under water:

“We are committed to partnering with their government and military to support their efforts to bring relief to the millions of Pakistanis impacted by these floods,” Gen. James N. Mattis, the head of Central Command, said in a statement. The United Nations has estimated that at least one-fifth of the country is underwater, but the scope of damage seems far greater. About 14 million people have been affected by the floods, 6 million of them are children, according to the United Nations children’s organization, usually known as Unicef. Estimates of the dead have ranged between 1,200 and 1,600.

It’s nice, of course, that General Mattis and CENTCOM are trying to help Pakistan deal with this. Indeed, I don’t see any substantial political dissent from the idea that insofar as the United States is capable of saving Pakistani lives via assisting their flood-response efforts that we have strong moral and pragmatic reasons for doing so. At the same time, you see massive political dissent from the idea that the United States has strong moral and pragmatic reasons to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that make these kind of deadly outlier events more likely and more frequent.

In Russia, meanwhile, there’s an unusually small amount of moisture which is spurring massive forest fires and we’re now left to console ourselves with such not-actually-reassuring headlines as “Few Chernobyl radiation risks from Russia fires”.