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| State boat launch after Hurricane Irene Photo: Sarah Sterling |
We the undersigned residents of Mill Street, Cross Street, and Tanners Lane ask the City of Hudson Conservation Advisory Council (CAC) to exercise prudence by not drawing undo attention to the City's only residential neighborhoods potentially impacted by climate-induced sea-level rise.The two, of course, are related.
In June 2016, a climate survey for Hudson prepared by the Hudson River Estuary Program reported that, by 2100, 120 households in Hudson might be impacted by sea-level rise: 38 with flooding; 82 with inundation.
The prediction is based on Scenic Hudson's sea-level rise projections, whose worst case scenario estimates sea-level rise to be 72 inches by 2100. There are other models that predict a future that is not quite so dire, and some believe that one of the more conservative models, one that does not predict flooding and inundation for 120 Hudson households in 2100, should be the one that informs the CAC's Open Space and Natural Resources Inventory.
It is feared by some that accepting the worse-case scenario that the sea levels will rise six feet in the next 83 years would have the immediate effect of new city government regulations and requirements, having to do with building materials and methods and flood insurance, being imposed on the residential properties most at risk of being impacted by sea-level rise.
For more information about the issue before the Conservation Advisory Council, visit the CAC website, Conservation Matters.
COPYRIGHT 2017 CAROLE OSTERINK
If I may offer a small clarification, the outrageously inflated predictions of the DEC's Hudson River Estuary Program were based on a misreading of FEMA methodologies. That is unrelated to anything provided by Scenic Hudson. The latter's "Sea-Level Rise Mapper" simply shows you water depths against the local topography, to which the DEC added higher elevations which were unwarranted because of the actual nature of the earlier federal studies. The error has since proliferated throughout other programs.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the same misunderstanding, which was since corrected by FEMA, was recapitulated by the consultants to the City's Conservation Advisory Council. The error was pointed out to the physicist who works for the consultant, Randall + West, but the need for a correction which was later acknowledged by the R+W physicist has greater implications than the few re-wordings offered in the consultant's updated climate memo.
Can anyone answer why the consultant and just everyone else prefers the dire and mistaken narrative over the more sensible sets of scenarios promoted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (in the AR5). You can map the IPCC's projections using Scenic Hudson's SLR Mapper and see that the world-body's worst case scenario would have a negligible effect in Hudson.
That's just not good enough for our betters who will make our decisions for us.
Whether its the CAC, the DEC, Governor Cuomo, or R+W, the fundamental problem is bias (read: willing ignorance) added to a penchant for doomsaying and self-inflation. The problem has more to do with psychology than with science, and this is to be absorbed by the residents of Tanners lane, Cross Street and Mill Street.
In my own discussions with residents on these streets, at no time was it suggested that people's insurance rates would be impacted by the CAC's misinformed recommendations. A rumor did reach me, though, that someone on the CAC was mischaracterizing these conversations, suggesting that insurance was being mentioned as a scare tactic.
The suggestion was sheer calumny based on resentment, which is how our CAC has been run since its founding. (The despicable cowardice of the CAC members generally is another component of the same calumny.)
Our CAC will give members of the public 5 minutes to speak to the fantasies which the CAC members have, by now, all but accepted as fact. Five minutes ... what a sick joke.
But this is exactly why the equally ignorant Common Council reappointed some of these same members on Tuesday.
Didn't anyone think it odd that Alderman O'Hara did not recuse himself from reappointing his CAC Chairman? I thought it was wrong, and I told him so.
Its time to call on the CAC to account for themselves, especially it Chairman. What background dose he have in science. Perhaps he read a radical book in the 1960,or wrote one !
ReplyDeleteWell he's reappointed now, thanks a load Common Council.
DeleteSometimes it seems that nobody in City government has any idea what's really going on. Granted, that's probably true of politicians in general, that they just follow the nearest crowd and then cover themselves as best they can. But what about the real world they're supposed to be serving? This sea-level rise business is a perfect example of governmental cluelessness.
But there are other examples.
The CAC has had TWO YEARS to request a modification of the City's SPDES permit, which has been incorrect for 15 years. The permit puts the GPS coordinates for the City's Wastewater Treatment Plant two miles north of Troy! The permit also neglects to note that the North and South Bays are "sensitive habitats," technically speaking, but nothing will be changed unless and until the City requests it of the State DEC. Apparently two years is not long enough to figure this out.
Why hasn't anything been done to recommend to the Common Council that the Conservation Overlay recommended in the 2002 Comprehensive Plan be ratified?
Where's an update to the City's sewer separation planning - a properly done separation based on the City's past studies which were barely mentioned in the improperly done plan of 2014. It's up to the CAC to collect the past plans into one place, but after two years they wouldn't even know where to look.
If you speak with CAC members, they wouldn't have a clue about any of these things. So why is everyone so obtuse?
This is just not good enough, but now our CAC aspires to become a Conservation Advisory Board (CAB). That makes a lot of sense, right?
A totally fantasized river-level rise of six feet wouldn't even inundate a half dozen homes in Hudson with each high tide, never mind 82!
ReplyDeleteThe colored satellite photos above show the current "100-year flood," as determined by FEMA and shown in blue, and the projected 100-year flood ON TOP OF the fantasized six-foot rise of the river in green.
Can anyone in City government understand why residents might be annoyed with the CAC's inattentiveness and total lack of knowledge? Unless and until these people apply themselves, and join the public in correcting the consulting physicist, then the CAC is out of its depths. It is arguably incompetent.
On it's seldom read "methodology" page for sea-level rise, Scenic Hudson does give two ranges of projections for the Hudson River north of Kingston.
ReplyDeleteOf the two sets of possibilities on offer, the first and highest numbers are from ClimAID, which uses highly speculative modeling with feedback loops considered unreliable by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Of these "semi-empirical models," the 800 scientists of the IPCC have expressed "low confidence."
Scenic Hudson's only other possibility, after factoring in some local conditions, generally coincides with the IPCC's projections.
In the worst-case scenario for the 2080s, which means that humankind does absolutely nothing to change carbon release into the atmosphere, and there are no innovations to help us, Scenic Hudson projects an 8 to 18-inch river-level rise north of Kingston through the 2080s.
When you use Scenic Hudson's SLR Mapper to project 18 inches onto the City of Hudson, there's practically no difference from today's shoreline.
But the more reasonable projection is just not exciting enough. It doesn't light our hair on fire in the way need our politics to advance the very best things in life.
It's for this reason that the CAC Chairman Jonathan Lerner specified in the RFP for an environmental consultant that the City would only be using the ClimAID models for its Natural Resource Inventory. Chairman Lerner ordered on our behalves, and now we're getting what we paid for. (This is what irked residents on Tanners lane, Cross Street, and Mill Street, and not any threat that their flood insurance rates would be affected.)
Once the residents of the three streets understood the meaning of the satellite maps above (everything you need to know is in the captions), most asked the same question: "Why would they do this?"
ReplyDeleteMeaning, why would the CAC embrace as a matter of policy a river-level rise which is almost certainly an exaggeration, would have almost no impact on Hudson anyway, and would only impact homeowners on Tanners, Cross, and Mill Street if it impacts homeowners at all?
Why indeed?
But to be fair to the CAC members, who among us can see through our received climate pieties who haven't also made an effort to scrutinize the science? After all, that's why we pay experts, to tell us how to set policy. To tell us how to think.
Unfortunately, it takes an apostate to see that the immediate political payoff of frightening people - with ridiculous sea-level rise implications for an impossible number of buildings impacted - is sexier than the ecologically-minded alternative.
The loser in this case is wetlands restoration, which becomes pointless once our fanatical experts assure us that the wetlands of the North and South Bays will soon be underwater. (The 800 scientists of the IPCC, however, indicate no such thing.)
Which is more exciting for planners, politicians, journalists, CACs, activists, and fund-raisers alike: wetlands restoration or worldwide cataclysm?
I mean, which is more exciting if it's a given that almost nobody will make any effort to understand these issues before they reach an unshakable conclusion.
But if you've given any thought to the matter at all, and you think the Conservation Advisory Council may be listening too closely to a self-interested consultant, then the CAC will give you 5 minutes in which to contradict a Cornell-trained physicist.
Did you want to say something before now? Did you even sign a petition to that effect? Well the CAC refused to accept it, so tough luck.
In other words, the minds of the CAC members are already made up. The opinions of residents are of no account. As always in Hudson, the public may "participate" but only as window dressing. Don't ever forget your place.
Once the residents of the three streets understood the meaning of the satellite maps above (everything you need to know is in the captions), most asked the same question: "Why would they do this?"
ReplyDeleteMeaning, why would the CAC embrace as a matter of policy a river-level rise which is almost certainly an exaggeration, would have almost no impact on Hudson anyway, and would only impact homeowners on Tanners, Cross, and Mill Street if it impacts homeowners at all?
Why indeed?
But to be fair to the CAC members, who among us can see through our received climate pieties who haven't also made an effort to scrutinize the science? After all, that's why we pay experts, to tell us how to set policy. To tell us how to think.
Unfortunately, it takes an apostate to see that the immediate political payoff of frightening people - with ridiculous sea-level rise implications for an impossible number of buildings impacted - is sexier than the ecologically-minded alternative.
The loser in this case is wetlands restoration, which becomes pointless once our fanatical experts assure us that the wetlands of the North and South Bays will soon be underwater. (The 800 scientists of the IPCC, however, indicate no such thing.)
Which is more exciting for planners, politicians, journalists, CACs, activists, and fund-raisers alike: wetlands restoration or worldwide cataclysm?
I mean, which is more exciting if it's a given that almost nobody will make any effort to understand these issues before they reach an unshakable conclusion.
But if you've given any thought to the matter at all, and you think the Conservation Advisory Council may be listening too closely to a self-interested consultant, then the CAC will give you 5 minutes in which to contradict a Cornell-trained physicist.
Did you want to say something before now? Did you even sign a petition to that effect? Well the CAC refused to accept it, so tough luck.
In other words, the minds of the CAC members are already made up. The opinions of residents are of no account. As always in Hudson, the public may "participate," but only as window dressing.
1.
ReplyDeleteIs Hudson's Conservation Advisory Council really interested in what residents think, or does the CAC exist to promote a specific conclusion and outcome?
Next month the CAC will give you five minutes to explain yourself. Recall that that's after last month's question-and-answer period with the consultant was hastily cancelled, which was at the same time a petition was refused by the CAC Chairman which was critical of the same climate predictions debunked by the international IPCC. The petition was refused for two meeting cycles of the CAC, perhaps because the CAC has embraced the debunked climate model.
Okay, so public participation is not the CAC's thing. What's new? In Hudson the new boss is the same as the old boss, and it seems our bosses permanently distrust City residents. (Fittingly, our CAC Chairman was originally appointed by Common Council President Don Moore.)
But does anyone suppose it's even remotely possible to cover a single climate-related subject in five minutes? The following section (2) concerns one detail among many, and CAC members have not heard of it before now nor have they figured it out for themselves.
When your five minutes are up, though, you can bet Chairman Lerner will pull the plug on you. He'll say you are out of order, and even command that you leave the room. Believe it or not, this is typical of Hudson's CAC meetings, although nobody's ever heard of this in any other community that has a CAC.
In other words, the CAC is not interested in being contradicted. Moreover, its members believe their job is not to evaluate the information for themselves, but to defend the "experts" whom they've hired with our money.
The group-mind is already set, though that's not how science works let alone public participation (oops they're not scientists, just failing citizens).
2.
ReplyDeleteIn a January "technical memo" by the CAC's consultant, a document the public could only obtain by using the Freedom of Information Law in April (why wasn't it shared immediately?), the consulting firm's Cornell-trained physicist made a claim that the government's FEMA studies in the 1980s "used tidal data alone."
If true, then climate warriors could justifiably claim that storm surge on the Hudson River (which is wind related), and increased tributary flows from rainstorms (the fanatics call it "input" even though water doesn't stay "put") are ADDITIONAL to already suspicious predictions for higher tide levels (see the petition).
Here is FEMA's troublesome sentence from 1989, but don't spend much time trying to figure it out:
"High tides produce higher flood elevations than fluvial flows, so peak discharges were therefore not computed on the Hudson River."
The South Bay Task Force (SBTF) contacted FEMA for clarification, and learned that FEMA had NOT "used tidal data alone." What FEMA's confusing sentence meant was that storm surge and increased freshwater flows were included in the data after all.
That being the case, you cannot ADD these same factors a second time, though our consulting physicist was prepared to do exactly that.
The SBTF contacted the CAC's consultant and got the following reply:
"Among other things, we [now] plan to say that FEMA conducted a frequency analysis of river stage at three gauges along the Hudson River which implicitly included tide, freshwater flooding and storm surge. Thus, we’ll remove 'using tidal data alone' and 'ignores freshwater inputs' from the FEMA-FIRM section of the memo."
(Incidentally, why is it that residents - and not the CAC - have had to correct the hired physicist? It's for good reason that this FEMA matter is unknown to CAC members. Whenever the subject of sea-level rise comes up at CAC meetings - which is only following the meetings since the meetings adjourn the moment the subject arises! - CAC members exhibit a ferocity when defending their consultant's specific predictions.)
And now that the consultant's technical memo has been edited and reissued, does it reflect the promised changes? It does not.
The old claims are still there, right along with the misleading jargon ("inputs"!).
(Incidentally, the only way the public can compare the memo's earlier draft with its reissue, much of which is rewritten, is by reading the two PDFs side-by-side. Locating the changes is nearly impossible. If there's any record of the changes made to the document, such as the red-lined iteration of the 2011 LWRP, and if this record was not made available to the public, then that was another intentional misdirection. I believe that such a document exists.)
The public will have five minutes to make a statement on changes to a document that had to be FOILed in the first place. It's not a conversation. It's not a workshop. It's not even a City board; it's a self-important advisory committee.
This is how propaganda is disseminated by "experts," and how the public is disenfranchised by an advisory council.
3.
ReplyDeleteThe SBTF simply requests that the City use the sea-level rise projections of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
For this you can expect to be dismissed as a climate denier. You can expect your CAC to circulate a lie that homeowners on Tanners, Cross and Mill Street who signed a petition promoting the IPCC were frightened into signing after being told their insurance rates would go up.
But it was NEVER suggested or implied that anyone's insurance rates would be affected!
Think about it: the CAC is a governmental body that has circulated a lie to injure critics of its own dishonesty! This detestable behavior was rewarded five days ago when the same people were reappointed by the eternally brain-dead Common Council.
THEY'RE ALL TOOLS, and we're tools too, inasmuch as we placidly accept whatever "inputs" are fed to us by our betters.