Tuesday, June 03, 2008 - Posts
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Eric, thanks for your post on the "natural disasters" op-ed. (Can it really be that someone surnamed Blow is the Times' new storm reporter?) It leaves this takeaway:
As often as not, so-called "natural disasters" owe the latter word as much to acts of human agency as anything else. Floods and wildfires and mudslides do seem worse than ever because there are more people and buildings on flood plains, mountains, and hillsides than ever. That answer should mark the beginning, not the end, of discussion.
It's easy to understand why a profit-seeking developer would build in fragile areas. Easy, too, to understand why someone would buy there—it seems every California wildfire story includes an interview with a homeowner who'd been attracted by the relatively lower prices of new houses far from city center and who knew nothing of the fragility of the area. What's not easy to understand is why policymakers permit ever more construction in such areas; that's a question deserving more examination in this country.
As for countries outside the United States, the problem often is more acute. Regions threatened by the expected consequences of climate change include places like the densely populated Mekong Delta. Putting into place policies that will avert disaster there is an act that human agents ought now to undertake.
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A scary graph appeared on the New York Times op-ed page on Sunday. It seems to show a profound acceleration in the rate of natural disaster in the United States and the world. In the words of its author, Charles Blow:
According to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, there have been more than four times as many weather-related disasters in the last 30 years than in the previous 75 years. The United States has experienced more of those disasters than any other country.
Blow continues:
Who do we have to thank for all this? Probably ourselves.
Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued reports concluding that "human influences" (read greenhouse-gas emissions) have "more likely than not" contributed to this increase. The United States is one of the biggest producers of greenhouse-gas emissions.
However, his source—the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters—states the obvious problem with Blow's figures, one that Blow neglects to mention to his readers: that reporting has greatly improved over the decades. As one of its reports notes, the annual number of earthquakes appears to have increased over the decades, but no one thinks that earthquakes are caused by climate change. What has changed is the quality of earthquake-monitoring systems, the reliability of government records, and so forth. (While it is true that the incidence of hurricanes has increased over the last few decades, there remains a great deal of scientific controversy about whether this trend will continue.) The pre-1970 data, which are responsible for most of the dramatic rise in the graph, are probably worthless.
There is another data artifact that drives Blow's graph, one that is also well-known in the scientific community. The main reason for the increase in the number and costliness of natural disasters in the United States, and probably in other countries as well, is that people have been moving to the most vulnerable areas—the coasts (especially Florida and California)—and building expensive structures there. CRED defines a natural disaster as an event where 10 or more people are reported killed, 100 people or more are reported affected, a declaration of a state of emergency occurs, or a call for international assistance is made. Obviously, all these criteria are more likely to be met when a hurricane, earthquake, or other natural disaster occurs in a highly populated area than when it occurs in a sparsely populated area.
This is not to deny that some extreme weather events—droughts and flooding, for example—may be connected to climate change. It's just to point out that there is a difference between reporting the facts and scaring people with misleading statistics. Blow is right to worry about climate change and to urge the United States to join international efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. But he misuses the data to make this point—despite CRED's repeated warnings about reporting and data problems—and as a result, he misses the main implication of the data: that the United States and state governments should regulate construction in coastal and other vulnerable areas more strictly. This is much more important in the short run than a climate treaty, as the benefits of a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions won't be felt for decades. As CRED says in the report cited above, "Disaster data—handle with care!"
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Marty as usual offers an elucidating post in response to my question about whether Congress is likely to wade back into terrorism detention issues this coming summer. But I gotta say, Marty, I'm closer to David on the key point. Just because a court decision in Boumediene might leave no serious reason why Congress should act before the election, doesn't mean Congress won't.
Though I'm well out of my depth in political punditry, I've tended to view the odds of major terrorism legislation pre-election as slim—the administration is too weak, the substantive and electoral stakes too high, and the members' political interests too diverse to get something passed this time around, especially something as mammoth as a new court, or administrative detention scheme. That said, Sen. Leahy this week is hosting a Senate judiciary committee hearing on how well the federal courts handle terrorism cases, featuring several witnesses who think (for deeply well-informed reasons) the federal courts do better than any plausible alternative. Someone felt the need to push back against some brewing detention storm. My hope remains they're just whistling in the wind.
On Marty's particular point that Congress is unlikely to think about a trial system because Boumediene isn't actually about the military commission/war crimes trials at Guantanamo. Quite right, Boumediene is directly about the far less elaborate process for determining whether someone is properly detained as a "combatant" (problematically defined), whether or not they've actually committed a crime under U.S. or international law. But while that distinction appropriately matters a lot to the court, it's not at all clear Congress wouldn't want to try to deal with both matters at once (as it did the last time it legislated on the topic in 2006). Indeed, the security court proposals I've seen floating around are geared toward putting these two decisions institutionally together, merging the terrorism trial function and indefinite detention supervision function (through something like periodic review) under the control of a single body, abandoning the federal courts for criminal terrorism trials and codifying a more formalized system of preventive detention going forward. The no-doubt attractive idea is to fix the Guantanamo mess in one fell swoop.
But here's the thing, and with apologies to Justice Holmes—the security court idea lets the hard case of Guantanamo make terrible law for counterterrorism detention going forward. The options for fixing Guantanamo are now grossly limited and badly skewed by the consequences of a series of years-old decisions to torture some of the detainees, and to delay any serious inquiry into all of the detainees' status until time and distance from evidence about the circumstances of their capture have made a meaningful hearing all but impossible. Courts-martial or criminal trials are far more difficult now since evidence obtained under coercion is inadmissible. Administrative hearings that might have been sufficient under the Geneva Conventions if conducted upon capture are now plainly inadequate. At this stage, none of the options are ideal. And none is a promising base line from which to design all detention policy going forward.
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Imagine if, during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Judge Lance Ito ordered the district attorney's office to hand over DNA samples and logs of O.J.'s stay in county jail after his arrest. Then imagine that the prosecutors refused to do so. And that, instead of being fined for contempt of court (or thrown in jail themselves), these same prosecutors somehow got their boss to get Ito tossed off the bench. And then the D.A.'s office worked behind the scenes to replace Ito with a more, shall we say, compliant judge.
Wouldn't happen. Couldn't happen. Never in a million years. Not even in California.
Well, Cuba isn't California, and Guantanamo Bay is further still.
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