Note: After Sandy hit, we wrote that FEMA’s confused, uncoordinated reaction was Obama’s Katrina. Instead in a photo op, Obama congratulated by Chris Christie for a good job while begging for assistance, got a big boost in the polls. A few hours later, he went on campaigning. Many weeks later FEMA is still providing some financial help but putting the suffering people affected by Sandy in a mountain of bureaucracy. Government in action. The real work is being done by the Red Cross and the many church and charity groups. Even today, many trailers that could be used to house people still in the cold are sitting idle in Pennsylvania.
Hurry up and wait.
That’s what first responders were left to do after being deployed by FEMA to assist in the storm-ravaged areas in the initial days after superstorm Sandy, FoxNews.com has learned. A FEMA worker who spoke to FoxNews.com described a chaotic scene at New Jersey’s Fort Dix, where emergency workers arrived as the storm bore down on the Atlantic Coast. The worker said officials at the staging area were unprepared and told the incoming responders there was nothing for them to do for nearly four days.
“They told us to hurry, hurry, hurry,” the worker, who works at the agency’s headquarters in Washington and volunteered to deploy for the storm recovery effort. “We rushed to Fort Dix, only to find out that our liaison didn’t even know we were coming.”
“The regional coordinator even said to us, ‘I don’t know why you were rushed here because we don’t need you,’” said the worker, who spoke out of frustration with the lack of planning and coordination following the devastating storm.
‘I worked in Katrina and Katrina was run better than Sandy.’
- Anonymous FEMA first responder
After arriving in New Jersey, the worker and others waited for three full days and parts of another, even as reports dominated the television of the devastation and suffering wrought by the storm, which struck land on Oct. 29. When they asked for assignments, they couldn’t believe the response, according to the worker.
“They told us to go to the Walmart nearby or to check out the area but told us to stay out of the areas affected by the storm,” the worker said. “If our boss back at headquarters had not been alerted and didn’t make a push to get us assignments, the people running the show on the ground level would have just kept us sitting in the barracks.”
In a Nov. 3 email obtained by FoxNews.com, an administrator back in Washington urged the regional team to get his people into the field after learning they were idled..
“My people are being told to go sightseeing,” the e-mail reads. “They may have a mission in 2-4 days ... I am asking them to reach out to contacts there that may be able to use their expertise ... We will continue to seek these opportunities as otherwise these personnel resources will be wasted ... Please advise way ahead ...”
Told of the worker’s complaints, a FEMA official acknowledged that there were delays in getting responders out into the field but said the time was mostly spent firming up training and accommodations.
“I’m not going to say we couldn’t have done better,” Michael Byrne, a FEMA federal coordinating officer, told FoxNews.com. “I can understand the emotional commitment. They want to jump right in and start with the effort. I feel the same way.
“The time was used to find the best place for them and for quick-training,” he said. “There were logistical challenges but we have been fully engaged in the areas since then.”
But that didn’t jibe with the account of the worker, who said the much-maligned agency seemed more organized during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “When there’s disaster, every second counts,” the worker said. “That clock starts ticking once the storm makes landfall. I worked in Katrina and Katrina was run better than Sandy.”
Even after FEMA workers were finally sent out from Fort Dix, many did not have useful information to convey to victims, said the worker. “They are put out in the field and they don’t know what to tell people,” the worker said. “Survivors will fall through the cracks.”
Byrne, who noted there are still 800 FEMA workers in the field helping victims recover, said the responders he dealt with were generally well-prepared. “If there were other people who weren’t able to help, I’d like to know who they are,” he said. “We can always do better, but they have done a great job on short notice.”
The agency has come under fire from residents and elected leaders, including Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) - who represents some of the hardest hit areas in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. He recently told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that FEMA is not prepared to respond effectively to disasters, especially in urban areas.
“Hurricane Sandy should be a major wake-up call,” Nadler said. “When disaster strikes, our densely populated urban areas and economic centers must be able to recover quickly.”
Read more.
Breaking News: MONCKTON gets evicted from Doha COP18 conference
An excerpt from an E &E Newswire story…
After the news conference, and as diplomats gathered for the climate conference president’s assessment of how close countries are to agreement, Monckton quietly slipped into the seat reserved for the delegation of Myanmar and clicked the button to speak.
“In the 16 years we have been coming to these conferences, there has been no global warming,” Monckton said as confused murmurs filled the hall and then turned into a chorus of boos.
The stunt infuriated negotiators and activists here who gather every year to address what they believe is one of the world’s top threats, the steady rise of man-made global warming.
As Monckton was escorted from the hall and security officers stripped him of his U.N. credentials, several people noted that just a few hours earlier a group of young activists had been thrown out of the convention center and deported. Their crime: unfurling an unauthorized banner calling for the Qatari hosts to lead the negotiations to a strong conclusion.
By late today, several activists attending the conference had posted calls to “deport Monckton” on their Twitter feeds.
a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-12-02/obama-plans-for-climate-deal-as-fiscal-cliff-negotiations-rage" title="Bloomberg">Bloomberg
As leaders in Washington obsess about the fiscal cliff, President Barack Obama is putting in place the building blocks for a climate treaty requiring the first fossil- fuel emissions cuts from both the U.S. and China.
State Department envoy Todd Stern is in Doha this week working to clear the path for an international agreement by 2015. While Obama failed to deliver on his promise to start a cap-and-trade program in his first term, he’s working on policies that may help cut greenhouse gases 17 percent by 2020 in the U.S., historically the world’s biggest polluter.
“We are making good progress, and I think we are on track,” Stern told reporters today in Doha when asked if the U.S. can meet its goal even if Congress doesn’t pass climate legislation this decade.
Obama has moved forward with greenhouse-gas rules for vehicles and new power plants, appliance standards and investment in low-emitting energy sources. He’s also doubled use of renewable power and has called for 80 percent of U.S. electricity to come from “clean” energy sources, including nuclear and natural gas, by 2035.
“The president is laying the foundations for real action on climate change,” Jake Schmidt, who follows international climate policy for the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview in Doha. “Whether or not he decides to jump feet first into the international arena, we’ll see.”
Treaty Talks
Envoys from more than 190 nations are entering their second week of talks today at the United Nations conference working toward a global warming treaty. Their ambition is to agree to a pact in 2015 that would take force in 2020. It would supersede limits on emissions for industrial nations under the Kyoto Protocol, which the U.S. never ratified.
Negotiations so far continue to be plagued by divisions—largely between rich nations like the U.S. and fast-developing economies such as China and India—over issues including financial aid to help the world’s most vulnerable countries deal with floods, droughts, rising sea levels and other climate- related changes.
This year marks the end of so-called fast-start finance of almost $30 billion pledged by developed economies to poor nations from 2010 through 2012. Industrialized countries have promised to ramp up financing to at least $100 billion by 2020. So far, those nations including the U.S. haven’t provided specifics on their plans for the funding.
‘Pressing Forward”
The Obama administration has “every intention to continue pressing forward” with funding to the extent it can without opposition from Congress, Stern said today.
Another potential sticking point in the climate talks revolve around a push by the European Union and developing countries for the U.S., Japan, Canada and other developed nations to commit to steeper emissions cuts between now and 2020.
Since 1990, the EU has decreased its greenhouse gases by 18 percent, while the U.S. has increased emissions by 10.8 percent, EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said in Doha today.
“We’re moving very fast in the wrong direction,” Hedegaard said. “All major economies, being it the EU, or U.S., or emerging economies, all of us will have to do more.”
U.S. negotiators have said they have no plans to raise the level of its emissions-reduction goal for 2020. The U.S. has “done quite significant things” to cut greenhouse gases in Obama’s first four years, Stern said, adding that “more can be done.”
Quiet Effort
Obama’s push so far is being pursued without fanfare as the administration and Congress grapple to avert a budget crisis and $607 billion in automatic spending cuts. Unlike 2009, when Obama failed to prevent the collapse of climate talks in Copenhagen, the U.S. can point to more concrete actions it’s taking in the fight global warming.
The U.S. president has more ammunition at hand. The Environmental Protection Agency is required under the Clean Air Act to move ahead with regulations on emissions from existing power plants. Those are responsible for about a third of U.S. emissions, the largest chunk.
Measures such as those, along with continued low natural gas prices and state actions, can cut emissions 16.3 percent by 2020, Resources for the Future, a research firm, estimates. Emissions already are down 8.8 percent from 2005 levels, according to Jonathan Pershing, a State Department negotiator in Doha.
“The U.S. is in a much stronger position going into the Doha talks despite failure of Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation,” said Trevor Houser, a former U.S. climate negotiatorwho served during the Copenhagen meeting. “For countries like China that were able to hide behind a perception of U.S. inaction, the fact that U.S. emissions are falling helps increase pressure. It takes away the excuse that action is stalled because of the U.S.”
A summer of extreme weather also is supporting the U.S. delegation in the talks by raising public awareness and concern about the risks of climate change, Pershing said last week in Doha. So far this year, superstorm Sandy devastated the East Coast while wildfires raged in the west and a record drought wrecked crops in the Midwest.
“The combination of those events is certainly changing the minds of Americans and making clear to people at home the consequences of the increased growth in emissions,” he said at a Nov. 26 news conference in Doha.
The portion of Americans who say climate change will affect them a “great deal” or by a “moderate” amount rose by 13 percentage points to 42% from March to September, according to a poll by Yale University and George Mason University.
Piers Corbyn, Today 05:57 AM
Factual error. You refer to CO2 as a ‘pollutant’ when it is not. It is the food of plants and recent increases (from the geologically very low level of ~0.03%) are good for agriculture. Furthermore as a matter of fact there is no observed or proxy real data in the real world which demonstrates that CO2 increases contribute to warming and there is not one scientist in the world who can produce real data from recent centuries or millenia (or more) to show this. I challenge your publication to show otherwise.The great danger of the CO2-warmist delusion is that it is pointing the world in the wrong direction. The world is not warming but cooling and the increase in very extreme events in the last 2 years (eg) is as expected as the world approaches a new Little Ice Age (LIA). Indeed the extreme situations in USA, UK and Europe of summer 2012 were predicted in long range in a large amount of detail using a solar-activity understanding of the approaching Little Ice Age. Agriculture is suffering and will continue to suffer and world food shortages will increase as we move more into LIA Climate Change. This real and present climate change is much worse for agriculture and the world economy than the marginal benefit of the small but unrelated, coincidental, increase in CO2.
Thank you, Piers Corbyn, WeatherAction long range weather and climate forecasters
ICECAP NOTE: Liberals will applaud these efforts and the public may support clean energy. But the mention of natural gas and nuclear as examples is disingenuous. They know the environmentalists and public would not support mass increase of nuclear power and the EPA is working to destroy our ability to extract natural gas through fracking, that has enabled a worldwide boom.
Current scientific knowledge does not substantiate Ban Ki-Moon assertions on weather and climate, say 125 scientists
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon
Policy actions that aim to reduce CO2 emissions are unlikely to influence future climate. Policies need to focus on preparation for, and adaptation to, all dangerous climatic events, however caused
Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations
H.E. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General, United Nations
First Avenue and East 44th Street, New York, New York, U.S.A.
November 29, 2012
Mr. Secretary-General:
On November 9 this year you told the General Assembly: “Extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal...Our challenge remains, clear and urgent: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to strengthen adaptation to even larger climate shocks and to reach a legally binding climate agreement by 2015… This should be one of the main lessons of Hurricane Sandy.”
On November 13 you said at Yale: “The science is clear; we should waste no more time on that debate.”
The following day, in Al Gore’s “Dirty Weather” Webcast, you spoke of “more severe storms, harsher droughts, greater floods”, concluding: “Two weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard of the United States. A nation saw the reality of climate change. The recovery will cost tens of billions of dollars. The cost of inaction will be even higher. We must reduce our dependence on carbon emissions.”
We the undersigned, qualified in climate-related matters, wish to state that current scientific knowledge does not substantiate your assertions.
The U.K. Met Office recently released data showing that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years. During this period, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations rose by nearly 9% to now constitute 0.039% of the atmosphere. Global warming that has not occurred cannot have caused the extreme weather of the past few years. Whether, when and how atmospheric warming will resume is unknown. The science is unclear. Some scientists point out that near-term natural cooling, linked to variations in solar output, is also a distinct possibility.
The “even larger climate shocks” you have mentioned would be worse if the world cooled than if it warmed. Climate changes naturally all the time, sometimes dramatically. The hypothesis that our emissions of CO2 have caused, or will cause, dangerous warming is not supported by the evidence.
The incidence and severity of extreme weather has not increased. There is little evidence that dangerous weather-related events will occur more often in the future. The U.N.’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its Special Report on Extreme Weather (2012) that there is “an absence of an attributable climate change signal” in trends in extreme weather losses to date. The funds currently dedicated to trying to stop extreme weather should therefore be diverted to strengthening our infrastructure so as to be able to withstand these inevitable, natural events, and to helping communities rebuild after natural catastrophes such as tropical storm Sandy.
There is no sound reason for the costly, restrictive public policy decisions proposed at the U.N. climate conference in Qatar. Rigorous analysis of unbiased observational data does not support the projections of future global warming predicted by computer models now proven to exaggerate warming and its effects.
The NOAA “State of the Climate in 2008” report asserted that 15 years or more without any statistically-significant warming would indicate a discrepancy between observation and prediction. Sixteen years without warming have therefore now proven that the models are wrong by their creators’ own criterion.
Based upon these considerations, we ask that you desist from exploiting the misery of the families of those who lost their lives or properties in tropical storm Sandy by making unsupportable claims that human influences caused that storm. They did not. We also ask that you acknowledge that policy actions by the U.N., or by the signatory nations to the UNFCCC, that aim to reduce CO2 emissions are unlikely to exercise any significant influence on future climate. Climate policies therefore need to focus on preparation for, and adaptation to, all dangerous climatic events however caused.
Signed by over 125 international scientists - see list here
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As part of the 24 hour of programming designed to counter Al Gore’s Dirty Weather 24 hour of programming, I was able to do two segments, the first on extreme weather and the second on Sandy. My apologies on the second presentation in which at the end I did an imitation of Andrea Bocelli. I thought I was doing a voice over graphics still at that point. My bad. I often close my eyes when doing radio to avoid distractions. Close your eye and just listen.