3 Weeks Out: Finally a NYT Book Review Katrina Correction

I guess other folks more concerned and more motivated about this than myself took a bit more effort to point out the problems with Timothy Egan's book review of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun: the Sunday NYT Book Review yesterday had a correction and there is now one appended to the on-line version of the review.

Here in New Orleans, the Times-Picayune did a bit of a better job by quickly publishing a letter to the editor from the founder of Levees.Org about President Obama's characterization of Katrina as a "natural disaster". That statement was made in an interview with the President by local reporters, so his mis-statement didn't get picked up nationally and, besides this one letter, I don't think it got much coverage locally. But, again, in some parallel bizarro world if a President McCain had made such an oversight, he'd be lambasted for being clueless about what flooded New Orleans after Katrina.

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Even Published Authors Can Mis-speak

Occasional errors in the morning paper don't surprise me any more. Even the Sunday New York Times we get delivered each week (but at thirty dollars a month, maybe not for much longer when I can walk down the block and get it for $5 at Starbucks) has routine mistakes that I chalk up on too much reliance on spellcheck and not enough on real editorship and skull sweat.

But this egregious mis-use/mis-wording nearly made me do a spit-take with my yogurt this morning. Its from an article-slash-interview with Ethan Brown, the author of "Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder that Rocked New Orleans", an otherwise fine-sounding book about a horrible post-Katrina murder-suicide committed by an Iraqi war vet. Brown worked as a reporter for a while and talked about applying his investigative skills to this story:

"That's what I was doing. Scavenging. Getting everybody's story right. Trying to get these two apocryphal events -- the Iraq war and Katrina -- right. " (Gag-inducing emphasis added.)

Of course - duh - he meant to say "apocalyptic", not "apocryphal", because for damned sure Katrina and the Iraq war are NOT "of doubtful authenticity".

Even a published author, skilled and experienced in weaving words into precise, poetic combinations, can mis-speak. But though these words are similar ... well, they start with the same two syllables, but they really ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO BEING SIMILAR ... they are as different in meaning as two words can be. A total, complete, mistaken choice of words.

And isn't it the interviewer's, or the editor's, job to catch this? Doesn't this deserve at least a [sic] after the word? Does anyone at the Times-Picayune own a dictionary that has actual pages?

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Follow-Up: Hurricane Katrina, No New York Times Correction, and Pres. Obama Makes the Same Mistake

Yesterday's New York Times Book Review didn't contain any correction or mention of the mis-statements that Timothy Egan made in his review of Dave Eggars' Zeitoun that I wrote about the other day. I searched both the NYT web page and the relevant database on Lexis and found nothing. (And, apparently, you can't leave comments on book reviews on the Times' web page. Huh?)

But I guess that the New York Times' error in this doesn't matter since President Obama is saying basically the same thing:

"I think that Katrina was really a wake-up call for the country...that all of us can fall prey to these kinds of natural disasters". Rebuilding New Orleans Still a Priority, Obama Says, New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 23, 2009, page A-21. (Emphasis added)

Oh, the shitstorm that would rain down in some parallel-hell of a universe where a President McCain made a statement referring to Katrina as just a natural disaster. The New York Times, President Obama, and the entire country may have forgotten this, but we in New Orleans still remember an important detail about Katrina: the catastrophic flooding wasn't due to the hurricane overtopping the levees, but resulted from the breeching of floodwalls that we now know were improperly designed and constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers over the past forty years.

Are the Times and the President glossing over this because now, all of a sudden, they don't want to draw attention to the inefficiencies and ineptitude of the federal government because the current administration is proposing that a big, new bureaucracy be created to provide a federalized health insurance option for one sixth of our population and take its place besides other great government success stories like Amtrak, the Post Office, and, yes, the Corps of Engineers?

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Hurricane Katrina and Sloppy Errors in the New York Times Book Review

I guess with the increase in corrections in the New York Times, spotting errors isn't hard, but getting the date and details wrong on Hurricane Katrina is pretty egregious. Yes, its just in the Sunday NYT Book Review of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun, but saying that

"Katrina hits on Sunday, Aug. 28 2005" and that "[i]t's a Category 5 storm..."

as reviewer Timothy Egan does, is like talking about the 9/10 Terrorist Attacks.

Yeah, OK, on Sunday those still in town were definitely feeling the effects of Katrina, but it didn't make landfall until Monday morning; though that's the correct meteorological meaning of "hit", we can let that one slide. But though Katrina had been a Cat5 storm, it was down to a Cat3 by the time it made landfall in Louisiana; Egan just plain got that wrong in his review. (The Saffir-Simpson scale categories are based solely on wind speed; though Katrina's winds had decreased when it came ashore, it still packed a record storm surge and was one of the largest hurricanes ever. Maybe Egan and his editors just .... know, no excuse for this sloppiness, but OK - it was a powerful, big damn storm, Cat5 or not.)

Perhaps these are only things that locals would care about, but in what sounds like perhaps the best book about Katrina so far (haven't read it myself yet), and even perhaps the best book that Eggers has written out of his entire oeuvre, I think these oversights only serve to sour us in New Orleans on this otherwise great review. We're perfectly willing to forgive his sloppiness in specifying what neighborhood the Zeitoun family lived in (a lot of us can't keep some of those straight), but for us, 8/29 is just as evocative of the date our tragedy took place as 9/11 is for the entire country.

But what is unforgivable is the dilettantesque mistake that the reviewer makes in attributing New Orlean's deluge to just the shear force of nature. In describing the second day after the storm, Egan says:

"Day 2, the world changes. Zeitoun wakes to a sea of water, after the levees have been overtopped. He’s neck-deep in a city of a thousand acts of desperation."

If the New York Times and the rest of the country has forgotten that the catastrophic flooding wasn't due to Katrina overtopping the levees, but to the failure and breeching of the levees due to their improper design and construction, then we've learned nothing and made no progress in how we allocate resources and plan for risks such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters. (On the other hand, Eggers, apparently, gets it right - the local reviews and discussions of the book I've seen would definitely mention it if he had botched that critical point.)

So this Sunday I'm look for a big, fat, kiss-ass apology to New Orleans in the New York Times Book Review.
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Legal Scholarship, Global Warming, and Jazzfest

I've been thinking about this for a few years, ever since I read Can We Save New Orleans?, 19 Tul. Envtl L. Rev 1 (2006), by Professor Oliver Houck of Tulane School of Law. It's a very good, informal riff on a lot of the environmental issues related to New Orleans, Louisiana, the Mississippi River, all tied up in a nice bow of justifiable post-Katrina anger and personal narrative, including excerpts from Professor Houck's own evacuation journal.

What stood out in my mind from this article when I first read it was a rather specific prediction about global warming, though I slightly mis-remembered it - he doesn't give a time frame like I had thought he had (a lot of anthropogenic global warming alarmists tend to omit specific predictions of when the planet is going to be significantly hotter than whenever their spreading their current hysteria). But Professor Houck does give a specific temperature prediction linked to one of our big annual cultural events here in New Orleans:

Here in Louisiana we will be warmer in summer (think, maybe, 103 degrees at Jazz Fest) .... Houck, Tul. Envtl. L. Rev 1, at 27.

For one, the "maybe" in the parenthetical is his big weasel-word out of pulling the specific figure of 103 degrees out of thin air. The rest of his sentence discusses predicted drier conditions and the effect that may have on our state's leading crops and then a footnote for that sentence refers to (after an "id." or two) this:

Envtl. Prot. Agency, Climate Change and Louisiana 3 (1997) available at http:// yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/globalwarming.nsf/UniqueKeyLookup/SHSU5BURCA/$File/la_ impct.pdf

The only part of that four-page report that I found which predicted specific temperature change in Louisiana was this:

[It] is projected that by 2100, temperatures in Louisiana could increase about 3°F (with a range of 1-5°F) in spring and summer, slightly less in winter, and slightly more in fall. Envtl. Prot. Agency, Climate Change and Louisiana 2 (1997).

Like a lot of the source material cited by alarmists, it's a bit more measured than the attention-grabbing headlines and statements: "could increase" anywhere from one to five degrees in a hundred years. But 103 degrees at Jazz Fest? Yes, Jazz Fest is hot: it's a music festival with tens of thousand of people crowded onto a dirt and asphalt racetrack and fairgrounds in late spring. Is it really likely to be 103 degrees there any time soon? Ever?

As a librarian I deal in facts. Students sometimes think we know how to find anything, but I tell them that while that's not true, I do know how to find out how to find just about anything. So I spent some time learning about weather data the did some research and came up with the average high temperature for Jazz Fest during its 40 year history.

Jazz Fest has had different schedules over its forty year history, so to have a consistent year-to-year set of data, I used a constant set of ten days over the last weekend of April through the first weekend of may - the first Friday through the next weekend's Sunday, which has been the more-or-less consistent schedule for the Fest in the past 15 years or so. Also, I included the days between weekends because the second weekend of Jazz Fest has started to include that Thursday so this way I'm taking an average of the more-or-less same ten days year to year (and because your hardcore Jazz Fest fans make good use of these weekdays to continue enjoying the local music scene, some consider Jazz Fest to be the entire ten day period).

The National Climatic Data Center, part of NOAA, has its primary on-line climate data search here:http://cdo.ncdc.noaa.gov/CDO/cdo

It took me a while to figure it out - you submit your query and they actually e-mail you a link a little while later with the information you requested (the link lasts two weeks, but I saved the important data). The various data stations collect different data, and the range of years for which they collected data varies, and the stations nearest the fair grounds don't have complete data for these forty years so I used the main station at the New Orleans airport (which, I think, is the main station in this area - it definitely has the most complete data).

There's no way I could find to get just the data for certain dates, or just the April and May data, for all forty years, so I submitted a request for all forty years of data and then copied the daily high temperatures to my spreadsheet for each year's ten day Jazz Fest "period". (You can view either the original data from the NCDC (PDF) or my spreadsheet of the daily highs (also PDF)).

What I found out is this: the hottest Jazz Fest ever was 2002, when the average temperature was 89.1 degrees. The hottest single day ever was May 2 of that year, when the temperature was 92 degrees. So even if the upper range of the EPA's 1979 prediction is correct, Jazz Fest might be 97 degrees in a hundred years. Still damn hot, but well short of 103 degrees.

Looking over the numbers, its clear there is no definitive warming trend; the second hottest Jazz Fest was 1987, when the average temperature was 84.9 degrees. This year was the tenth hottest (84.9 degrees), but the eleventh, thirteenth, and fourteenth hottest Jazz Fests were all in the 1970s: 1975, 1971, and 1978 - 83.5, 83.4, and 83.1 degrees, respectively. AND the third, fifth, and ninth coolest Jazz Fests were all in the last four years: 2005, 2004, and 2009 - 77.3, 77.7, and 79.1 degrees, respectively.

The full numbers are sorted different ways in the next three charts. Here's the average high temperatures for all forty years, in chronological order (click any of these charts to see larger versions):


And, because there's no shortage of fun things you can do while number crunching, here's the forty years of Jazz Fest ranked from hottest to "coolest" (74.9 degrees is "cool" here in New Orleans):


and here it is the data, coolest to hottest:


Conclusions? Yes, the planet has gotten warmer in the past century or so. But these Jazz Fest temperatures are consistent with a more realistic view of climate change than the anthropogenic alarmists have: there hasn't been a clear "hockey stick" temperature increase in the past few decades and its likely that what warming we have seen peaked in the late 1990s and that natural variations dwarf mankind's contributions to warming the planet.

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Hurricane Warning Escalation

In the days before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, the National Weather Service used some language that they have previously kept in reserve for storms that looked to be particularly lethal. The warning went out at 10:11am on August 28 and said, in part:

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS […] POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

(See U.S. Dept. of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, service assessment: hurricane katrina, August 23-31, 2005 18 (2006) (available at: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/assessments/index.shtml)

Katrina weakened to a Category 3 and though it still had the highest storm surge on record, it was the failure of the federally built levees in New Orleans that resulted in the 1300 deaths here, not the direct effects of the storm.

So last week for Hurricane Ike, the NWS had to up the ante in their warnings. Many news stories mention the "certain death warning" given for Galveston:

ALL NEIGHBOURHOODS AND POSSIBLY ENTIRE COASTAL COMMUNITIES WILL BE INUNDATED DURING THE PERIOD OF THE PEAK STORM TIDE. PERSONS NOT HEEDING EVACUATION ORDERS IN SINGLE FAMILY ONE- OR TWO-STOREY HOMES WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH.

(See, for example, 'Certain death' warning over Ike, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7612106.stm)

I haven't found the actual warning that contains that language on the NOAA/NWS web site, but though there have been a few dozen confirmed casualties, it looks again like the warning was again over-the-top. As it should be, I guess, though this didn't convince everyone to leave Galveston.

But then what will the NWS do next time? Nothing is much more dire than "certain death", so expect the next big hurricane to inspire warnings such as:

HURRICANE ARMAGEDDON IS PREDICTED TO RIP THE TIME-SPACE CONTINUUM AND UNLEASH THE DEMON HORDES OF CTHULU TO RAIN DOWN DEATH AND DEVASTATION UPON ALL SURVIVORS IN THE REGION; ANY RESIDENTS NOT KILLED IMMEDIATELY BY THE STORM OR UPON THE RAZOR CLAWS OF THE OLD ONES' SPAWN SHALL HAVE THEIR LIMBS RENT ASUNDER AND THEIR ENTRAILS STREWN UPON THE BARREN WASTELAND THAT USED TO BE THEIR HOMES.

Maybe that will get people's attention.
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Evacuation...

It's Sunday morning. Three years ago we left on a Sunday morning for Katrina and didn't come back for five weeks. Who knows was the law school is going to do if we can't come back in a few days; I do NOT want to do that again.
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