Just finished writing a paper on climate change and the coastline. I did quite a bit of research on Katrina, and other storm-related floods around the world, because cc is bringing more intense storms.

The data is quite scary - Katrina killed 1800 people in New Orleans, and is on record as the US's most costly natural disaster. And yet, storms of similar scale hit the Uk and Netherlands in 1953 and killed around the same amount of people, which made the governments bring on decent flood risk management policies, warning, good quality defences, emergnecy planning etc. When the same scale of storm happened in 1978 THERE WERE NO DEATHS.

When Katrina first happened I saw an interview with the designer of the Levees, who said he had been told to scale down for cost reasons. In my research, I saw a report to Congress which said 'maybe we should have considered the cost of loss of life in our calculations'. It's kind of depressing.

Anyway, new IPCC report is out. They're going for a lot more certainty in most things, but they haven't included the impact of green ice melt because it's 'unpredictable'. So Al Gore (and a decade of coastal scientists before him) is saying 5m for the greenland ice, another 5m for the antarctic ice, and IPCC is saying 48cm by 2100 but we can't estimate the amount of ice melt! Can annyone see a bit of a planning gap looming?