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Notes -
80+ dead and rising in Central Texas floods.
Kerr County is the Summer Camp capital of Texas. It's rugged hill country terrain and proximity to the Guadelupe River is perfect for exotic adventures outdoors, and it is close enough to major population centers to be convenient for parents to drop-off their children.
The downside is that low-lying cabins get completely wiped out in flood events. Camp Mystic for girls has double-digit casualties alone.
It is a common refrain to bemoan the fact that, "we don't let kids be kids anymore," and that may be true, but a big part of it is that we as a society simply don't consider the inherent risks acceptable anymore. I shudder to think about making 10-year-olds sit through a 30-minute site-specific emergency preparedness seminar, but that's where this is going, and given what's happened, I'm not entirely sure it would be a bad thing.
I think rich countries shouldn't be building houses and infrastructure in flood plains without damming or proper measures to control the water. It's not impossible. The Netherlands has most of its economic activity below sea level, they eroded the North Sea.
There are big floods all the time in Britain and Australia that wreck people's houses. There ought to be a more aggressive stance taken towards the weather, bring it under control one way or another.
End of day you really can't account for every variable, or conditions that are far outside the 'expected' normal range.
Weather in particular is a chaotic system. Some days the conditions just happen to coincide to make things more severe than expected.
Remember just about a month ago a Swiss village got swept away by an avalanche. What are we to do about this risk? Engineer every mountain to be stable?
Or Volcanic eruptions. We don't HAVE an engineering solution to those!
The arguably better solution in many cases is to build the houses and infrastructure as cheaply as can reasonably be done so they can be more easily rebuilt, and spend the extra money on early warning and evacuation efforts.
Mastering chaotic systems is the whole point of the game. That's what civilization is for, managing irrigation and controlling rivers is one of the oldest duties of government. We should also be working harder on controlling the weather. Weather is very complex but new AI methods are useful here, plus more sensors would be useful.
Building infrastructure to be replaceable and developing early warning systems is good but controlling the system entirely is better. Past a certain level of development, when human activity alters the whole climate system, we have to get more serious about controlling the environment rather than simply inhabiting it.
Imagine a man living in a huge mansion. His presence reshapes it slowly but surely as he builds up endless empty beer cans, bags full of garbage are overflowing. Rats and pests are building up. There are mysterious stains on the walls. And the mansion isn't so great in the first place, there are floorboards that mustn't be stood on, broken windows that let in the cold air.
He can either minimize his presence (not buy all these beer cans, eat 100% of his food so there's minimal waste, not tread where it's dangerous) or he can grow up and clear out all the garbage, renovate to fix up this place. Even though renovations are expensive, exhausting and you never know what kind of unexpected costs will emerge, it's still the right decision.
That's the, I dunno, "scary" part.
Quelling weather in one place might make it harsher somewhere else. How do you dissipate the energy of this system without it bursting out all at once somewhere?
That said, I would be all for engineering the paths of major hurricanes so they don't intersect with land at all. Simple enough approach.
Note, I'm huge on eventually rendering weather a nonissue. Become a Kardashev II Civ ASAP.
Or build O'Neill colonies where the weather can be precisely controlled at all times.
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