Brownie’s still doing a heckuva job

Remember how when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the head of FEMA was some disgraced (really) Arabian horse judge who turned out to be pretty incompetent at running a disaster relief agency?

And then everybody wondered why he was so bad at his job? Was he just in over his head? Completely unqualified? Or was he actually, proactively an idiot?

Welp, 10 years later, I think we’ve got an answer:

Michael D. Brown, the former Federal Emergency Management Agency director who resigned in disgrace after criticisms of how he handled the storm, is also a climate change science denier, particularly on the idea that seems most relevant to his former profession: sea level rise.

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But in the ThinkProgress interview, Brown actually did doubt some of the data that says disaster risk is increasing — namely, sea level rise. The way Brown sees it, the sea levels will not rise the way scientists predict they will. This is partially proven, he said, by the fact that people are still buying and developing big properties on the more vulnerable areas of the East Coast. If Brown could be convinced that sea levels were rising, though, he did said he would support adaptation measures.

See, when it comes to climate predictions, some people like to rely on “experts” who have “actually studied” the “relevant science” and “make informed predictions” based on the “latest available hard data.” Maybe that’s your thing, and, whatever, I’m not going to judge. But the rest of us? We prefer to go to the guys who really know what’s up: real estate developers. After all, when’s the last time the real estate market led the entire industrialized world astray? Clearly the fact that people are still buying land proves without a doubt that said land will never be affected by rising seas. And we’re definitely not already seeing the impact of sea level rise on housing markets.

Someday, guys like Brownie here are going to be standing neck deep in the rising Atlantic Ocean, insisting that water levels are the same as they’ve always been and, anyway, if the seas were really rising then the invisible hand of the market would be personally lifting them all to safety. I recommend investing in high-altitude properties so you’ll hopefully still be around to see it.

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