Hurricane Sandy apparently wasn’t that destructive, given that, as the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto observes, the New York Times wasn’t prevented from its usual stupid bloviating:

Some people prepare for natural disasters by stocking up on food, water and batteries. At the New York Times, they stockpile tendentious ideological arguments. Thus within hours, as other journalists were scrambling around the storm zone in search of facts, the Times was ready with a set-piece editorial that hit the Web just hours after the storm called Sandy made landfall in the Northeast.

The title was “A Big Storm Requires Big Government,” and here’s the nut: “Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of ‘big government,’ which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it.” That’s a straw man, as the Times itself admits at the end of the editorial by linking to a Politico story reporting “Romney would not abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

“Gov. Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” Politico quotes a Romney spokesman as saying. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”

It’s not clear if the Times disagrees with Romney’s actual position, which more or less describes the status quo. If you spent hours yesterday watching local TV news in New York, as we did, you saw a lot of Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and you heard a lot about state and local policemen, firemen and other emergency personnel. The federal government’s role was largely invisible.

The Times is also aghast that supposedly “Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job.” For our part, we’d like to thank Con Edison for the uninterrupted electricity.

Let’s stipulate that FEMA is a vitally important agency, a point on which there seems to be no serious disagreement anyway. How exactly does that make the case for “big government”? FEMA’s annual budget is $14.3 billion, according to lefty Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein. That’s approximately 1/272nd of total federal spending, estimated at $3,888.4 billion by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

To be sure, there are other crucial government functions, such as defense, that cost more than FEMA does. But the Times has it utterly backward in suggesting that necessary government justifies extravagant government–that FEMA’s work somehow redeems everything from ObamaCare to Solyndra to Big Bird. (Speaking of which, further to the Times’s contempt for profit-making companies, yesterday afternoon all of New York’s commercial TV stations pre-empted their regular programming for news of the approaching storm. PBS’s Channel 13 was showing a cartoon.)

Making our point symbolically, Government Executive reports that most of the federal government responded to the storm by shutting down: “Washington-area federal agencies will remain closed Tuesday as Hurricane Sandy continues to unleash its wrath up and down the East Coast. . . . Emergency employees are required to report to work. Everyone else affected will be granted excused absence.”

And here’s President Obama, speaking yesterday afternoon at FEMA headquarters: “My message to the governors, as well as to the mayors, is anything they need, we will be there. And we’re going to cut through red tape. We’re not going to get bogged down with a lot of rules.”

Even the most leftist president in American history is suddenly touting deregulation. Of course, he’s faced with responsibility to act in an emergency, not to mention a tough re-election challenge. The only real-world pressures on the Times editorialists were a deadline and an empty page. Still, you’d think a modicum of professional pride would stop them from filling it with such nonsense.

And, by the way, Sandy wasn’t that destructive according to historical measures, says Roger Pielke:

In studying hurricanes, we can make rough comparisons over time by adjusting past losses to account for inflation and the growth of coastal communities. If Sandy causes $20 billion in damage (in 2012 dollars), it would rank as the 17th most damaging hurricane or tropical storm (out of 242) to hit the U.S. since 1900—a significant event, but not close to the top 10. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 tops the list (according to estimates by the catastrophe-insurance provider ICAT), as it would cause $180 billion in damage if it were to strike today. Hurricane Katrina ranks fourth at $85 billion.

To put things into even starker perspective, consider that from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall—Carol, Hazel and Diane—that in 2012 each would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy.

While it’s hardly mentioned in the media, the U.S. is currently in an extended and intense hurricane “drought.” The last Category 3 or stronger storm to make landfall was Wilma in 2005. The more than seven years since then is the longest such span in over a century.

Flood damage has decreased as a proportion of the economy since reliable records were first kept by the National Weather Service in the 1930s, and there is no evidence of increasing extreme river floods. Historic tornado damage (adjusted for changing levels of development) has decreased since 1950, paralleling a dramatic reduction in casualties. Although the tragic impacts of tornadoes in 2011 (including 553 confirmed deaths) were comparable only to those of 1953 and 1964, such tornado impacts were far more common in the first half of the 20th century.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that drought in America’s central plains has decreased in recent decades. And even when extensive drought occurs, we fare better. For example, the widespread 2012 drought was about 10% as costly to the U.S. economy as the multiyear 1988-89 drought, indicating greater resiliency of American agriculture.

Reason.com adds, well, reason about Romney:

In a 2011 debate, the self-evidently barbaric challenger took time away from pinching babies to suggest that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could be shrunken down and many of its responsibilities shifted to state and local governments. The former Massachsetts governor opined that, “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction.”

To Washington Post columnist and reliable Obama supporter Eugene Robinson, such thoughts are nothing more than a “glib exercise in ideological purity” and just another way of transferring “unfunded liabilities to the states.” The New York Times has flatly declared that “A Big Storm Requires a Big Government,” which is sort of like saying that a foot-long hot dog needs a 12-inch bun. This sort of response – that the feds should not only be on the hook for just about everything that happens everywhere but that Washington alone is capable of coordinating effective relief efforts, is widespread.

And simply wrong. As Matt Welch noted earlier today, FEMA spends a whopping “$10 billion on disaster coordination and relief.” For all sorts of reasons – the foremost being the immutable law of geography – first responders will always be largely drawn from local and state sources. Those are the people who will not only be most numerous but will also have the best knowledge of a given area. And other than immediate humanitarian aid, is there any reason to shift the costs of living near the ocean, or a river, or in a fire-prone desert area to taxpayers who choose not to inhabit places that are so risky and expensive? In a 2004 story for Reason, millionaire TV anchor John Stossel wrote about how federal dollars rebuilt his waterfront home on Long Island. Who would have thought that wealthy, politically powerful people would be able to get cheap insurance from the feds? While the exact program that benefited Stossel doesn’t exist in the same form anymore, it’s been replaced by similar deals – including a bipartisan boondoggle that President Obama signed into law just this summer.

Far from being some sort of paragon of competency and sagacity, FEMA is notorious even among other Washington-based bureaucracies for failure to perform. The terrifying extent of the agency’s incompetence become horrifyingly visible during Hurricane Katrina (itself a case study in the failure of local, state, and federal governments to provide basic safety for residents). Democrats today can claim that everything’s jake with FEMA now that Michael D. “Heckuvajob” Brown is gone, but that just isn’t true, especially when it comes to the narrow question of disaster coordination. Consider this 2011 Government Accountability Office report, which flatly states that FEMA “has not followed sound management practices to design, administer, and evaluate pilot programs that advance and integrate state and federal catastrophic planning efforts.” As often as not, the difference between a relatively quick and successful recovery effort – such as the one following the 2011 tornado that flattened Joplin, Missouri – and a botched one is the ability of locals to circumvent bureaucracy rather than wasting time engaging it.

The feds are good at throwing massive amounts of money at problems, but they remain pretty bad at actually fixing things. Part of the reason that the response to Sandy was so robust (and proactive) is that major local and state politicos in the affected areas – including New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell – all had experienced major weather-related SNAFUS in recent memory. These guys were on top of things because the last time around – during 2010’s blizzard for Bloomberg and Christie, and last summer’s freakish electrical storm for O’Malley and McDonnell – they were caught flatfooted and caught holy hell for it.

It’s all to the good they were on tiptoes this time around, but it doesn’t somehow point to increased efficiency on the part of FEMA or the feds more generally.

The Reason story generated a great Facebook  comment:

The left’s “big problems require big government” line is worst than tiresome, it’s destructive. Yes, New Jersey and the upper eastern seaboard suffered mightily from Sandy’s wrath. And, simultaneously another preventable disaster went unnoticed. A solitary young child named Donny in urban Detroit will grow up without a decent education and live a listless life, because FEMA took capital from a Detroit entrepreneur to send it to New Jersey to buy a dozen more pallets of sand bags that end up stored in a warehouse, because the sand got there too late. That entrepreneur would have invested that money in a new business that would have employed dozens of people including Donny at an entry level position from which he would have learned skills that would have taken him to other jobs . . .

Back at the Wall Street Journal, MIT Prof. Kerry Emanuel claims U.S.  weather forecasting is inferior to European forecasting. Emanuel presents an interesting argument, with a wrong conclusion:

What we need is a dedicated effort to create a numerical weather prediction enterprise second to none. Our current effort takes up about 3% of the overall budget of its parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In my view, we should double this to 6%. But money alone will not put us on top; we need to shake up NOAA’s dysfunctional organizational structure and create, perhaps with our neighbors Canada and Mexico, a center for numerical weather prediction that routinely taps into the enormous pool of talent across our government, academic, and private sectors, and that welcomes innovation. We are a country that suffers disproportionate economic losses from natural disasters, and we should create and operate the world’s finest weather prediction models. Not only would we be able to take pride in this accomplishment, but the benefits we would reap would greatly exceed what it would cost to get there. It is a win-win proposition.

So double NOAA’s money but “shake up” its “dysfunctional organizational structure”? The way government works is that the former happens, but the latter does not. If you’re going to increase any government agency’s money, it needs to prove itself, or fix itself. First.

According to one comment, familiar political arguments (See Gore,  Albert Arnold III) are the reason, if Emanuel’s claim is correct:

Most of our “weather” research money has been sucked up into “climate” research. That’s why our numerical weather prediction research budgets are so small. Kerry, you of all people should be well aware of this.

Pielke agrees:

Public discussion of disasters risks being taken over by the climate lobby and its allies, who exploit every extreme event to argue for action on energy policy. In New York this week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared: “I think at this point it is undeniable but that we have a higher frequency of these extreme weather situations and we’re going to have to deal with it.” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke similarly.

Humans do affect the climate system, and it is indeed important to take action on energy policy—but to connect energy policy and disasters makes little scientific or policy sense. There are no signs that human-caused climate change has increased the toll of recent disasters, as even the most recent extreme-event report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds. And even under the assumptions of the IPCC, changes to energy policies wouldn’t have a discernible impact on future disasters for the better part of a century or more.

The only strategies that will help us effectively prepare for future disasters are those that have succeeded in the past: strategic land use, structural protection, and effective forecasts, warnings and evacuations. That is the real lesson of Sandy.