From the decision to place the Lousiana National Guard in Iraq doing a job they never intended to do, to the paralysis of the federal agencies involved in emergency management, to the de-emphasis of predictive atmospheric science that could call this event before it happened, to the rape of the Lousiana coast line ecology for countless oil adventures, to the poor planning that places one of the main oil portals of the United States in harm's way, to countless acts of thoughtless greed making this act of nature even more difficult to bear, there is largely the cult of Dear Leader to blame.
The real disaster is yet to come home to us.
Consider this map, of what the world was in the Late Cretaceous age, and what will be again if one or both of the poles melt.
Consider what this dislocation will mean in terms of human suffering.
I know it's a bit beyond the people of Bu$hCo to grasp. Surely, though, there is someone in the Company this might strike home with. If only in terms of the money they'll lose if the entire Midwest goes under water.
And let me assure the Beltway Kewl Kids: once there's a body of water separating you from the surviving Rocky Mountain states, you're going to have a very hard time keeping your States United.
Addendum
When I fetch stories, you can be sure I fetch 'em far.
People get into "he said, she said" types of arguments about whether global warming is real, and what it means, and what are realistic endpoints, and if those endpoints are valid.
But let's look at a couple of facts:
First, a relief map of the United States, courtesy of your government.
Notice the three darkest shades of green are areas averaging 500 feet of elevation or less. Notice the lowest elevation, to 250 feet- it extends in the south all the way north to Paducah, Kentucky. The 500 foot line extends all the way north to Lake Michigan. If one or both poles melted, how far north would the Gulf extend? To Traverse City and the Sleeping Bear Dunes?
It's better than the Gulf now in August. Melt the glaciers and there goes the neighborhood...
Farfetched, eh?
As far as melting the caps goes, let's look at some data from NASA here.
Farfetched, eh?
Now, how fast would all this happen? Some look for appreciable change by 2099. Some not at all. Some paint a rosy picture of our ability to cope anyway. It's important to note these changes aren't monotonic, and may synergize with other environmental factors.
In life, I have found it best to be prepared for the worst.
Which is not farfetched at all.
1 comment:
Hi, Kelley,
I basically aree that BushCo could, but won't, do a lot more to help stave off the likely economic effects of Katrina, but the rest of this piece is rather exaggerated. Nobody has reasonably predicted gobal warming leading to flooding of the Plains, even if all of the ice caps melt. Some lower Mississippi Valley flooding is plausible, and certainly a lot of coastal inundation that puts a large chunk of places like Florida underwater, but the ancient ocean in the Midwest had a lot more to do with plate tectonics than lack of ice sheets: As the eastern and western sections of what is now America came together, the land in the middle rose & dried out. A large chunk of the area once submerged is now over 1000 feet above sea level, and there isn't enough water on Earth to cause sea level to rise that far.
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