FEEDBACK PLEASE ====> LTTE Re: New Orleans/Global Warming

[tk2kewl]

It is time for the most ambitious environmental restoration project ever! Unfortunately the government should condemn much of the destroyed property surrounding the Mississippi Delta for exactly this purpose, paying property owners for their land to be reclaimed for natural beaches, barrier islands, marshes and swamps.

It would provide a bail-out for a lot of property owners who didn't have flood insurance, for some it may be a loss, but for the Gulf Coast as a whole, and thus the nation, it would be the only right thing to do in the face of global warming and rising sea level. Furthermore, preventing reconstruction in the most vulnerable areas would have a positive economic impact by the reducing insurance risk which is largely born by taxpayers through federal flood insurance policies.

Such a project would protect a rebuilt New Orleans while providing the beginnings of a more sustainable tourism and fisheries economy. The dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico would also have a shot at recovering, as more natural shoreline of swamps and marshes would reduce the nutrient and pollutant load on the Gulf.

Unfortunately, I am not optimistic that the Bush administration would even consider implementing such a plan, not even in the smallest token manner. This administration hash shown nothing but disdain for the environment and seems to have a serious deficit of common sense.

[alkaline9]

1. I love your idea, but I fear we are alone in this debate...nt

[tk2kewl]

2. There are a lot of people who understand this is the ONLY answer

to a viable future, not just in NO but all over the world. I hope Al Gore comes out and says something along these lines.

[pippin]

3. Katrina's Real Name: It's Global Warming.

"The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.

When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the driver was global warming.

When a severe drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the Missouri River to their lowest on record earlier this summer, the reason was global warming.

In July, when the worst drought on record triggered wildfires in Spain and Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years, the explanation was global warming.

When a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees and killed more than 20 people in one week, the culprit was global warming.

And when the Indian city of Bombay (Mumbai) received 37 inches of rain in one day -- killing 1,000 people and disrupting the lives of 20 million others -- the villain was global warming.

As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours, more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms.

Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying.

Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of Hurricane Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue.

The reason is simple: To allow the climate to stabilize requires humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent. That, of course, threatens the survival of one of the largest commercial enterprises in history.

In 1995, public utility hearings in Minnesota found that the coal industry had paid more than $1 million to four scientists who were public dissenters on global warming. And ExxonMobil has spent more than $13 million since 1998 on an anti-global warming public relations and lobbying campaign.

In 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when President George W. Bush was elected president -- and subsequently took suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies.

As the pace of climate change accelerates, many researchers fear we have already entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change.

Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the US media.

When the US press has bothered to cover the subject of global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what the warming is doing to our agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather.

For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations.

Today, with the science having become even more robust -- and the impacts as visible as the megastorm that covered much of the Gulf of Mexico -- the press bears a share of the guilt for our self-induced destruction with the oil and coal industries.

As a Bostonian, I am afraid that the coming winter will -- like last winter -- be unusually short and devastatingly severe. At the beginning of 2005, a deadly ice storm knocked out power to thousands of people in New England and dropped a record-setting 42.2 inches of snow on Boston.

The conventional name of the month was January. Its real name is global warming."

Unfortunately, as quoted by a repug legislator, they see global warming as "a hoax." :mad:


http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=107350

[phantom power]

4. That would be a good idea.

I think New Orleans should strongly consider using this disaster as an opportunity to rebuild on higher ground.

[rustydad]

5. Nature is King

As we warm the atmosphere and then the oceans, sea level will rise. Sea level cities will all be like New Orleans, diked, below sea level. They will all be exposed to storm damage whether from tropical storms or winter storms. At some point there simple will not be enough human energy and capital to maintain the dikes. We will lose all coastal cities and facilities that are at or just above sea level today. That coupled with agriculture displacement from Climate Change and Peak Oil and energy shortages will be the end of the Industrial Age as we have known it for two centuries. We are sleepwalking to ignore this confluence of forces. Nature will win. Bob