Hurricane Katrina: Real Name - Climate Change
THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON AMERICA'S WEATHER SYSTEMThe hurricane that struck Louisiana two days ago was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is climate change [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. Ross Gelbspan @ Boston Globe
A GLOBAL TREND
The latest hurricane is not an isolated disaster. It is part of a global trend. So far this summer, thousands of people around the world have drowned in massive and abrupt floods.
India, known for its torrential monsoons, has taken hundreds if not thousands of casualties in a series of storms that have left houses submerged and survivors vulnerable to hunger and disease.
On July 26, Bombay alone saw the deaths of nearly 450 and the displacement of 200,000 residents after a record 94 centimeters (37 inches) of rain fell in a span of 24 hours.
Last week in Eastern Europe, at least 70 people died in unprecedented rains.
The severe weather, particularly the anomalously harsh weather in Europe, has been attributed by meteorologists to an unusual “kink” in the jet stream, the strong atmospheric band of current responsible for regular and reasonably predictable weather patterns.
Scientists have predicted that such shifts in the jet stream, accompanied by a sharp increase in the number of hurricanes and other serious weather events, will be one of the consequences of global warming.
While meteorology is a science complicated by chaotic weather patterns, statistics on the tumultuous developments illustrate a definite trend in the past decades.
US government meteorological agencies, however, have been muted in acknowledging the role played by global warming in the trend. This is in no small part due to the Bush administration’s refusal to accept any limits on carbon dioxide emissions, which cause warming.
Figures from the US National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration regarding tropical storm activity indicate that since 1995, all of the Atlantic hurricane seasons have been above normal, with the exception of the 1997 and 2002 El Niño years, with six of the past ten years classified as hyperactive.
This means that on NOAA’s Accumulated Cyclone Energy index, which analyzes the collective intensity and duration of each year’s hurricane season, cumulative storm activity is at least 175 percent above the median activity, representing an average year.
NOAA forecasts the ACE index for 2005 somewhere between 180 and 270 percent of the median, making it the seventh “extremely active year” of the last ten.
According to a National Weather Service report, “Hurricane seasons during 1995-2004 have averaged 13.6 tropical storms, 7.8 hurricanes, 3.8 major hurricanes, and with an average ACE index of 159 percent of the median...
"In contrast, during the preceding 1970-1994 period, hurricane seasons averaged 9 tropical storms, 5 hurricanes, and 1.5 major hurricanes, with an average ACE index of only 75 percent of the median.”
Until the official hurricane season ends in November, the National Weather Service predicts as many as fourteen more tropical storms in the Atlantic, with as many as nine of them becoming hurricanes. Naomi Spencer @ World Socialist
HEY NAOMI,
KATRINA AND KYOTO?? I MET THE GUY WHO ORIGINATED THIS IDEA AT THE BEACH
YESTERDAY
HE: Oh, my layman friend—you are so deprived of any particulars of the raging climate war. With the Medieval Warm Period looking over our shoulders, and its absurd putative --“1200 AD---three-degrees-warmer than today.” Blaspheme!! How can we inventive climatologists proclaim that today’s 1- degree increase is the warmest in 1,000 years?? This mythological Medieval Warm Period droned on for 350 years—and ours is barely 25 years old!! And if l we allow stupid researchers to tell the masses that this warming was followed by remarkable worldwide cooling period–-such natural variation takes the wind from the sails of our good ship Global Warming. Our cardinal doctrine is gone. Great industries like the Sierra Club, NDF, The Pew Group, The Kyoto Protocol Defenders, NRDC and numberless others would lose credence and shut down—with jobs lost and huge economic disruption. It has been reliably estimated that 20% of the world’s lawyers would be forced to find new professions…
Life, and this earth, I mused, is infused with near-cyclic phenomena. They come and they go—and they return again. But I respect the biblical proverb, “There is {really} nothing new under the sun.”
But I enjoy Destin much more when God is on his throne and I am on his beach.
SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW BUSH? BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THIS.