Hurricane Katrina: Political Aftermath

[angus]

Is President Bush paying enough attention to the natural disaster?

oh, the bushies are going to be all over this.  State of Emergency is already enacted.  and if hillary's smart, she'll be on the next flight to Baton Rouge as well, standing beside the Guvnah and crying big alligator tears for the flood victims.

You laugh, but there are some plans to develop bombs that woudl disrupt the eye of a hurricane while it was forming.  This would prevent storms from forming, or so the theory goes.

okay, but for a party that opposes "playing god" with fetal tissue, that's a bit strange...

where to begin?  Meteorology 101.  First, hurricanes are your friend.  They act as nature's air conditioning.  It's an engine that runs on heat.  They cycle warm air from the tropics into the mid-latitudes.  The so-called thermohaline circulation runs a sort of Atlantic conveyor belt, part of a global system in which a continuous flow of upper-level water is drawn from the tropical Atlantic torard the Pole.  Without it, there'd be no summer in places like Newfoundland.  Cold dry air coming from Canada exracts heat from water.  And I'm sure we don't want to tamper with this process.  In fact, one might argue that our contributions to global warming have increased the frequency of hurricanes.  If you look at sea-surface temperatures (SST), you'll note a cool period to about 1994.  Not coincidentally, there were very few category 3-5 storms during that period.  By 1995, the mean SST was about, oh, 83 degrees or so.  In 1996 when I was living in Boston, a huge storm came in October, flooding Kenmore station and closing down the Green line for 3 days!  11 inches of rain fell one day.  The whole East Coast may have just been lucky for 30 or 40 years.  Or, maybe our own contributions to rising SST have caused more storms.  You can verify that from about the mid 90s onward, we've had higher SST and more frequent category 3 or more storms.  But, in any case, last year probably wasn't a fluke.  Expect more over the next several years.  And not just florida.  From Boston to Bonaire, and everywhere in between, expect to ocassionally have to run for higher ground.  2004 was just a wake-up call.  But not one that says:  Hey, build better bombs.  Maybe it just says:  Are you sure you want to buy that condo in Key West?

[angus]

yes.  it's all accurate.  and it's not pontificating.  something for republicans:  "New Orleans is surprising evidence of what men will endure, when cheered by the hopes of an ever-flowing tide of dollars and cents."  and something for democrats:  "Some of the future projections of sea level rise elsewhere in the country due to global warming would approach what we presently see in Louisiana..." 

Basically, none of that land is particularly habitable.  But if folks are going to set up oil towns and cotton towns, they can expect to ocassionally expect to get their belongings blown away. 

And, yes, we ought to let the Mississippi take its own natural course, but New Orleans tourism officials don't like that idea.  The people who brought us the Suez Canal and the Eiffel Tower certainly have fine engineering schools, but they're not very good at hanging on to empires or picking good places to build cities.  I'm sure there are advantages and disadvantages to allowing the river to run its natural course, though.  See also "The incredible shrinking bayou" pp. 88-105, National Geographic Magazine, October 2004.  My money's on the tourism board winning out over the Sierra Club types.  They just have more clout.

Not much to say, really, except to continue to make fun of the French.  It's seems there's never really a bad time to do that.  And, it takes our minds of natural (Katrina) and man-made (Iraq) disasters.  And, in fact, all of this was all their fault.

[angus]

Actually, I'm enjoying a nice full-bodied côtes-du-rhone, mon ami.