Ten years ago, what American would have believed they’d someday be living in a country that denies global warming and evolution? In 2005, nature provided all the proof of herself we need.
The Sierra Club is calling it Year One. Bill McKibben:
…a month before Katrina hit, [the] Massachusetts Institute of Technology…published a landmark paper in the British science magazine Nature showing that in the past half century tropical storms have been lasting 60 percent longer and spinning winds 50 percent more powerful. Two weeks after Katrina struck, Science published another paper, by a Georgia Institute of Technology team, demonstrating that Category 4 and 5 hurricanes have become twice as likely in recent decades… Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared to monster size in the abnormally hot waters of the Gulf. Within a day, a million people were homeless. That’s far too many, we soon found out, for the federal government to cope with. And it’s just the beginning…
Katrina cast up ironies like so much flotsam and jetsam. The storm, for instance, wreaked particular vengeance on Mississippi, a state governed by Haley Barbour (R), who in an earlier incarnation as a GOP power broker and energy lobbyist helped persuade President George W. Bush to renege on his promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Thanks to Barbour and the other lobbyists-turned-administrators who throng the White House, the federal government has done exactly nothing to slow the progress of climate change. Today we’re emitting 20 percent more carbon than we were in 1990, when scientists were first issuing their prescient warnings.
More ironies: The sky-high gasoline prices that followed Katrina actually reduced the amount of energy Americans used, at least for a few weeks, something that hadn’t happened since the Carter administration. And the scores of Explorers and Navigators running out of gas on Houston freeways as their owners fled Hurricane Rita may have marked the beginning of the end of the SUV era.
Of course, it’s too late to prevent global warming. So far we’ve raised the temperature of the planet by about one degree, globally averaged, and that’s been enough to set the poles to melting and the winds to roaring. Even if, right now, we started doing all that we could to overhaul our energy economy, we’d probably still be stuck with a couple more degrees of warming, and the world would change more profoundly than at any time in human history.
But hope of progress in Washington is nil. The criminally lazy energy bill signed by Bush a few weeks before Katrina struck enshrined our current approach to energy, which, at its essence, can be summed up as “more”: more drilling, more refining, more combustion, and more handouts to the oil and gas industry. Growing numbers of state and local governments have begun to act, and their efforts hold promise for the future. In the meantime, what do we have to look forward to? The computer modelers tell us that the mid-case estimate—not the worst-case but the most likely scenario for the rest of the century—is in the range of another five degrees of warming. That would make the planet hotter than it has been through all of human history.
…Katrina revealed deep helplessness among our rulers. Part of it stemmed from cronyism and incompetence, part from the sheer overwhelming force of the blow. We will slowly recover, but even the United States has only so many hundreds of billions to spare. New Orleans will be rebuilt—this time. But what if hurricanes like Katrina go from being once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two storms? How many times will we rebuild?
I know plenty of folk in Oklahoma that reckon the Earth (and universe?) is/are 6,000 years old. Not to pick on OK, but the anecdote is true. Anyway, Happy Inu Year everyone!
Note: (Inu = dog in Japanese; 2006 is the year of the dog in Asia.)
The White House is a who’s who of corporate CEOs that have formed companies only to run them into the ground, bailing out with fat profits before the proverbial feces hits the fan. They are doing to the country what they have done for years to their stockholders. That is the corporate way, the bigwigs (King George and his merry band of raiders) decide what the truth is and it is up to the underlings (Congress) to make it so. Add to that the loyal, unquestioning foot soilders (fundamentalist Christians) which use their churches to promote the neocons’ fascist agenda. With the marriage of corporations, government, and fundamental Christianity they have come up with a combination that Mussolinni could only dream of. They have decided that there is no global warning because it cuts into the bottom line. That is their reasoning. Just ignore it and it will go away They have decided that evolution is no longer relevent just to throw a bone to their army of drones as a payoff for their efforts. Ten years ago we had a two party system. That has been all but destroyed. One can see signs of the pendulum swinging the other way, but it is an election year and it is only beginning. I have a feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet.
While I agree with your position on Katrina .I wish to take issue with your position on evolution,which I think is a depraved abomination masquerading as science.Science denies the existence of the soul because it cannot be detected in laboratory.And to claim you know for a fact what happened one million year ago is absurd.Scientific theories tend to change over time.Scientific facts are a different matter .No one has ever seen a primate turning into a human being.However any body can claim anything within a million year.
The theory of evolution will one day perish and the memory of its proponents wiped out from the face of the earth.
A previous commentator states: “No one has ever seen a primate turning into a human being.” True. It is also true that no one has ever seen gravity and no one has ever seen Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Do we then conclude that neither gravity nor nuclear reactions exist?
Perhaps instead of teaching the theory of gravity we could teach the “theory of intelligent falling.” That is — objects fall down because that’s the intelligent thing to do — if objects fell up, they’d just keep on falling up into space where they would be lost. By falling down, objects hit the ground where they can be retrieved. Sounds like “Intelligent Falling” to me.
Did you see that JP response? I mean really, did you actually read it? What’s truly frightening is that most Americans are actually this delusional in the year 2006! WTF? Will our nation survive long enough to evolve beyond these holdover Neanderthals? Absolutely in-friggin’-credible. How can we ever hope to pick ourselves up out of this hole the Fascist Bush empire has dropped us into with people like this able to cast a vote?
I liked Zeb’s response to idiot Joe. When will people like Joe finally give up and admit the fact that we are all animals? We are all descendants of apes. Apes are our close relatives. Apes should and could be our friends if we only had the mind to do it.
As Miks Jagger said….Im a monkeee mannnn! I’m a monkeee!!! I’m a monkee!!!
Wait! I think we just saw a human turn into a primate.