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STEWARDSHIP:
Environment & Energy | August 26, 2005
A
CYCLONIC
TASTE
OF
THINGS
TO
COME
By
Douglas Drenkow, "Progressive
Thinking" As
Posted in "GordonTalk"
and "Comments
From Left Field"
As Hurricane
Katrina -- now a Category 5, the most powerful force on the
planet -- bears down on New Orleans, threatening the largest
American city below sea-level with the cataclysmic flooding long
feared, we cannot help but feel humbled by the awesome power of
nature.
The other night, guest-hosting
for Barry Gordon on "NewsRap",
I discussed with my good friend Steven
R Kutcher, a world-class environmentalist, and our audience
the physical and psychological benefits from appreciating and
respecting nature (I highly recommend a new book, "Last
Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit
Disorder" by Richard Louv).
While such discussions among
"tree huggers" rarely make for exciting, provocative
debates -- the whole point is that if we learn to love the world
around us (field and stream, birds and bees, flowers and heaven
forbid our fellow human beings) when we're young, we'll tend to
love 'em when we're older -- disrespecting nature can have
profoundly disastrous consequences.
I hope I'm not the only one old
enough to remember those old margarine commercials where the
lady warned, "It's
not nice to fool Mother Nature" -- right before the
thunder and lightning hit.
Disregarding those words to the
wise, my fellow fossil fuel-addicts, our insatiable jonesing for
those combustible hydrocarbons is going to be the death of us
yet.
Every million barrels of
petroleum, million cubic feet of natural gas, or million tons of
coal we burn add just that much more sunlight-trapping carbon
dioxide to the atmosphere of the
Greenhouse we call Earth, getting just that much hotter year
after ever less temperate year.
Not that every place on Earth
will see this rise
in temperature worldwide; in fact, some places will
experience -- and, arguably, have experienced -- record severe
winter weather because of this phenomenon: Global Warming
aggravated by our burning fossil fuels is fundamentally altering
the climate of the entire Planet Earth by adding more energy to
the global weather systems.
And that brings us back to the uneasy situation in The Big Easy.
As Katrina's fury is fed by the
warm waters of the Gulf -- as we remember how NOAA predicted
that, after a record-breaking start, this
could be one of the worst hurricane seasons ever recorded --
we should take grave notice of this dire warning, based upon the
best meteorological modeling, about the effect of Global
Warming on hurricanes:
"The strongest hurricanes
in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense
hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is
warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere. Although we cannot say at present whether more or
fewer hurricane will occur in the
future with global warming, the hurricanes that do occur near
the end of the 21st century are expected to be stronger and have
significantly more intense rainfall than under present day
climate conditions."
Remember that. Remember that
when we see the devastation that we unfortunately, undoubtedly
will in the days ahead.
Remember that when the
Bush Administration tries to stop the world from dealing
with the problem of Global Warming.
And remember that when we see
scores, hundreds, or thousands more Americans die atop the
world's second largest known oil reserves, in Iraq.
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