Global Warming and Hurricanes

I think global warming can no longer be discounted. What is debatable is how much of that is attributable to greenhouse gases? The estimates vary according to how much you like Dubya.

But since it cannot be confirmed and since scripture can be confirmed, we can deduce that the Hurricanes in the US, the tsunami and the earthquake in Pakistan is a result of God`s wrath for our misadventures in Iraq, Kashmir and the asian currency crises respectively.

I read somewhere that the weather goes through a cycle of ups and downs. currently we are in the middle of the severe climate. did you read something like that?

even though katrina was a costly disaster, in terms of human and capital cost; i wonder if the devastation would been this great had the levies remained intact. it was a man made tragedy also, since all the residents knew that they were living below sea level and just next to a huge lake.

one way to resolve the problem of global warming would be new technologyu to run cars. maybe hydrogen, solar cells. if industry is given some incentive, it may come out with some alternative fuel. hence reducing the greehouse gas effects.

It is not that catastrophies are more frequent..it is that more and more humans are living in areas that such phenomenon wreak havoc on. A cat 5 hurricane in 1955 would have cost much less in damages than Katrina. The investment in infra and people etc drives up the costs/damages. If the earthquake happened in laddakh, no one would care. But it happened in an area which should not have as many people as it holds.

One thing that troubles me sooooo much is the phenomenon of tornados. Why do they always ravage trailer parks? As if, god is against mobile homes. What the feck`sthe matter wiht him? :-)

Thanks for this article. The sea is warmer than before with less ice in the arctic

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20050928/arctic_sea_ice_050928/20050928?hub=CTVNewsAt11.

Our disregard for the change, our denial and apathy is summarized well here:

http://www.granta.com/extracts/2032

I quote from: `Worried? Us?`, Bill McKibben

When Bill Clinton was President he sat by while American civilians traded up from cars to troop-transport vehicles; George Bush has not only rejected the Kyoto treaty, he has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to replace ‘global warming’ with the less ominous ‘climate change’, and issued a national energy policy that foresees ever more drilling, refining and burning. Under it, American carbon emissions will grow another forty per cent in the next generation.

As satisfying as it is to blame politicians, however, it will not do. Politicians will follow the path of least resistance. So far there has not been a movement loud or sustained enough to command political attention. Electorates demand economic prosperity—more of it—above all things. Gandhianism, the political philosophy that restricts material need, is now only a memory even in the country of its birth. And our awareness that the world will change in every aspect, should we be so aware, is muted by the future tense, even though that future isn’t far away, so near in fact that preventing global warming is a lost cause—all we can do now is to try to keep it from getting utterly out of control.

This is a failure of imagination, and in this way a literary failure. Global warming has still to produce an Orwell or a Huxley, a Verne or a Wells, a Nineteen Eighty-Four or a War of the Worlds, or in film any equivalent of On The Beach or Doctor Strangelove. It may never do so. It may be that because—fingers crossed—we have escaped our most recent fear, nuclear annihilation via the Cold War, we resist being scared all over again. Fear has its uses, but fear on this scale seems to be disabling, paralysing. Anger has its uses too, but the rage of anti-globalization demonstrators has yet to do more than alienate majorities. Shame sends a few Americans shopping for small cars, but on the whole America, now the exemplar to the world, is very nearly unshameable. ``

http://www.granta.com/extracts/2032

We desperately need anarchy in consumption.

Regards

S