Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Katrina: A Big Fucking Wakeup Call

I begin with this op-ed from the Boston Globe, which dares to speak the harsh, painful truth:
Katrina's real name

By Ross Gelbspan | August 30, 2005

THE HURRICANE that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is 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. [more...]
The science of this is actually quite simple, although many may find it confusing, because in order to understand it, you need to understand the difference between "heat" and "temperature". When most people think of "global warming", they quite naturally expect the temperature to go up. But that's not exactly the way it works. In some places it may actually get warmer, but not everywhere. In some areas, you might initially end up with colder weather.

This is due to the fact that what global warming actually does is to increase the total amount of heat that is contained within the world's weather system. Heat is energy, and that energy can have a variety of effects. One possible effect is to increase the temperature of the air. Another possible effect is to increase the temperature of the surface of the ocean. The overall effect, though, is to rev up the world's weather system. The reason we have weather at all is because the equatorial regions are warmer than the poles. Warm air tends to rise over the top of cold air, so when you combine this temperature disparity with the rotation of the earth, you get all sorts of interesting swirly patterns of warm and cold air, i.e. weather. The key point is that the entire weather system is driven by heat--take away the heat, and, eventually, we wouldn't have weather anymore (it would also be really, really cold). But what happens when more heat is added to the system? The additional energy causes it to cycle more energetically--the weather system is driven harder and harder. This means more dynamic and violent weather patterns, which basically translates into hotter heatwaves, colder cold snaps, and bigger storms.

Hurricanes are actually the best example, because they are very well understood and simple to explain. A hurricane is just a big energy vortex, powered by the hot water of the ocean surface underneath it. If the water is too cool, the energy vortex is starved, and the storm dies. The same thing happens when a hurricane moves over land--it's lifeblood, the warm, tropical waters which kept it alive, are gone, so it gradually starves. But, on the other hand, give it a really big expanse of nice warm water to travel over, and it will get bigger and bigger and bigger. This is precisely what happened with Katrina, which was not a particulary notable storm when it hit Florida. Scientists have actually determined the exact water temperature that is necessary for hurricane formation to occur. If the water is over 26 degree Celcius (and the air above it is relatively free of wind shear, which tends to disrupt hurricane formation), it's warm enough to feed a hurricane. Once it's formed, the more warm water it has to travel over, and the warmer the water, the more violent it will become. So if we have warmer oceans, we can expect to have stronger hurricanes. Katrina really is not all that surprising, for people who have actually been paying attention.

I guess the question that needs to be asked is, "What is it going to take to wake people up to what is going on?" Will the almost total destruction of one of the most important seaports in the entire world be sufficient? Or are we as a species so blitheringly stupid that even this won't be enough?