[Mb-civic] Katrina's Real Name

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0830-22.htm

Published on Tuesday, August 30, 2005 by the Boston Globe
Katrina's Real Name
by Ross Gelbspan
 
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.

As a Bostonian, I am afraid that the coming winter will -- like last winter 
-- be unusually short and devastatingly severe. At the beginning of 
2005, a deadly ice storm knocked out power to thousands of people in 
New England and dropped a record-setting 42.2 inches of snow on 
Boston.

The conventional name of the month was January. Its real name is 
global warming.

Ross Gelbspan is author of ''The Heat Is On" and ''Boiling Point."

© 2005 Boston Globe

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