Something a lot of climatologists have already said: Global Climate Change is to blame for the horrific, souped-up hurricane season that took out, among other cities, New Orleans.
MONTEREY, California (Reuters) -- The record Atlantic hurricane season last year can be attributed to global warming, several top experts, including a leading U.S. government storm researcher, said on Monday.
So here's the thing: The unusually warm water in the gulf that fuelled the monster hurricane season never went away. It' behind the unusually strong storms that just ripped through the Midwest, sacking my old home town, Iowa City. And you know, I watch the evening news and hear people standing out there, fuelling up their gas-guzzling SUVs, and bitching about how much it costs.
I drive Saturn 3-door. It gets around 30 mpg, and we drive so little that we haven't really felt the impact of rising gas prices. In 2000, when my wife and I tried to buy a hybrid - we lived in Austin at the time - we had car salesmen at a Honda dealership turn around mid-sentence and walk away from us when we asked about hybrid electric vehicles. So, in Austin, in 2000, we just couldn't get a Prius, and the Toyota dealership wanted us to put down $500, wait 6-8 months, and then we'd have to take an Insight with whatever features and whatever color arrived. The auto industry was working so hard to keep us from buying a hybrid that we actually couldn't do it.
Our next car will be a hybrid, probably a Prius. They're available now much more widely, and I doubt any salesmen will turn their backs on us and walk away when they learn that we don't want an SUV this time.
We're watching this catastrophe of Global Climate Change loom, watching it prepare to decimate New Orleans and the Gulf Coast again, watching it bash the Midwest with unusually severe storms far, far inland, and we still have elected representatives who deny that Global Climate Change is even happening. I wonder what it will take. We know exactly what's causing this, know that it's causing supercharged storms to trash our cities, know that the rising sea levels threaten not just island nations such a the Maldives, but our own coastal population centers, as well. But at the gas pumps, on the evening news, people driving gas guzzlers are bitching about how much it costs to fuel them.
I have a suggestion for them, a tip on how to cut down that bill: Don't drive gas guzzlers.
SUVs pollute disproportionately heavily. That pollution exacerbates Global Climate Change. But Bush's solution? Suspend environmental regulations governing Big Oil. We have a badly broken iraq, a nation we sacked at least partly for its oil (if that wasn't one of the reasons, then the amount of oil we're taking wouldn't be a state secret), which means that our troops are dying for oil. We have Global Climate Change in progress, taking out our cities. We have record-high gas prices and record profits for Big Oil. And we have a Texas oil man in the White House not only refusing to back the Kyoto Protocols, but rolling back our own current environmental regulations. Can anyone really be surprised that gas costs so much? What did we expect of Bush, really - that he'd act for the people?
And to the people who think that they can render this phenomenon a mere political opinion, then yell at it until it goes away: To hell with you. A do-nothing solution is not a solution at all.
Apologies for the scattered structure of this entry. It's just that what is happening, and why, and what we need to do to stop it, all of these are out there in plain sight for us to take in. We've known for more than 30 years what we needed to do. And we. Won't. Do it.
I have the feeling, right now, that we'll get what we deserve. It's already started to happen.