posted on SustainabiliTank.info, August 31, 2005.

The present catastrophe, and many more to come, are easily predictable because of our insistence of destroying planet earth and life as we knew it, by emitting CO2, as if we still do not understand the effect this has on the climate.

President Bush and the Governor of Louisiana said they pray for the victims, President Bush said he will pay from our money for the damage. We believe that praying and paying are no answer for as long as the oil fossil fuels interests, the automotive industry, the organized labor unions are allowed to prey on planet earth and on us.

Washington and New York seem oblivious to what goes on. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times could not cough up a good article - it took Ross Gelbspan and the Boston Globe to write the truth. Their article was then picked up the following day by the International Herald Tribune that has now moved away from its previous limitation to its two constituent papers. Overseas the facts are made clear in most journals. In this case, for instance, I have seen good articles in the British Independent and the New Zealand Herald. How long do we have to wait until a good lawyer picks up the subject and causes the criminals to pay up like it happened in the case of the tobacco industry?

Ross Gelbspan threw us the challenge to give Katrina a family name - we suggest here Fossil-Carbon. I know we can get blue in our face before Washington will finally act on a real energy policy. Yes the green will be blue by then too.

Sir David King, British Government chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Katrina. It could be bet that in no time some known member of a university with a known School of Petroleum Engineering or a Department of Economics stuck in their interpretation of the bible or Adam Smith, or some other great credentials, will just say - it is all natural - including the destruction of our jewel New Orleans. Sure, such articles keep coming and they get equal time in our press - just read Gelbspan’s take on this.

Would it not be nice for someone at the UN high level meetings next month to point an accusing finger at the real culprits?

 PJ@SustainabiliTank.info.)

————————————————

The following appeared on Boston.com:

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.

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.”
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.