Warming Katrina

For one of those countries among our alleged “betters” insofar as learning and historical perspective are concerned, the Germans seem to be forgetting something: Katrina Should be A Lesson To US on Global Warming

The toughest commentary of the day comes from Germany’s Environmental Minister, J?rgen Trittin, a Green Party member, who takes space in the Frankfurter Rundschau, a paper owned by the Social Democrats, to bash US President George W. Bush’s environmental laxity. He begins by likening the photos and videos of the hurricane stricken areas to scenes from a Roland Emmerich sci-fi film and insists that global warming and climate change are making it ever more likely that storms and floods will plague America and Europe…

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung also delivers a punchy plea for more attention to global warming, saying politicians should pay more attention to Katrina’s alarming images than to election polls and economic forecasts. “Hurricane Katrina has delivered terrible photos. Experts are already calling it the worst hurricane of all time. But this year’s hurricane season has only just begun. Flooded villages, mud slides, sandbags….Scientists are quite calmly saying that we will see this kind of thing more often. After all, this is what they have been forecasting for years — climate change, human-caused and irreversible. But a change of policy is not in the cards. Politics is trapped between voters and industry lobbyists. And of course, there is the killer argument: Protecting the environment impedes economic growth.” This is not how it should be, the paper opines. Indeed, more “pictures from New Orleans should encourage us to follow science’s advice on climate protection.”…

“People will argue about the causes of climate change for a long time to come,” the paper writes. “But its effects are already reality. They are called Katrina, or the flood catastrophes in southern Germany, Romania, Switzerland and Austria….”

The S?ddeutsche Zeitung uses its feature page as a defacto editorial by focusing on the hurricane as its theme of the day. Among its articles, it cites a study by US hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that shows a rising tendency for hurricanes that exactly reflects the curve of greenhouse gases. German scientists from the Max-Planck Institute hail the study as the first proof of a real link. “If this man-made warming continues, we will have to expect stronger storms in future” Emmanuel tells the paper….

I saw some talking head from NASA on one of the news channels yesterday, showing some data on the warmth of the water in the Gulf over some recent span of time (not sure how far back), and illustrating in time lapse the elevated water temperatures this year. The elevated temperatures, he explained, fed the storm system, helping to turn Katrina from a smallish hurricane as it left Florida into a monster as it passed over the Gulf and inland over the Delta.

Which is similar to the descriptions of the circumstances of the Galveston Storm of 1900, an event of which the better-informed German eco-left is probably not aware. That hurricane, too, came as a surprise, during a hot summer in which unusually warm water temperatures were recorded in the Gulf.

Looking back in time to similarly catastrophic events which precede the bulk of the “greenhouse gas” emissions which eco-moralists seem to nowadays blame for every natural disaster which pops up would undermine their ability to pin the blame on human activities, of course, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise. Like the religious moralists who will certainly proclaim in the days to come that God Himself sent Katrina to punish the region for its embrace of gambling, boozing, lewd behavior, and homosexuality, there are sure to be those even in this country who will see in Katrina the retributive hand of Gaia or Mother Earth, punishing Man for his prodigious production of “greenhouse gases”, pursuit of economic growth and profit over “sustainability”, dependence on technology, alteration and exploitation of “natural” “ecosystems”, and a host of other green sins symbolized by the commercial and industrial activities of the area.

ADDENDUM: And of course, there will inevitably be sneering rebukes from some quarters over any plan to focus resources on getting oil production back up to pre-storm levels…”putting profit over people”, for example. Halliburton will no doubt be referenced.

But as Isaac Cline himself recorded less than three weeks after the storm which bears his name, such an ordering of priorities isn’t new, nor is it proof of some moral defect of modern society — it’s the forward-looking response of those determined to recover from the experience, repair the damage done, and move into the future:

The grain elevators which were full of grain suffered the smallest damage. Ships have resumed loading and work is being rushed day and night. The railroad bridges across the bay were washed away, but one of these has been repaired and direct rail communication with the outside world was established within eleven days after the disaster. Repairs and extensions of wharves are now being pushed forward with great rapidity. Notwithstanding the fact that the streets are not yet clean and dead bodies are being discovered daily among the drifted debris, the people appear to have confidence in the place and are determined to rebuild and reestablish themselves here. Galveston being one of the richest cities of its size in the United States, there is no question but that business will soon regain its normal condition and the city will grow and prosper as she did before the disaster. Cotton is now coming in by rail from different parts of the State and by barge from Houston. The wheels of commerce are already moving in a manner which gives assurance for the future. Improvements will be made stronger and more judiciously; for the past twenty-five years they have been made with the hurricane of 1875 in mind, but no one ever dreamed that the water would reach the height observed in the present case. The railroad bridges are to be built ten feet higher than they were before. The engineer of the Southern Pacific Company has informed me that they will construct their wharves so that they will withstand even such a hurricane as the one we have just experienced.

ADDENDUM: Moonbattery has an interesting set of graphs showing the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. by decade. For all hurricane categories, the number has been below the historical average since 1951, and the number of major hurricanes (category 3-5) below the historical average since 1961. Was there that much global warming in the 1940s? I’m sure George W. Bush was to blame, somehow, despite being just a toddler at the time.