Wake up and smell the smoke.
My Country, My Country [film]
http://mycountrymycountry.com
http://pbs.org/pov/pov2006/mycountry
"...a lot of people will continue to die and this is a war that was started by my country. I felt that my life wasn't any more valuable or precious than anyone else's; it was worth taking that risk to tell this story."
-Laura Poitras
======
Senator Nunn referring to need to have fear to drum up business for the military industry - "...the threat blank..." - once the U.S.S.R. had fallen
projectcensored.org/Publications/2004/1.html
======
Australia Group
http://www.gene-watch.org/genewatch/articles/16-2wright.html
http://australiagroup.net/en/control_list/bio_agentsadditions_in_italica.htm
======
http://blackagendareport.com
http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/html/unionsallies.html
http://talkingpointsmemo.com
wonkette.com
======
This book documents that hurricanes are becoming much stronger though perhaps not more frequent:
+
The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of American Coastal Cities
http://www.ebooks.com/ebooks/book_display.asp?IID=267243
http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=519448&agid=2
...In March 2003, my book Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast was published. It predicted in great detail that a Katrina-like storm would soon destroy New Orleans, leaving thousands of people dead and the national economy bruised. When the hurricane did hit, precisely as foreseen, journalists from around the world began calling me, asking how it felt to be a prophet. How amazing, they said, that I was able to see this disaster coming when so many others didn't.
In truth, I deserve no credit whatsoever for my prediction. Katrina's arrival was as certain as tomorrow's sunrise. There were thousands of pages of reports before the storm, from advocacy groups and government agencies, spelling out the need for better levees and bigger barrier islands to prevent the looming catastrophe. Hindsight is 20/20, and Americans are now outraged by the lack of prior action. Yet the predisaster paper trail was so long, stretching to the moon and back, that a journalist like me was just stating the obvious prior to August 2005. Katrina was coming. The facts were as clear as day.
And now something else is coming, something just as obvious but much bigger and even more dangerous. Which leads us to the second question on every American's mind: Can Katrina happen where I live? The answer, unfortunately, is yes, yes, and again yes. If you are one of the 150 million Americans who live within a hundred miles of a coastline - and even if you live much farther inland - you could be inhabiting the next New Orleans. The bad news for you is that there are even more studies full of even more scientific data confirming this fact than there were predicting Katrina prior to 2005.
The issue this time is global warming...
...Among the six most powerful hurricanes to strike America in the last 150 years, three of them - a full half - happened in just fifty-two days in 2005: Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.
In 2003, I declared with complete confidence that Katrina was coming. I argued that below-sea-level New Orleans would soon fall prey to a major hurricane because of human actions. Now I beseech readers to trust me when I say Houston and Tampa and New York City and Baltimore and Miami are in equally deep trouble. If you want to know what disasters these cities will be frantically fighting against fifty to seventy-five years from now, just turn on your television. Look at New Orleans today. That's the future.
Yet a full year after Katrina hit, we are still ignoring that storm's biggest lesson. We continue to turn a blind eye to global warming the same way we once ignored the dire pleas for stronger levees in Louisiana. History is repeating itself on the largest scale imaginable. The pages that follow will make clear that all of America - and indeed the whole planet - is now like a low-lying land behind broken and insufficient levees, and the water is coming up fast.
But, thankfully, there is a plan to get us out of this mess just as there was once a viable plan to prevent Katrina's worst impacts. It involves the seemingly unlikely aid of hybrid cars and modern windmills and solarized homes. Clean energy is the solution to global warming, and clean energy is as widely available to us today as the dirt below our feet for filling sandbags. We just have to pitch in and pick up our shovels and get to work - right now.
In the end, the metaphors only go so far. We have but one planet Earth, and it is not just another watery Louisiana parish we can vacate and return to when the danger's gone. Our days of running are simply running out.
Soon we won't have any place to go.
======
+
excerpt page 48:
Chapter 4
Global Warming: Same Mistakes, Bigger Stage
...page 50
...around 1750, with widespread use of coal...prospect of rocketing to as much as 700 ppm or more by 2100. That's the "blade" portion of the hockey stick. It's pointing straight up from the flat line of our past. The heat-trapping power...is growing exponentially...
page 126
...For anyone who fully accepts the reality of global warming and drops all denial about what's causing it, daily life in America can be a difficult thing to take in indeed. Seeing the mammoth, inefficient SUVs and the hand-scorching incandescent lightbulbs at every turn, and knowing the moral and practical implications of both, is like having to watch all the world's bread swept into a giant pile each day and set on fire, or watching all the world's milk trucks dump their cargo onto the street.
Deepening this pain is the waste of human lives in tandem with the wasted energy, and indeed because of it. It's the twenty-year-old American boys blown up in Iraq every day along with scores of noncombatant men, women, and children. It's the three thousand American lives wasted on 9/11.
...the daily waste of clean, renewable energy all around us: the unused power of sunlight falling on our roofs and wind power blowing along our mountains and biofuels waiting for harvest across our farms. That we have barely even begun to exploit these resources represents a huge waste of precious time and bounty...
page 140
Chapter 9 - Climate Cover-up at the White House
But enough with the chronic nay-saying of the U.S. fossil fuel industry and its chief mouthpiece George W. Bush. We have the capacity to transform our energy habits in a hurry...
page 154
...we all own the sky...in equal measure...the sky is far too vital and fragile to be treated as a worthless dumping ground of harmful greenhouse gases. It simply can't hold much more of these gases while supporting life as we know it on earth...
http://mycountrymycountry.com
http://pbs.org/pov/pov2006/mycountry
"...a lot of people will continue to die and this is a war that was started by my country. I felt that my life wasn't any more valuable or precious than anyone else's; it was worth taking that risk to tell this story."
-Laura Poitras
======
Senator Nunn referring to need to have fear to drum up business for the military industry - "...the threat blank..." - once the U.S.S.R. had fallen
projectcensored.org/Publications/2004/1.html
======
Australia Group
http://www.gene-watch.org/genewatch/articles/16-2wright.html
http://australiagroup.net/en/control_list/bio_agentsadditions_in_italica.htm
======
http://blackagendareport.com
http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/html/unionsallies.html
http://talkingpointsmemo.com
wonkette.com
======
This book documents that hurricanes are becoming much stronger though perhaps not more frequent:
+
The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of American Coastal Cities
http://www.ebooks.com/ebooks/book_display.asp?IID=267243
http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=519448&agid=2
...In March 2003, my book Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast was published. It predicted in great detail that a Katrina-like storm would soon destroy New Orleans, leaving thousands of people dead and the national economy bruised. When the hurricane did hit, precisely as foreseen, journalists from around the world began calling me, asking how it felt to be a prophet. How amazing, they said, that I was able to see this disaster coming when so many others didn't.
In truth, I deserve no credit whatsoever for my prediction. Katrina's arrival was as certain as tomorrow's sunrise. There were thousands of pages of reports before the storm, from advocacy groups and government agencies, spelling out the need for better levees and bigger barrier islands to prevent the looming catastrophe. Hindsight is 20/20, and Americans are now outraged by the lack of prior action. Yet the predisaster paper trail was so long, stretching to the moon and back, that a journalist like me was just stating the obvious prior to August 2005. Katrina was coming. The facts were as clear as day.
And now something else is coming, something just as obvious but much bigger and even more dangerous. Which leads us to the second question on every American's mind: Can Katrina happen where I live? The answer, unfortunately, is yes, yes, and again yes. If you are one of the 150 million Americans who live within a hundred miles of a coastline - and even if you live much farther inland - you could be inhabiting the next New Orleans. The bad news for you is that there are even more studies full of even more scientific data confirming this fact than there were predicting Katrina prior to 2005.
The issue this time is global warming...
...Among the six most powerful hurricanes to strike America in the last 150 years, three of them - a full half - happened in just fifty-two days in 2005: Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.
In 2003, I declared with complete confidence that Katrina was coming. I argued that below-sea-level New Orleans would soon fall prey to a major hurricane because of human actions. Now I beseech readers to trust me when I say Houston and Tampa and New York City and Baltimore and Miami are in equally deep trouble. If you want to know what disasters these cities will be frantically fighting against fifty to seventy-five years from now, just turn on your television. Look at New Orleans today. That's the future.
Yet a full year after Katrina hit, we are still ignoring that storm's biggest lesson. We continue to turn a blind eye to global warming the same way we once ignored the dire pleas for stronger levees in Louisiana. History is repeating itself on the largest scale imaginable. The pages that follow will make clear that all of America - and indeed the whole planet - is now like a low-lying land behind broken and insufficient levees, and the water is coming up fast.
But, thankfully, there is a plan to get us out of this mess just as there was once a viable plan to prevent Katrina's worst impacts. It involves the seemingly unlikely aid of hybrid cars and modern windmills and solarized homes. Clean energy is the solution to global warming, and clean energy is as widely available to us today as the dirt below our feet for filling sandbags. We just have to pitch in and pick up our shovels and get to work - right now.
In the end, the metaphors only go so far. We have but one planet Earth, and it is not just another watery Louisiana parish we can vacate and return to when the danger's gone. Our days of running are simply running out.
Soon we won't have any place to go.
======
+
excerpt page 48:
Chapter 4
Global Warming: Same Mistakes, Bigger Stage
...page 50
...around 1750, with widespread use of coal...prospect of rocketing to as much as 700 ppm or more by 2100. That's the "blade" portion of the hockey stick. It's pointing straight up from the flat line of our past. The heat-trapping power...is growing exponentially...
page 126
...For anyone who fully accepts the reality of global warming and drops all denial about what's causing it, daily life in America can be a difficult thing to take in indeed. Seeing the mammoth, inefficient SUVs and the hand-scorching incandescent lightbulbs at every turn, and knowing the moral and practical implications of both, is like having to watch all the world's bread swept into a giant pile each day and set on fire, or watching all the world's milk trucks dump their cargo onto the street.
Deepening this pain is the waste of human lives in tandem with the wasted energy, and indeed because of it. It's the twenty-year-old American boys blown up in Iraq every day along with scores of noncombatant men, women, and children. It's the three thousand American lives wasted on 9/11.
...the daily waste of clean, renewable energy all around us: the unused power of sunlight falling on our roofs and wind power blowing along our mountains and biofuels waiting for harvest across our farms. That we have barely even begun to exploit these resources represents a huge waste of precious time and bounty...
page 140
Chapter 9 - Climate Cover-up at the White House
But enough with the chronic nay-saying of the U.S. fossil fuel industry and its chief mouthpiece George W. Bush. We have the capacity to transform our energy habits in a hurry...
page 154
...we all own the sky...in equal measure...the sky is far too vital and fragile to be treated as a worthless dumping ground of harmful greenhouse gases. It simply can't hold much more of these gases while supporting life as we know it on earth...
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 10:26 AM
1 comments
