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."
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