Thursday, September 01, 2005

Wrath of Katrina

And God looked down on the wicked people of New Orleans, and it displeased him greatly. This once devout city, had become a portal to perdition. Where there was once churches teeming with the faithful, there was now drinking and debauchery, Voodoo and Girls Gone Wild. He sent a Hurricane to open the levees, and a deluge enveloped the streets, so that the sinful could walk them no more. Just like Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorra, the wrath of God destroyed an entire city for the sins of her people.
I know this sounds silly, and outside of a handful of religious zealots, this kind of talk is considered hateful and ignorant. But there is a group of people who are saying the same thing: that Katrina was the result of men turning their back from God, and engaging in excess.
The clouds had barely parted before Leftists rushed to blame human activity for Katrina. On August 30, while the flood waters were just beginning to rise, Ross Gelbspan of the Boston Globe said, "The hurricane that struck Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming."
Many environmentalists blame the United States refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, for the global warming that supposedly led to this storm. The Kyoto Accord was short sighted, and would have been ineffective even if the United States had signed it. Ten years later it makes about as much sense to sign on to Kyoto as it would to write a cough syrup prescription for Nicole Brown Simpson.
When the Kyoto Accord was drafted, China was considered a developing nation, and exempted from the treaty. Today, China is the world's second largest consumer of fossil fuel, and they release trainloads of CO2 daily. If Kyoto were signed, most American manufacturing would have eventually moved there, in search of cheaper energy, so that net CO2 emissions would be unchanged from where they are today. Meanwhile, the American economy would have been devastated. Since the treaty would have done little or nothing to lower the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but great damage to the American economy, then certainly Kyoto supporters must think the American economy is solely to blame for Global Warming.Such is the conclusion you must come to, If you listen to the rants of the Left.
On August 29, Twitching heroin addict Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a blog post: "As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2."
He also thinks that his knowledge is based on science, rather than nervous paranoid delusions. He said , "Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming."
But the science is not clear. I wonder if he even read the article he cites. A quick perusal of that Nature article in ques tion, written by Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicates that Bobby Junior, is as adverse to intellectual curiosity, as his uncle Teddy was to swimming underwater. It turns out that Kerry Emanu el believes that there has been no increase in the "prevalence of hurricanes." From the article:
"Global climate model predictions of the influence of global warming on storm frequency are highly inconsistent, and there is no detectable trend in the global annual frequency of tropical cyclones in historical tropical cyclone data."
In fact, Kerry Emanuel seems a little uncomfortable being cited as proof linking Katrina to global warming. In a recent Salon article he said:
"Not that many hurricanes get that powerful, but we've had hurricanes like Katrina before," he said. "Camille was about the same strength. Andrew was about the same strength. Katrina was just unfortunate, because it happened to hit a very densely populated area."
Other hurricane experts concur; Dr. Chris Landsea, of NOAA; the nations foremost expert on Hurricanes said in his resignation letter to the IPCC: : "All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin."
In the August 30 New York Times, Dr. William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University said recent hurricane activity, "is very much natural"
Apparently, the belief that hurricanes are the result of global warming is based on nothing more than faith, or in other words, "religion." Most of the Left believes that nature is avenging man's habit of indiscriminate pollution. It's a story as old a religion itself: Zeus gets angry for Prometheus stealing fire, Yahweh is mad that Eve bit the apple, and RFK Jr. is mad that commoners are riding around in limousines nowadays.
It is not your standard biblical sins that caused this cataclysm, but the sin of consumption. It wasn't fornication and bacchanalia that brought the wr ath of the goddess, but the modern sins of SUVs and air-conditioning, eating at Mc Donalds and shopping at Wal Mart. Yes, the All American lifestyle created this storm.
It's time to place the Environmental Apocalysts, into category of disdain , with bible salesmen, snake oil merchants, and charlatans.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not that anyone bothers to read the tortured scribblings of an increasingly isolated (both in logic and ideology) pundit, but for the record, global warming is directly attributable as an indirect cause of Katrina.

I'm not sure what evidence it will take to convince you, who has so much vested in holding the opposite opinion. The rest of us, who still reason for ourselves, look at the surface temperature in the Gulf of Mexico (now above 90 F/30 C - historic highs) and can only conclude that if anything, Katrina was a mild storm compared to what is coming.

Increased surface seawater temperature worldwide is causing a measurable increase in storm systems and their ferocity.

Now would be a good time to sell that waterfront property.

The Undersigned

Tim Slagle said...

Well, I can say with great certainty, that an anonymous post with absolutely no supporting evidence isn’t going to change my mind.

The real puzzle, is why you insist that Katrina was fueled by global warming despite the contrary opinion of most hurricane experts.

blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. John 20:29

PWS said...

Please tell me Tim you aren't a Christian and aren't religious.

Tim Slagle said...

I've been to church maybe five times in the past year, with family, usually on holidays; I don't think that qualifies as religious. I was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic school for seven years; many Christians will tell you that disqualifies me from being a Christian.
Perhaps you failed to grasp the inference of the post. I don't believe that weather events are god punishing the wicked, because there are other cities more wicked than New Orleans could imagine, and they are still standing (Washington DC). I also don't believe that Katrina was nature's retribution for burning gasoline, but there is an entire wing of American politics ready to claim it was. There is no scientific evidence linking Katrina to global warming, but the Left believes without seeing proof.
In this post, I was highlighting grand irony: that the same people who think that Global Warming causes Hurricanes, think religious fundamentalists are silly. Actually, they both have a lot more in common than either side is willing to admit. Using catastrophes to evangelize is an old tradition, newly adopted by the Left.

PWS said...

I got your none-to-subtle irony but I was just find it silly to compare something that a majority of scientists agree on and basless fear and ignorance (religion).

However, I don't think the "left" is to blame for this. Go to the scientists and listen to what they say. Not many people were saying "global warming caused Katrina!". If they were, you are right, they are idiots. A variety of factors cause hurricanes, and possibly one of them is global warming according to many who study climates and weather patterns. Therfore, there is some truth in the global warming propaganda, something that is completely absent from religion.

Tim Slagle said...

pw,

Bjorn Lomborg, http://www.lomborg.com , was criticized by the Left for being a statistician rather than an environmental scientist, and had no authority to write The Skeptical Environmentalist. By the same standard, climatologists have no authority to speculate on hurricanes.

Meanwhile, the great majority of hurricane experts claim there is no link between hurricane frequency and global warming, and very little link between hurricane intensity and climate change (according to Dr. Kerry Emanuel, global warming accounted for only a 2.5% increase in intensity over the past century).

Hence, faith that hurricanes are the result of burning fossil fuels is nothing more than baseless fear and ignorance; or by your definition: "religion."

Anonymous said...

Eventdently the writer of this article does not know god. For God is great and has the power to destroy but with his love he lets us choose our life and for that we will pay for our sins. God does not send evil or storms to kill or destory us for if so what about the earthquakes and tornadoes all over the world just to name a few and the furture hurricnes that will continue to come.