aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Events set in motion will run their course

So the storm will hurt New Orleans--the question is how bad? I have family and friends there, and New Orleans is a possible next place for us to live, so I pay attention. I remember reading stories like this one, that Kevin Drum points to, last year when Ivan came around:

A direct hit from a powerful hurricane on New Orleans could furnish perhaps the largest natural catastrophe ever experienced on U.S. soil. Some estimates suggest that well over 25,000 non-evacuees could die. Many more would be stranded, and successful evacuees would have nowhere to return to. Damages could run as high as $100 billion.

Last month, on the topic of global warming, I pointed to an Energy Bulletin post entitled In all likelihood, events are now set to run their course a paper on climate change (link since removed) from the London School of Economics:

[T]he paper argues that human experience of other difficult “long wave” threats (e.g. HIV/AIDS) reveals a broadly analogous sequence of reactions. In short: (i) scientific understanding advances rapidly, but (ii) avoidance, denial, and reproach characterize the overall societal response, therefore, (iii) there is relatively little behavioral change, until (iv) evidence of damage becomes plain.

I wish the people of New Orleans well, but more I wish that our civilization could come up with a political system capable of addressing known long-term threats, whether AIDS, global warming or cities below sea level.

UPDATE: This is terrifying. I can only hope it’s wrong.

LATER: Checking the links again, the “Short term forcast” and “Urgent weaather message” are gone. Maybe that’s good news.