GREENIE GUILT FOR THE KATRINA DISASTER

Excerpt from the L.A. Times, no less

In the wake of Hurricane Betsy 40 years ago, Congress approved a massive hurricane barrier to protect New Orleans from storm surges that could inundate the city. But the project, signed into law by President Johnson, was derailed in 1977 by an environmental lawsuit. Now the question is: Could that barrier have protected New Orleans from the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina? "If we had built the barriers, New Orleans would not be flooded," said Joseph Towers, the retired chief counsel for the Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans district.

Tower's view is endorsed by a former key senator, along with academic experts, who say a hurricane barrier is the only way to control the powerful storm surges that enter Lake Pontchartrain and threaten the city. Other experts are less sure, saying the barrier would have been no match for Katrina.

The project was stopped in its tracks when an environmental lawsuit won a federal injunction on the grounds that the Army's environmental impact statement was flawed. By the mid-1980s, the Corps of Engineers abandoned the project. The project faced formidable opposition not only from environmentalists but from regional government officials outside of New Orleans who argued that the barriers would choke commerce and harm marine life in ecologically sensitive Lake Pontchartrain.





A REVIEW OF GREENLAND TEMPERATURE TRENDS

An article from CO2 Science Magazine, 14 September 2005 shows that Greenland is in fact COOLING. This is a BIG scientific review article so I will reproduce below just a few paragraphs:

The data revealed that temperatures there during the Last Glacial Maximum approximately 25,000 years ago were 23 ± 2 °C colder than at present. After the termination of the glacial period, however, they rose to a maximum of 2.5°C warmer than at present, during the Holocene Climatic Optimum of 4,000 to 7,000 years ago. The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were also documented in the record, with temperatures 1°C warmer and 0.5-0.7°C colder than at present, respectively.

Finally, after the end of the Little Ice Age, they report that "temperatures reached a maximum around 1930," but that they "have decreased during the last decades." All of these observations clash with the hockeystick temperature history of Mann et al. (1998, 1999), which is used by the IPCC to make it appear that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were mere fables and that 20th-century warming "during the last decades" was unprecedented over the past one to two millennia and caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions....

Last of all, based on a study of climate data and remotely sensed sea ice concentrations, Laidre and Heide-Jorgensen (2005) report that "since 1970, the climate in West Greenland has cooled, reflected in both oceanographic and biological conditions," with the result that "Baffin Bay and Davis Strait display strong significant increasing trends in ice concentrations and extent, as high as 7.5% per decade between 1979 and 1996, with comparable increases detected back to 1953 (Parkinson et al., 1999; Deser et al., 2000; Parkinson, 2000a,b; Parkinson and Cavalieri, 2002; Stern and Heide-Jorgensen, 2003)." These trends, in their words, have led to increasing numbers of ice entrapment events, "where hundreds of narwhals [have] died during rapid sea ice formation caused by sudden cold periods (Siegastad and Heide-Jorgensen, 1994; Heide-Jorgensen et al., 2002)."

In conclusion, Greenland, like most of the rest of the world, is subject to a likely solar-induced millennial-scale oscillation of climate that produced a Medieval Warm Period there about a thousand years ago that was approximately 1°C warmer than what it is today; and in contrast to climate-alarmist claims, it has not experienced unprecedented warming over the past few decades. Rather, it has experienced cooling in most places. As a result, Greenland is anything but a shining example of what anthropogenic CO2 emissions might do to earth's climate. In fact, it's a good example of what they likely will not do, i.e., prevent cooling when some other more powerful factor nudges earth's climate in the opposite direction.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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