A PERSUASIVE PROPHECY ABOUT THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CAPITALISM AND KATRINA

We already know how this is going to end. The American economy will shiver a bit, stagger slightly, adjust itself and absorb the cost of Katrina. The miserable scumbags who exploited the misery and interfered with the rescue will be arrested, run off or shot. CNN may get over its hyperventilating, indignant surprise that food, drink and comfort could not be instantly delivered to those who, for whatever reason, remained in the danger zone despite warnings.

We will learn painful lessons from mistakes and failures that will enable the remarkable rescue apparatus we have devised to work better next time.

Slowly the little stories of personal heroism and common decency in the face of misery and chaos will come out. As usual, the Salvation Army will have performed its sacrificial work with hardly a notice from anyone. And scores of religious groups, churches, synagogues and other organizations like the Red Cross will have brought the essentials of help, from cots to coffee, to those suffering at the ground level of this terrible disaster. The grim business of finding and identifying the bodies will come to its slow, painful finish.

The strain on oil supply will subside and gasoline prices will retreat. The economic power plus personal altruism of Americans, which funneled more than a billion dollars in non-governmental aid to the victims of last year's Pacific tsunami, will outdo itself. Yes, millions of dollars will be wasted, misdirected, misspent, stolen. Politics will be played. The media will yammer endlessly. And yet the necessary relief will be delivered.

Lost heirlooms will mysteriously show up in antique stores and flea markets. "Flood" cars will be refurbished and show up on used car lots all over the country.

The Gulf Coast will build over its scars. The viscera of New Orleans will be repaired and restored but the city will never be the same again. The looted shelves of the Wal-Mart will be restocked. Houses will be bulldozed and rebuilt. The casinos will be back in business. Slowly, mysteriously, miraculously the detritus of the hurricane will be cleaned up, trucked away or recycled.

Within the miracle of the market, it will be rediscovered that, indeed (in the 16th century observation of John Heywood) it is "an ill wind that bloweth no man good." Production of everything from the most mundane essentials to the most effete luxuries will increase. There will be work for those who want it.

We will learn or relearn many things about ourselves -- not all good, not all tidy. It will be remembered that we made this unseemly and unexpected passage with perhaps a little too much self-doubt, a little too much impatience and nastiness, a little too much evidence of how spoiled, how forgetful, how complacent before nature we have become.

Nothing can mitigate the loss of loved ones, nor completely assuage the something that is torn from within when a home, however humble, is suddenly, literally gone with the wind and water. The whole force of who we are as a nation tells us that this time of disaster and chaos, which now looms so large, will not bring us to our knees, but will join other disasters as a vivid memory and a sobering history lesson.

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SOME COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON KATRINA

By Dr. Roy W. Spencer, Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama

Hurricane intensity and track forecasts for Hurricane Katrina were, from a historical perspective, pretty darn accurate. Early forecasts had the hurricane tracking farther east in the Florida panhandle. But as of 11 p.m. Saturday night (48 hours before high winds started reaching the coast of Louisiana) the National Hurricane Center (NHC) was forecasting an "intense hurricane". The forecast track issued at that time was almost dead-center on the eventual landfall location. Katrina ended up intensifying and moving more rapidly than normal, leading to less lead time than would have been desired for the warned areas.

Nevertheless, warnings of a "catastrophic event" were made in time for virtually all of the people who were willing and able to leave New Orleans and coastal areas to do so. Most people did indeed leave the warned areas -- but not all of them. NHC makes it a special point in the case of especially broad hurricanes such as Katrina to tell people to not focus on the exact forecast track of the eye since such a broad area will be impacted anyway.

How Did Katrina Rank?

From a meteorological perspective, Katrina was unusually intense and large, but not unprecedented. At one point it had the fourth lowest recorded air pressure for an Atlantic hurricane (902 mb, or 26.64 inches), but this statistic should be taken with a grain of salt since we have only a few decades of good measurements, and many systems that do not threaten land are never measured directly. At initial landfall southeast of New Orleans, Katrina was a category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds estimated at 145 mph.

The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, also estimated to be a category 4 storm, caused over 6,000 deaths. This is commonly considered to be the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history. The much lower casualty figures for modern hurricanes, even in the face of explosive population growth in hurricane prone areas, is a testament to current satellite, weather forecasting, communications, and transportation technologies. Were it not for modern technology, we could well experience what Bangladesh has endured in the not too distant past -- an estimated 300,000 to one million dead from a 1970 tropical cyclone. Tropical cyclone disasters with 10,000+ dead are not uncommon there.

Adjusted to 2004 dollars, Hurricane Andrew of 1992 was the costliest hurricane on record, at about $44 billion. It remains to be seen whether the Katrina event will exceed this record. If it does, it will be more attributable to the desire of so many people to live and build in coastal areas than to the inherent strength of the hurricane itself. Indeed, if we ask the question, "which land falling hurricane in U.S. history would be the most expensive if it happened today?" the clear front-runner would be the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. It is estimated that, if that hurricane occurred today, the costs would reach about $110 billion.

Global Warming and Hurricanes

There is some recent research that suggests that of all Atlantic and West Pacific tropical cyclones measured since the 1970's, a warming trend in sea surface temperatures has been accompanied by stronger and longer-lived storms. In fact, the increase in the total power generated by the storms that the study computed was actually much larger than could be accounted for by theory, suggesting changes in wind shear or other processes are operating in addition to just increased temperatures. (Unpublished results by the same researcher suggests, however, that this trend was not apparent in land falling hurricanes since the 1970's).

Given the recent work, how should we view the role of global warming? First, we know that category 4, and even category 5, storms have always occurred, and will continue to occur, with or without the help of humans, as the above examples demonstrate. Therefore, if we are prepared for what nature can throw at us, we will be prepared for the possible small increase in hurricane activity that some studies have suggested could occur with man-made global warming. To suggest that Katrina was caused by mankind is not only grossly misleading, it also obscures the real issues that need to be addressed, even in the absence of global warming. From a practical point of view, there is little that we can do in the near term to avert much if any future warming anyway, no matter what you believe that warming will be, including participating in the Kyoto Protocol. So why even bring it up (other than through political, philosophical, or financial motivation)?

Living with the Risk

It has long been known that New Orleans was at greater risk of catastrophe than most coastal areas, especially from flooding and the hurricane storm surge. While the storm surge itself is not what inundated the city, it was responsible for the levee failures that then caused flooding over the couple of days following the hurricane.

Another geographical area of concern is the U.S. 1 evacuation route out of the Florida keys. A rapidly approaching and intensifying hurricane in this area could also lead to a great loss of life.

The only way to completely avoid the loss of life and property in these areas is for people to not live there, and for businesses to not operate there. The stark reality, however, is that this will not happen. People in these areas live at greater risk than most of the rest of the country, and they will continue to in the future. No human endeavor is risk-free, and coastal residents simply take greater risks than most of the rest of us. As long as weather forecasts are not perfect, and as long as severe weather events are (necessarily) over-warned, weather disasters will continue to happen.

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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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