It is the second day of the official Hurricane season, and I've yet to hear any forecasts or predictions as to its severity. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center (CPC) does have a 2011 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook on its website, but there has been nothing in the local and news outlets. I'm pretty sure that's because the space allocated to weather related news has been taken up almost entirely by the devastating tornadoes throughout the eastern half of the nation and the flooding in the Midwest.
News coverage of these events has not included any real discussion about global warming. But it is on everyone's mind, either to attribute the severe weather to it, or deny that global warming is an issue. Our climate has warmed and cooled over the centuries. Sometimes as severe enough to cause things like the Ice Age. Sometimes only enough to lengthen the growing season in traditionally cooler regions. But while the so-called global warming is probably part of that natural process, I most definitely believe we human beings have been helping it along more quickly and making it more severe than it might otherwise be. Between polluting our planet and trying to control water resources, we are damaging our habitat.
Here in the United States, as we've become a more urbanized culture, we've forgotten what it means to live with nature. Flooding rivers enrich the soil in their flood plains. We try to control the flooding, but we have to use chemical fertilizers to enrich the soil. And we still can't prevent floods. In fact, as recent events in Louisiana showed, preventing flooding in one area can mean deliberately flooding another.
And where did we get the notion that tornadoes don't happen in cities? I remember one Summer when we were visiting my grandparents in Chicago--I couldn't have been more than six or seven--when we stood on the back fire escape of their two-flat watching a funnel cloud skip across city rooftops in the distance. We probably should have been down in the basement.
Maybe we ought to be seriously rethinking how we live with nature.
Yeh, we still seem to think that nature is supposed to bend itself to our will. That it's there for us to plunder and pillage to our heart's content. And we get this idea from the Bible, whether we know it or not: "...and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." We also conveniently ignore that God commanded us to be vegetarians, which, after the Noah flood, God gave up on.
ReplyDeleteWhen I would say things like this at DuPont, where I used to work decades ago, I was accused by management of being a Luddite!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite