- I’ve never been a climate skeptic. I don’t know why the climate is changing, but changing it is.
- In 2012, Bill Maher asked me (when I was the Republican on the panel) whether I believed global warming was man-made. I could hear the mostly young audience inhaling preparatory to verbally tossing rotten vegetables at me when I said, “No.”
- But I didn’t.
- What I said was “That’s the wrong question. The right question is: Is it better to put more crap into the atmosphere or less crap.”
- The audience cheered in pleased surprise.
- Even then, I was not new at the give-and-take of political give-and-take.
- I was sent to Baton Rouge after Katrina hit, to help set up a press operation.
- I was too late. I failed.
- By the time I got there, the story was set in stone. FEMA Administrator, Mike Brown (of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” fame) was frozen in the command trailer. President Bush – who is one of the most compassionate men I have ever known – was photographed looking out the window of Air Force One flying over a devastated New Orleans.
- The Lad, Reed, who had worked for FEMA and was sent in by a different agency, sat in the seat next to me doing what he did and still does – stage manage a bewildering array of activities like a plate spinner on the Ed Sullivan show.
- FEMA is divided into sections. As I remember it, Section 13 was Intergovernmental Affairs and Communications. There was a guy in from the Boston office who had been in the Superdome the night of the storm. He was on his cell phone explaining to someone that nobody was in charge of Section 13 (or whatever the number was).
- When he hung up I asked him what was going on and he told me there was a box without a name on the org chart.
- “Can you do that job?” I asked him. He said he could. “Then you’ve got the job until someone tells you otherwise.”
- “Do you have the authority to make that decision?” he asked. “No one else is making any decisions around here so, yes,” I said.
- NBC News described the pre-Katrina levee system, thus:When Katrina struck the Gulf Coast 16 years ago, the storm surge overtopped and broke through the levee system, which previous generations of leaders had taken cost-lowering shortcuts to build. The result was devastating flooding in New Orleans, which contributed to more than 1,500 deaths.
- Ida was a different storm that hit a different New Orleans. The levee system, following a $15 billion upgrade, largely held.
- Ida came ashore as a Category 4 storm with, according to Weather.com, one wind gust “clocked aboard a docked ship at 172 mph.”
- That’s the equivalent of a major tornado.
- Katrina drifted up toward the Great Lakes, losing punch and shedding moisture as it went.
- Ida, on the other hand, chugged through Mississippi and Alabama, taking a hard right through Tennessee, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York City before heading out to the Atlantic Ocean east of New England.
- Ida retained enough water to dump, according to the New York Times, over seven inches of rain in Central Park in the 24 hours between early Wednesday morning and early Thursday morning. Had it been snow, it would be about six feet deep.
- That followed the torrential rains of Hurricane Henri which, according to the Washington Post, “dumped a record 1.89 inches of rain on New York City in just one hour” a week, or so earlier.
- The soil of the eastern half of the United States is well and truly saturated. That the East Coast is drowning while the West Coast is desiccated and burning is another example of extreme weather systems wreaking havoc.
- Katrina killed over 1,500 people almost all in Gulf Coast states. Ida has left, according to CNN, 46 people dead, most in the Mid-Atlantic States.
- Hurricanes that threaten the continental United States are fueled by the warm waters off the southern US – Atlantic, Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. As those waters continue to warm, they will continue to supercharge storms like Ida.
- Is all this evidence of global climate change?
- Man-made or not, yes. It is.
- See you next week.
Posted from https://mullings.com/
