Is the worst yet to come?
Imagine 20 Years of This
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
There was a time when the cloud as an icon of destruction was shaped like a mushroom.
And a time when the cloud as a portent of fleeing populations gave off the buzz of locusts.
And a time when the cloud that symbolized unexpected death was the ashen plume shooting out of twin towers pancaking down.
Now the cloud we track across our television screens as a harbinger of all those things is touched with the ancient and divine: a vast, swirling eye. An unblinking thing that could have floated off an Egyptian cartouche, a Huichol ornament or the back of a dollar bill.
In a sense, we are back to a more innocent age. The dark eyes whirling ever closer are "natural" disasters, though they pack the force of thousands of Hiroshimas.
And if science is correct, we will be repeatedly reminded what "a force of nature" implies. Meteorologists argue that we have begun a new era of Atlantic storms pumped up by hot gulf waters, a cycle that oscillates in decades. The devastating hurricanes of the 1960's like Betsy and Camille were followed by a lull from 1970 to 1995 as cooler waters stifled the wrath of adolescent tropical storms. Now the streams of warm water that encourage rapid evaporation and spiraling winds are back.
If these are just the first dark puffs of a new kind of summer weather that will prevail for the next 20 years, can we possibly be ready for what is to follow?
Last year, four horsemen galloped over Florida in quick succession: Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne. Already this season, the Gulf of Mexico has seen one major hurricane, Rita, sweep in on the veil of another, Katrina.
As a consequence, parts of New Orleans and stretches of the Mississippi coast are nearly uninhabited, and likely to stay that way for months. In Texas, Houston, Galveston and Port Arthur have emptied, at least temporarily. The populations of coastal cities have been scattered in a great arc, some trapped on highways a few miles inland, some in shelters as far away as Massachusetts and California.
The absurdity is that a dangerous squall can now be tracked almost from its birth off the coast of Africa, but its victims still cannot get out of its way. Despite our amazing ability to foretell the meteorological future, greed and sloth may have overpowered most sane efforts to plan for it.....
For more click here
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
There was a time when the cloud as an icon of destruction was shaped like a mushroom.
And a time when the cloud as a portent of fleeing populations gave off the buzz of locusts.
And a time when the cloud that symbolized unexpected death was the ashen plume shooting out of twin towers pancaking down.
Now the cloud we track across our television screens as a harbinger of all those things is touched with the ancient and divine: a vast, swirling eye. An unblinking thing that could have floated off an Egyptian cartouche, a Huichol ornament or the back of a dollar bill.
In a sense, we are back to a more innocent age. The dark eyes whirling ever closer are "natural" disasters, though they pack the force of thousands of Hiroshimas.
And if science is correct, we will be repeatedly reminded what "a force of nature" implies. Meteorologists argue that we have begun a new era of Atlantic storms pumped up by hot gulf waters, a cycle that oscillates in decades. The devastating hurricanes of the 1960's like Betsy and Camille were followed by a lull from 1970 to 1995 as cooler waters stifled the wrath of adolescent tropical storms. Now the streams of warm water that encourage rapid evaporation and spiraling winds are back.
If these are just the first dark puffs of a new kind of summer weather that will prevail for the next 20 years, can we possibly be ready for what is to follow?
Last year, four horsemen galloped over Florida in quick succession: Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne. Already this season, the Gulf of Mexico has seen one major hurricane, Rita, sweep in on the veil of another, Katrina.
As a consequence, parts of New Orleans and stretches of the Mississippi coast are nearly uninhabited, and likely to stay that way for months. In Texas, Houston, Galveston and Port Arthur have emptied, at least temporarily. The populations of coastal cities have been scattered in a great arc, some trapped on highways a few miles inland, some in shelters as far away as Massachusetts and California.
The absurdity is that a dangerous squall can now be tracked almost from its birth off the coast of Africa, but its victims still cannot get out of its way. Despite our amazing ability to foretell the meteorological future, greed and sloth may have overpowered most sane efforts to plan for it.....
For more click here
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