Beyond coastal cities, you claim that all 150 million Americans who live within 100 miles of a coastline are in danger. How so?
Again look at south Louisiana. The whole state of Louisiana has been affected by Katrina and Rita, but especially Katrina. You had the problem of evacuees. You had state services that were so great that it bankrupted the state treasury. You've got the psychological trauma of these evacuees coming hundreds of miles inland and requiring services of local schools, just the wrenching effects throughout the broader coastal areas from a catastrophe of this size. It's not just if you have a house on the beach.
You call the denial that existed in New Orleans before Katrina about the city's watery fate a kind of "mass psychosis." How does American apathy about global warming compare to the apathy about the risks to New Orleans before Katrina?
They're very, very similar. There is the natural tendency to deny anything that is inconvenient, as Al Gore says.
In south Louisiana, the denial that the land loss was going to cause problems made catastrophe inevitable. Even though people had been through hurricanes, nobody had been through a hurricane like Katrina. When we have to address a threat that's beyond our lifelong experience, we're not that good at doing it. We basically are evolved to respond to claws and fangs in our face, not to a change in atmosphere that could reach a level in 10 or 25 years that will make us hungry. We didn't evolve to respond to those kinds of threats.
How can you be optimistic that we'll behave any differently when it comes to global warming then we did with New Orleans?
Well, I can't say that I am optimistic that we're going to behave any differently. Certainly, the evidence so far is that we're going to behave exactly the way people in south Louisiana did prior to Katrina. Even though people were starting to see this threat emerge, times were good. People were making money in the fisheries and tourism. It's the same now in terms of our global economy and national economy. We see the warning signs, we have people saying there's a problem, but basically the economy is roaring along. Everything seems OK, and that further accommodates our instinctive desire to deny the problem.
I want to believe that we can learn a lesson from Katrina. The other factors that might help us in our tortured relationship with global warming is that we are running out of oil, which is the chief driver of global warming. Our addiction to oil is a huge national security nightmare. I probably have more optimism that we'll do the right thing and switch to clean renewable energy faster as a result of our national security vulnerabilities than we will from global warming.
Looking at this coming hurricane season, what do you expect?
So far it's been a lot quieter than last year. NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] just announced that they were revising down their earlier predictions for the number of tropical storms and hurricanes for this season. But they're still expecting a higher than normal number of total storms and a higher than normal number of major hurricanes. Going by their forecasts, and my own knowledge of recent hurricane history, I think that it's very likely that America will experience another appalling hurricane event this year. Where and when, I don't know.
But the waters in the Atlantic and the Gulf are above normal in terms of temperature. The first six months of 2006 were the warmest on record since human record keeping began worldwide. All the trends are more heat, more water, warmer water, warmer atmosphere, and we know where all this leads.
Three of the six most powerful hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin over 150 years of record keeping happened in 52 days last year. In 2005, there were 27 named storms in one season, which beat the previous record from 1933, which was 21. Never before had 14 full-blown hurricanes formed in a single season. The old record was 12 in 1969. It just goes on and on and on. And that could be the new normal, maybe not this year, but on average.
Up in the Arctic, people have no words for the wasps and the barn owls and all these other species that are showing up because of global warming. They've just never seen them before. They have no words in their language for these species. The same way for the 2005 hurricane season, we really don't have any way to describe it and make sense of it. It's so anomalous and so far outside our experience that Americans really haven't come to terms with what happened in 2005. We have no word for it. It was as foreign to us as a barn owl in the Arctic Circle is to an Inuit hunter.
About the writer
Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon.
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