Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

S
112 connections
holes punched through ceilings as people tried to escape rising
water. The musty smell of decay was everywhere, overlaid with
an oily stench. Despair hung like Spanish moss in the hot, dank
July air.
Ninety miles to the south, the Louisiana delta is rapidly sinking
below the rising waters of the Gulf. This is no “natural” process
but rather the result of decades of mismanagement of the lower
Mississippi, which became federal policy after the great fl ood of
1927. Sediments that built the richest and most fecund wetlands
in the world are now deposited off the continental shelf—part
of an ill-conceived effort to tame the river. The result is that the
remaining wetlands, starved for sediment, are both eroding and
compacting, sinking below the water and perilously close to no
return. Oil extraction has done most of the rest of the damage by
crisscrossing the marshlands with channels that allow the intrusion
of saltwater and storm surges. Wakes from boats have widened
the original channels considerably, further unraveling the
ecology of the region. The richest fi shery in North America and a
unique culture that once thrived in the delta are disappearing, and
with them the buffer zone that protects New Orleans from hurricanes.
“Every 2.7 miles of marsh grass,” in Mike Tidwell’s words,
“absorbs a foot of a hurricane’s storm surge” (2003, p. 57).
And the big hurricanes will come. Kerry Emanuel, an MIT scientist
and former climate change skeptic, researched the connection
among rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, warmer
sea temperatures, and the severity of storms. He’s a skeptic no longer
(2005, pp. 686–88; also Trenberth, 2007). The hard evidence on
this and other parts of climate science has moved beyond the point
of legitimate dispute. Carbon dioxide, the prime greenhouse gas, is
at the highest level in at least the last 650,000 years and probably a
great deal longer, and it continues to accumulate by ∼2.0+ parts per
million per year, edging closer and closer to what some scientists
believe is the threshold of runaway climate change. British scientist
James Lovelock compares our situation to being on a boat upstream
from Niagara Falls with the engines about to fail.