Viridian Note 00454: Hello Alpha
- Key concepts:
- the rapidly gathering mayhem
- Attention Conservation Notice:
- Consists almost entirely of time-consuming links. May not be readable if you are in Florida, New Orleans, or the Yucatan. If you panic easily, it may not be readable, period.
I knew there would be an Alpha. I'm betting on
a Delta. If not this year, then next.
http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050919_hurricane_names.html
There are so many catastrophes this season, even the
suicide bombers want to dig people out of the rubble.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L23357407.htm
You can watch, but you can't hide. Well, actually,
you can hide pretty easily, but it's increasingly
likely that there will be no place for you to go back
to. Not even if you're an oil company. Not even if
you're Trent Lott.
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/DATA/RT/float-vis-loop.html
Off they go, hither and yon, the damp, dour
greenhouse equivalent of the Dust Bowl Okies.
http://www.epodunk.com/top10/diaspora/index.html
Did you ever read Longfellow's poem "Evangeline?" It's a pretty good poem, especially if you're into massive, permanent Cajun deportations.
"Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean.
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pre."
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/books/longfellow/evangeline00.html
"Overall, demographers predict that Katrina will
accelerate the population decline that plagued the
region well before the storm, By the 2000 census,
New Orleans had withered to 485,000 people from its
peak of 627,000 in 1960. Louisiana has been shrinking
as well; between 1995 and 2000, it was the only state
in the country to lose population."
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-4/113005104877980.xml
Time to knock about 50,000 drowned homes down inside
New Orleans. "Really, the whole scope of this thing
is hard to get your mind around." They always say
that nowadays, have you noticed that?
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3409324
It'll be difficult to finance new construction, since
the Gulf Storm Zone is becoming uninsurable. "You're
in good hands with Allstate," except, well, it's not
"good stewardship of the shareholders' capital" to have
such titanic losses in "extreme events." "Allstate
executives called it a once-in-500 years event and said
there is no way to predict such rare catastrophes."
Man, no wonder those boneheads are going broke.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9763388/
Meanwhile, in Dubai, awash with fossil-fuel money, the
anti-New Orleans rises from the desert.
http://pruned.blogspot.com/2005/10/dubai-via-archinect-los-angeles-times.html
Robert Kaplan, Mr. "Coming Anarchy," suddenly gets it about Khaki Green in a New York
Times piece called "Next: A War Against Nature."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/12/opinion/12kaplan.html
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050926/bacevich
"Imagine twenty years of this," urges Donald G. McNeil
in the New York Times. Hey, imagine two hundred years
of this. If the Arctic icecap goes, that's sure no
big imaginative stretch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/weekinreview/25mcne.html?8hpib
"If you consider yourself a "conservationist" of any
kind, and you're not ardently fighting climate change,
you're a ninny.
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/47327;jsessionid=aaadjB18bfqzwo
Mark Hertsgaard, "Global Storm Warning."
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20051017&s=hertsgaard
Bill McKibben, "Planet New Orleans."
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=20027
Mike "City of Quartz" Davis has long been expecting to
see benighted Los Angeles come apart at the seams,
so it's nice to see him enjoying his patented
terriblisma schadenfreude over more general
planetary holocaust.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=27240
This would be the Indian version of Khaki Green,
and they're getting pretty good at it; after their
massive Bombay floods, they sent Indian relief to
New Orleans.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1514225,0008.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4233008.stm
Sometimes Lord Browne of BP "Beyond Petroleum" sounds
like the only sane, calm personage in the world. That's
very weird, isn't it?
http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=98&contentId=7010395&PC=106bae7e79400
Maybe that's because, instead of moaning like sheep
before the storming slaughter, BP have the will and
capacity to build some new things. You know, a set-up
like this would make a well-nigh perfect monastery
in the Coming Dark Age.
http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7011310
