Radiofree West Hartford -- The Crow's Nest by Tom Evers

THE CROW'S NEST

Memo to Liberal Opportunists:

Don't blame Katrina on global warming or President Bush

By Tom Evers

September 05, 2005

The terrible images provided by the news networks of the flooded cities of New Orleans and Mississippi are heart wrenching. It's almost surreal to see the despair and sadness in the eyes of the victims who have lost their homes and lives to the wrath of Mother Nature, who discriminates against no one person or thing.

Fools are quick to blame the government for insufficient warning and inaction, or link the hurricane to America's contribution to so-called global warming. Yet for decades, meteorologists have warned those living in the "Big Easy" that one day a storm would approach that the man-made levies couldn't handle. After all New Orleans is nothing more than a large bowl which has areas that are 10 feet below sea level. The real question is why did it take so long for a Hurricane to finally arrive? Luckily (using a word that may confuse some), this storm was a mere Category 3 Hurricane, and not a Category 4 or 5, which would have been far more devastating to the region than Katrina. (See http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/deadly/Table1.htm for a comparison based on the Saffir/Simpson scale).

Predicting weather is a tricky business. And excepting a forecast as fact is up to each individual's own discretion. Forecasters cannot clearly tell you much about the future of any one storm with any certainty; they use models of previous storms to try and "guess" how a storm might track. But this is akin to stock market warnings that read, "past performance is no guarantee of future performance, invest at your own risk". If you are in a hurricane watch area, and you know that hurricanes are dangerous, you aught to take precautions just in case, and not gamble on the risk factor percentage.

The National Weather Service (NWS) did an admirable job of getting the word out about pending devastation associated with Katrina. Personally, I tend to monitor and track Hurricane patterns as a hobby, and watched this storm develop from a tropical depression to a Hurricane over the course of two weeks. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) regularly posts and warns people about pending storms via all media outlets and their own 24 hour website and transmission stations. It's notable that in the case of Katrina, the NHC placed several watches and warnings out and seemingly neither the City of New Orleans nor its population opted to heed the warning.

Over the next six months, I'm sure that miles of text in speeches and columns will be dedicated to placing blame outside of New Orleans. Hopefully, someone will recognize that the local and state governments are the folks that truly fell asleep at the wheel, most notably Mayor Ray C. Nagin, who based on his pathetic performance should clearly resign his post for the incompetence and behavior he's showed over the last week. He and his Council failed to both plan for this emergency, heed the warnings or act appropriately. Nagin has taken the low road, shunning personal accountability and attempting defect responsibility upward. Naturally, the problem is further complicated by illegitimate grand-standers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who have opted to throw gas on the fire by playing the racism card.

In cases like this, its good to have a scientific (non-political) reference point to go to in order to separate revisionist history from scientific historical fact. I recommend that readers go to http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastall.shtml and review some of the bizarre tracks that Hurricane's have taken over the last 50 years. Few of tracks are identical to one another, and therefore specific predictions as to where a storm will land based on past trends are hardly reasonable. The National Weather Service has done a great job at tracking storms over a 24-48 hour period. To those that need to react, it's true that there isn't a lot of time. But that's not the fault of NWS, that's our level of science and the variable nature of weather - that's reality. But if you live 10 feet below sea level on a coastal city that has experienced storms and warnings in the past, it might be rational to have a plan and bag packed just in case.

A final note worthy of discussion is that despite the opportunist clamoring by the environmentalists in the left wing that our weather patterns are caused by global warming, I would recommend that they review (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastint.shtml) and learn that six of the top 10 most intense hurricane's occurred prior to 1940, including a few in the 1800s. This proves that hurricane patterns are cyclical in nature and have little to do with current gas-emission trends.

Also, for those interested in the trivia, as far as the deadliest hurricanes are concerned only one in recent memory, Hurricane Alberto in 1994, fell onto the all time deadliest hurricane list (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdead.html).

Records at the National Hurricane Center are broken up into two major categories, 1851-Current, and Pre-1851 including up to 1492 (Atlantic Storms). Obviously as methods for capturing data and technology improved, so did the results. What is clearly known is that Hurricane's tend to occur in cycles, and have been haunting costal areas for centuries. This is a fact that has little to do with Republican or Democratic policies or administrations.

Sadly this week, unhelpful and misinformed groups like the German Press (http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,372179,00.html) and the Congressional Black Caucus ers chose to seize the opportunity to cheap shot the Bush Administration by trying to link Hurricane Katrina to current administration policies or assumed viewpoints, but more intelligent minds see that Mother Nature gets the credit for this one. More intelligent minds see that Mother Nature knows no discrimination; anyone or anything in her wake is subject to destruction.

I'm sure there will be plenty more on this….

Until next time… I'm Tom Evers