MODERN TIMES
by Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 1 Oct 2005
KATRINA: A LARGELY PREVENTABLE DISASTER
To
paraphrase philosopher George Santayana, those who don't learn from history are
condemned to repeat it. So let's
consider the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.
The
most serious lesson is the clarity with which Katrina revealed America's third
world underbelly. The world was
shocked by the number of poor people and black people caught in the disaster. At least since the Reagan presidency in
1981, America has largely ignored it's huge population of people living in
poverty. And so last year another
1.1 million fell into poverty as the number of poor increased to 37 million,
and the percentage of poor increased from 12.5 to 12.7, or more than one American
in eight. In our rich nation, this
statistic should outrage all of us.
We were struck, or should have been struck, by
the rich-poor divide revealed by the hurrican's aftermath. This inequality is well known to
anybody paying attention. Of all high-income
nations, the USA has by far the most unequal distribution of income, with over
30 percent of income in the hands of the richest 10 percent and only 1.8
percent of income going to the poorest 10 percent. Our average executive compensation, including stock options,
is $11 million per year, which is 350 times more than the $31,000 average pay of factory workers. Our ratio of CEO pay to worker pay is
more than ten times higher than it is in other rich countries, where it runs
from 12 in Switzerland to 30 in Italy.
Our wage disparities, which are characteristic of nations such as Mexico
and Brazil, show that the 3rd world image revealed by the disaster is largely
accurate.
Such poverty and disparity is obvious in
Fayetteville where, as Lowell Grisham showed in his September 5 column, the
average adult working full-time can't afford a place to live. And yet the richest live in million
dollar mansions.
Sweden, Denmark and other nations have shown us
that poverty can be nearly eliminated if society has the intelligence and
goodness to do it. Perhaps Katrina
will jar us into that kind of action.
Our transportation system is one example of
America's institutionalized injustice.
Many, perhaps most, people are too old, young, poor, or incapacitated to
drive. How do we provide for their
transportation? The answer, in New
Orleans, was "very poorly."
The evacuation plan failed to serve people who depend on public
transit. Mayor Nagin and the
entire city demonstrated insensitivity and incompetence in their lack of
planning and effort to assist the 250,000 citizens who did not have access to
cars.
Again, this problem exists here. How do people living in, say, central
Fayetteville's high-rise apartments obtain daily needs such as clothes,
groceries, and health care? The
answer is "with great difficulty or not at all." It's up to all of us
to insist that such services be located downtown and that mass transit be
widely available.
On the other hand, we can all be proud of
Fayetteville's response to Katrina.
City hall, Mayor Coody, businesses, churches, and the people did
everything possible to assist the many evacuees who came to our city.
The hurricane highlighted several environmental
issues. Development has destroyed more than one million acres of coastal
wetlands, along with barrier islands and stands of cypress trees, protecting
New Orleans. These could have
absorbed some of Katrina's energy and water.
The overbuilding of levees along the Mississippi
kept the river from depositing silt to replenish marshes and the river's
delta. Channeling projects
directed the river's water and sediment out to sea, causing New Orleans to sink
and bringing the Gulf of Mexico closer to the city.
And finally: Global warming contributed to Katrina's destructiveness.
There's solid evidence that global warming is
real, caused by humans, and will get worse. This has raised sea levels by seven inches, which means
higher storm surges, and pushed ocean surface temperatures upward by one degree
Fahrenheit. The link between ocean
temperatures and human activities was solidly confirmed recently when
researchers measured the way the temperature changes with depth in the top 500
meters of the ocean. The data
agreed precisely with the detailed predictions of global warming computer
models, and disagreed strongly with computer models that exclude human
activities such as fossil fuel burning.
There's a compelling argument connecting warming
oceans with stronger hurricanes. A
hurricane is a "heat engine."
It gets its energy from warm water vapor rising from the ocean. When this vapor is sucked into the
hurricane it rises, cools, and condenses into droplets, releasing heat in the
process--just as dew condensing on your lawn at night releases heat that warms
the grass. This heat drives the
winds. So warm surface water--80
degrees is sufficient--provides the fuel for the entire process. The surface of the Gulf, as Katrina
approached, was a broiling 90 degrees.
And it was precisely when Katrina entered the Gulf that its intensity
increased, from category 1 or 2 to category 4 or 5.
But a link between higher ocean temperatures and
hurricanes has not been firmly established by observations, although the
evidence has been mounting recently.
Two recent careful studies of hurricanes around the world show that the
average intensity of hurricanes is increasing but the number of hurricanes is
not increasing. Since 1970, the
proportion of hurricanes that are category 4 or 5 has increased. Some climate scientists claim that this
is caused by warmer oceans, while others dispute that claim.
It seems probable to me that humans have caused
hurricanes to increase in strength by up to one category--a number that's been
mentioned as reasonable by some climate scientists. If so, it made a real difference in Katrina's impact.
For many reasons, Katrina was largely a preventable
disaster.