Bush and global warming and hurricanes?

[Atrahasis]

Tell me if you disagree with anyting here or have something to add:

Fact: Tropical cyclones are caused by water in the tropics that is heated and becomes swirls of vapor.

Fact: Global warming does not help in lessening cyclones but can only make them more severe.

Fact: Heat and warming are made more severe by human activity, and the region that uses the most energy will produce the most heat and greenhouse gases.

Fact: The US is the world's single largest consumer of energy therefore producer of waste heat.

Fact: Local ambient temperatures are raised by local activity.

Fact: The Clinton administration had the foresight to try and control US emissions re factors that cause temperature rises via the Kyoto Accords.

Fact: When Bush took office he soon pulled out of Kyoto, favoring robust industrial activity in the US to controlling heat emissions.

Conclusions:

The severity of the recent hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico has not been helped by Bush's backward and regressive environmental policies, and in fact the lack of action can only have made them more severe, not less.

[S33K100]

I can't disagree as I haven't done enough research to do so.

But I must add that regardless of the effect 'global warming' has had on the strength of the hurricanes that hit the US coast every year, the point is the damage caused by Katrina could have been drastically lessened, if not prevented almost entirely by proper maintenance and improvement of the defences around New Orleans.

Had that FEMA organisation remained independent and been budgeted properly millions of $ were supposed to have been spent on improvement of the levees and sea walls around NO.

P.S. Shouldn't the Earth be getting warmer anyway? Granted not the kind of increase we have seen but isn't part of it related to the fact that we're still just coming out of the last ice-age, that is the Earth is moving into a closer orbit around the sun. And there is an interesting study here: climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/StottEtAl.pdf (most of the maths went over my head) that suggests increased solar activity is responsible for between 16 and 36% of the increase in variation.

[Johanobesus]

Maybe I'm wrong, I'm certainly no scientist, but I find it unlikely that large scale weather patterns could be so drastically affected in so short a time. I have no doubt that global warming is a problem, and that Shrubby's policies are, well, bad seems like too weak a word. However, to say that a Democratic administration would have prevented or weakened the hurricanes seems to me a tad bit extreme. I expect that if tomorrow the U.S. suddenly turned into the most green-friendly nation in the world, it would be many years or even decades before we noticed any effect.

Besides, the sad truth is the Democrats are just as beholden to big money as the republicans. They are ten times better, since they aren't controlled by delusional fundamentalists and neocons, but they don't exactly challenge the big corporations. I've heard it said more than once that Clinton was the best republican president since Lincoln.

And as S33k100 pointed out, the New Orleans engineers have been denied funding for years. As much as I despise sounding like a ditto head, Clinton could have approved the funding requests ten years ago.

[Atrahasis]

I've heard that it's too late to turn *back* global warming even if we sufficiently curtail our heat-making activities, that temperatures would still rise over the next 100 years or so, but I have heard it said that if we start to take proper measures, that we can *slow* the rise down.

Now, as far as hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico are concerned, they are caused by the Earth moving heat up from the equator to the north but also vertically up into the atmosphere, as very warm water becomes vapor mist and eventually into cyclones. That means the ambient temperature of the water nearby a continent is the determining factor of the severity of a cyclone. If industrial activity and prodigious use of energy creates and traps heat, that means the US as the world's #1 energy user and creator would naturally get the most severe cyclones....as it indeed has.

You may not be able to stop cyclone formation completey, but if you don't curtail your emissions it can only add to the problem...despite what people say about natural increase in teperature.

At least Clinton and Gore had and still have a mind for this sort of thing, whether it could have actually been implemented or not being another story. But to categorically pull out of Kyoto was basically walking into the future with eyes wide shut.

[MajorRacal]

After 9/11, when all the planes were grounded in the US, there was a significant reduction in plane generated pollutants across America. The impact was pretty immediate and gave credence to the Global Dimming theory. It demonstrated that human activities do have a strong bearing on environmental conditions, and can have dramatic and immediate effects.

[Atrahasis]

Great point....

The basic point that we humans create a lot of heat and heat-trapping pollutants should be a no-brainer, and the US as the #1 energy consumer and maker has to do something not for the world's sake, but for itself.