Katrina's real name
August 31, 2005
Is global warming. Here's a must-read Boston Globe op-ed on Katrina by Ross Gelbspan, who offers this explanation for the hurricane's unusual ferocity: "Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico."
Gelbspan also point out just how shameful news coverage of this and other "natural" disasters has been:
When the U.S. press has bothered to cover the subject of global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what the warming is doing to our agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather.
For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations.
Today, with the science having become even more robust -- and the impacts as visible as the megastorm that covered much of the Gulf of Mexico -- the press bears a share of the guilt for our self-induced destruction with the oil and coal industries. [LINK thanks to David Addams]
