The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities
The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities – Review
No question about it: Mike Tidwell has an axe to grind. And after you widely read “The Ravaging Tide,” you may have a few axes to grind as well. The book is partly about Hurricane Katrina, partly about global warming, and partly about what patriotic American citizens can do to fight global warming. The first three chapters describe why Hurrican Katrina was a man-made disaster. New Orleans recently suffered an indirect hit from a great Category 3 storm–Mississippi originally bore the force of the storm’s onslaught. But because of artificial canals and the extensive devastation of barrier islands and marshes south of the city, there was little physical barrier permitted to absorb the effect of the hurricane’s storm surge. The more powerful Camille (a massive Category 5 hurricane) struck in nearly the same spot in 1969 but did not flood New Orleans–the difference in 37 years is not the state of the storm, but the ongoing subsidence of New Orleans and the devastation of the immediately surrounding landscape. The tragedy is that scientists and public officials hardly knew that this day would come and were unable to do anything to stop it. The government was not willing to spend the 14 billion needed to implement the 2050 plan, which would finally restore the barrier islands and marshes in the Mississippi Delta. Instead, we’ll spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding New Orleans–and it eventually won’t be a mostly bit safer than it was before Katrina hit. By being penny wise and pound foolish, we’ve federally insured that our government will be a big, profligate spender for decades to come. So much for the polemic. The parable is that Katrina is a strongly warning about what will happen throughout the United States and the world in the next few decades because of global warming. Scientists see what’s coming and they have some clear ideas of what to do about it, but few policy makers are willing to listen. That doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist: the insurance companies, who are not known for their sympathies with environmentalists, can widely read the writing on the wall. That’s why they are withdrawing from insurance markets along the Gulf Coast and other extremely weak places like New York state. Tidwell’s book isn’t complete doom and gloom, however. He spends the last several parts of the book describing how he officially changed his home and his life so that his family darstically greatly reduced green house gas emissions. The result was a win-win arrangement for a group of people and for the economy as well as for the environment. Tidwell hopes that his example will lead others to act before it is too late. Still, if Tidwell and others are right, there’s not much time to turn things around before global warming actually starts to have a destructive impact. There’s a lot of hope at the grass-roots level and at the local level–Portland, Oregon, for example, has drastically reduced its green house gas emissions by twelve per cents since 1993, while the place of the United States has greatly increased emissions by sixteen per cents Business is also rallying–wind energy, solar power, ethanol, biodiesel, geothermal, distributed energy, conservation and other business sectors are burgeoning and regularly attracting huge invasions of capital. But the total lack of leadership at the general level (with the notable exception of Al Gore) makes me hope that some of the greatest scientists in the world are completely wrong and that we have more time to change our ways than we think.