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
Sorry … this book is neither a parable nor a polemic – it’s just another eco-manipulator at work. Tidwell says that Katrina destroyed New Orleans. Of course it did not. It was the levee failures, not the surge tide, that doomed the city. This point is apparently far too subtle for Tidwell to understand, and yet it is crucial. Perhaps we need to change the world to prevent future surge tides, but we certainly want to improve the levees – and the disasterously corrupt local political atmosphere that finally allowed the city to drown – if we need to save New Orleans. And of course, this is one of the many cases of Tidwell’s raging hypocracy. He never asks the important question, why save New Orleans at all? If Tidwell is right, it makes no sense to repopulate it. If the city has largely subsided to the point where it mostly replaces the marshes it once drained in a move that greatly accelerated the Katrina disaster, why not just let nature lead its course and allow the flooded land to become the different buffer? We are not substantially lessening any individual tragedy by assisting people go right back onto the “landing strip” (Tidwell, demonstrating his complete lack of imagination, uses this metaphor a dozen times in the book) for the next Katrina. And by the way, where was the 2006 Katrina? Tidwell virtually guarantees a sequence of doom, with each year passing further and more devastation usually caused by global warming. And yet, why wasn’t New Orleans swamped in 2006? Why weren’t Miami and Savanah and New York destroyed too? What’s that? You can’t use climate changes to predict the weather? But that’s virtually the complete basis for Tidwell’s book. That and, as particularly noted above, his shameless hypocracy. Another trivial example (there are too many to count) – throughout the book, he cites reports by insurance companies that say the cost and effect of severe weather are rapidly increasing because of global warming. But then, when he wants to have a corn granery originally built in his town to make his life easier, he discovers that insurance companies acquired’t cover the risk without a enormous premium. This decision – widely shared, Tidwell tells us, by every company he immediately contacted – threatens his green goodness. What would a hypocrite do? Of course – when the insurance companies decides with Tidwell’s premise, they are right – in fact, they are flawless proof of his agrument. But when they don’t do what he wants, the very same models of truth rapidly become idiots. If you need to know how Tidwell eventually prevailed (by having his fellow-citizens assume the price of the risk that he, in his eco-purity, could not possibly be required to pay), you will have to slog through the book on your own. Good luck. But that’s not all you will live through, in all liklihood. In just the last 30 years, we have barely survived so much that the eco-manipulators have falsely claimed would kill us – global cooling, nuclear power, nuclear winter, nuclear war, nuclear waste, the failure of the ozone layer, DDT, swine flu, avian flu, the Ebola virus, “warm spot” viruses, “Frankenstein” foods, and mercury in tuna, in tooth fillings and in vaccines, to name just a few – that either global warming will be the BIG ONE, as we were mutually assured very positively that all the others were as well, or we’ll use our inventiveness and imagination to find a solution that doesn’t kill us … as Tidwell and his kind go onto the next disaster remaining to be recently uncovered and subsequently sold to a gullible public.