Fwd: Ross Gelbspan: Katrina's Real Name

[Guest guest]

Having a corrupt mass media and government is more than just an annoyance. You

know when you send your taxes, they are going as corporate welfare to the

transnational investors who finance our elections. You know when you read your

corporate-viewpoint monopoly newspaper you will not find the public interest

covered, but get the views of those transnational investors.

 

No matter how bad things get in Iraq, we only hear one mass media viewpoint--

the same one we heard in Vietnam-- stay the course. No matter how many people

make the minimum wage, we hear that " free trade " is a good idea (the rich are

getting richer at an accelerated rate, which is seen by boot-lickers in

corporate media as a good thing).

 

But the most shameful propaganda is the support for the big polluters in the

face of " natural " disasters all over the planet. There is nothing natural about

global warming.

 

In our last presidential election, Kerry and Bush agreed to oppose the Kyoto

Treaty that would have started us on the road to sanity. We do not see a

responsible gesture on the part of our politicians, who now stay on their knees

kissing the butts of those who finance their campaigns at any cost to reason,

science, logic. Our political leaders are so craven that they won't even ask

for reasonable miles-per-gallon increases applied to new cars. Nader supported

the treaty and asked for gas mileage increases, but corporate media didn't allow

his views.

 

There are floods in Europe. New Orleans is under water. This is not the end of

it. In 1991 I got a letter from the Union of Concerned Scientists, signed by

most of the living Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, stating that the

problem of global warming is serious and must be addressed immediately. What

Americans saw was corporate toady George Will's column in the Washington Post

saying there is no such thing as global warming.

 

So the carbon continues to be spewed into the atmosphere, fueling hurricanes and

other disasters at ever increasing numbers. It's not a problem for an old guy

like me-- I've already lived longer than I thought I would. But what about the

children? Bush gives tax breaks to the wealthy while running up monster

deficits to put on the backs of the kids, an atrocity in itself, but his

environmental legacy will top that --Jack

 

 

 

 

Katrina's Real Name

 

by Ross Gelbspan

 

The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the

National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was

global warming.

 

When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and cut

power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the

driver was global warming.

 

When a severe drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the Missouri River

to their lowest on record earlier this summer, the reason was global warming.

 

In July, when the worst drought on record triggered wildfires in Spain and

Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years, the

explanation was global warming.

 

When a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees and

killed more than 20 people in one week, the culprit was global warming.

 

And when the Indian city of Bombay (Mumbai) received 37 inches of rain in one

day -- killing 1,000 people and disrupting the lives of 20 million others -- the

villain was global warming.

 

As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours,

more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms.

 

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.

 

The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying.

 

Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of Hurricane

Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to

keep the public in doubt about the issue.

 

The reason is simple: To allow the climate to stabilize requires humanity to cut

its use of coal and oil by 70 percent. That, of course, threatens the survival

of one of the largest commercial enterprises in history.

 

In 1995, public utility hearings in Minnesota found that the coal industry had

paid more than $1 million to four scientists who were public dissenters on

global warming. And ExxonMobil has spent more than $13 million since 1998 on an

anti-global warming public relations and lobbying campaign.

 

In 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when

President George W. Bush was elected president -- and subsequently took

suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies.

 

As the pace of climate change accelerates, many researchers fear we have already

entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change.

 

Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about global

warming stands out as an indictment of the US media.

 

When the US 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.

 

As a Bostonian, I am afraid that the coming winter will -- like last winter --

be unusually short and devastatingly severe. At the beginning of 2005, a deadly

ice storm knocked out power to thousands of people in New England and dropped a

record-setting 42.2 inches of snow on Boston.

 

The conventional name of the month was January. Its real name is global warming.

 

Ross Gelbspan is author of ''The Heat Is On " and ''Boiling Point. "