High Water Everywhere

Today, the Scientific American republished ‘Drowning New Orleans’, an article that in 2001 outlined the danger posed to New Orleans by hurricanes and high water, and some of the possible solutions. They were never implemented, in part because of chronic underfunding, and in part because so much money was diverted to pay for the Iraq war. Will Punch at Editor & Publisher reports that the that the Times-Picayune had repeatedly raised funding issues, obviously to no avail.

[A]fter 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The [Army] Corps [of Engineers] never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain.

The politics don’t end there; the administration that blew the Gulf Coast’s taxes on the war and a tax cut to benefit the rich also denys that global warming is happening. We can’t say that global warming caused the hurricane—as RealClimate put it, “such attribution is fundamentally impossible”. What we can say is that as the global temperature increases, so does the deadliness of storms. I recommend going and reading the article in full. Billmon covers the political aspects in detail, and Crooked Timber have ongoing coverage, donation links and the like; they linked to this interesting piece by Alan Schussman.

A couple of years ago, I started planning and writing a series of science fiction stories set in the Delta. The world they described was that of a series of islands, taking their living from the sea that had swallowed the land. Dirigibles cruised through stormy skies, while cities built upwards, sea walls guarding against the encroaching waves, the lower strata being abandoned as rising water claimed its toll.

I was looking back to an apocalyptic landscape described by blues musicians like Charley Patton and Memphis Minnie (who were responding to the Great Mississippi flood of 1927), but I was also looking forward, to a future where sea levels rose and cities drowned. I can’t help but think that too many responsible people have been living in denial. Global warming is our fault, but even if it weren’t, then surely measures still needed to be put in place to protect our coasts against the rising water. The future was closer than I’d thought, and we’re going to need our wellies to survive it.