What Sandy Is Teaching New York City That 9/11 Didn't
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-05/sandy-teaches-new-york-u-s-lessons-learned-on-9-11.html
Sea water floods the Ground Zero construction site on Oct. 29, 2012, in New York. Photographer: John Minchillo/AP Photo
Eleven years, one month, three weeks and five days ago I stood on West Street in southern Manhattan and watched many hundreds of people murdered, as a gray avalanche of concrete, glass and steel poured forth from a disintegrating tower to the street below. The 9/11 attacks changed everything, for all time, and we all felt it instantaneously.
Superstorm Sandy delivers a message first heard on Sept. 11, 2001: New York, as a proxy for the United States, is unprepared for anticipated 21st century threats.
The storm is different. Sandy elicits no moral shock of war, no blinding national insult, "no unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury," as a columnist put it in Time magazine after 9/11. Instead we're up against something much more elusive, an enemy we're much more poorly equipped to deal with than sleeper terrorist cells: the Earth.
"No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site," wrote Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert in a provocatively titled 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium."
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Hi - just joined DU today. Nice to meet you all. Will mostly be posting on this forum as my education/experience lies in Environmental Science. Looking forward to learning from you all!
Saw a thread on the NYT website this morning concerning Sandy and there were far too many deniers to mention. The wonders of the internet has once again allowed them to cherry pick what they like in order to deny the facts. Like, for instance, the fact that the Yankee Clipper of 1938 had a peak wind force of 270 km/h.
Preaching to the choir here, but I found this excellent piece in SA:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/10/30/did-climate-change-cause-hurricane-sandy/
If you meet anybody who thinks climate change didn't increase the potential or northern movement of Sandy, refer them to this article. The paragraph on the NAO and arctic sea ice melts is particularly potent in a discussion. For all of you who know about this sort of stuff, forgive me 
I just looked that up. I did not know that. I am so terribly sorry. Arkansan here - and I thought we were politically jacked-up! Well, we are, but damn son. So the tourism board, I'm assuming, was involved in that little maneuver?
Thanks for the welcome
I really appreciate the welcome and an OFB right back acha
The scary thing about all this is that environmental psychology is kind of pretty much saying that we are hard wired to not give a flip about the environment.
http://www.stwr.org/climate-change-environment/the-human-brain-is-made-for-environmental-complacency.html
A bit link happy today - sorry. My theory (and others) is that the reason we haven't found other intelligent life out there or been contacted (or have we?) is because our type of sentient life simply doesn't make it. We are selected against by our very nature. We outstrip our habitat too fast in every case and die. There may be sentient life out there, but it may be very different than ourselves and those differences may allow that form of life to survive without destroying its own habitat.
But there are those, like Peter Sinclair(who's on DU, btw), and the wonderful people at Skeptical Science, who have managed to overcome this problem, and are trying to educate people as well.
No doubt we're in serious trouble at the moment, but at least if we act sooner rather than later, we will be significantly better off than if we were to do nothing and risk going as high as 5-6, maybe 7*C by the end of the century depending on how positive feedbacks play out.
But there is hope: A lot of people have begun to really wake up these past few years and Hurricane Sandy seems to have been a major catalyst for yet further awakening. If we keep pushing on, and never give up no matter what, things will get better. But in order to avoid a possible catastrophe, we need to really get ourselves in gear.....let us strive for the best, as much as possible.
to that SA article. The AGW deniers never pass up an opportunity.
Just goes to show that pop culture can indeed serve gold nuggets of wisdom every once in a while.
... is that it is better to think with your brain than with your balls.
Eleven years of the latter have resulted in little more than an oversized swimming pool
filled with muddy water.
Let's see what happens this time.
(Coincidentally written on 9/11 as seen by the outside world )
