Reply #71: Agree and we do have evidence

[Jack Sprat]

of the changing global climate now and it is being ignored. There were not precedents before. Prior to Katrina, Hurricane Camille was probably the strongest storm of the century, in 1969. On Saturday evening before the early Monday arrival of Katrina, I met an old man bicycling on the beachfront in Waveland and asked him if he and his wife were preparing to evacuate. He told me that they were on fixed incomes and did not have the money to leave for a hotel for an indefinite period of time and that they had ridden out Hurricane Camille at the same house. No one anticipated the wall of water that was being pushed by Katrina's winds in the distance. We all knew it was covering the entire Gulf in size, but the winds were not as strong as Camille. Had we had some precedent in this new kind of storm, we would not have wasted our times boarding up windows of our homes and businesses. Hurricanes were not some new phenomena to the Gulf of Mexico. Had we known the intensity of what was coming in the way of giant surges of water moving far inland with Katrina, we would have forced neighbors like this elderly couple to evacuate with the rest of us. Thousands of the New Orleans residents, who were not monetarily able to evacuate, could have been rescued by friends and relatives who lived elsewhere. Tsunamis in Indonesia, heatstrokes in France, historical climate highs reached all over the globe, floods all summer in the midwest, droughts in the east, and my air conditioner running today in the Appalachians all foretell a growing pattern of catastrophes to come. The debate over global warming is long over. We are living it now.