Look at this satellite photo of New Orleans (three cheers, lads, to Pundit Guy who had the photo first).
The big blue spot is Lake Pontchartrain. The blue areas (underneath the clouds) is New Orleans. (Click on it and then blow it up to full size and you can see better.)
I mean, Holy Pete!
That being said, I'm exceedingly annoyed by the liberals who are trying to make political hay from these people's tragedy. Surely everyone by now has read or heard of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s outrageous post over at HuffPo where he insinuated that Misssissippi suffered the enormous destruction because its now-governor Haley Barbour implored in 2001, back when he was still a Washington player, President Bush to forget the Kyoto Accords. Drudge has had it up for two days now.
The sheer sophistry of his post is absolutely astounding. His post is essentially saying that Barbour's Mississippi got its just desserts because of his actions. But it doesn't just stretch but completely snaps credulity to believe that even if Kyoto had been adopted in 2001 that any benefits that would accrue from such adoption a mere four years ago would have done thing one to stop Katrina's effects. And even if we had fully complied with Kyoto since 2001, Eurpoe hasn't done a damn thing, and let's not even get into China or India. So what good would our having adopted Kyoto have done to the thousands now suffering?
And then there's this enviro-wackaloon who essentially blames every weather pattern on global warming. This yutz states:
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.
Well, isn't that special?
Then he states:
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.
Except that he doesn't anymore know that than a bag of dead rats.
I saw this guy, an environment professor at UVa, who has studied this stuff (OK, no shouts of, "Ah ha! Logical fallacy! Appeal to authority!" He's a professsor, so I 'spect he knows more about the subject than I) on one of the myriad cable talking head shows. He said that water surface temperature only explains about 10% of a given hurricane's severity. That leaves some other factors to explain that remaining 90%.
The leftists are absolutely giddy regarding Katrina and their hope that they can bully anyone who is not a similarly inclined leftist into swallowing their bugle oil. I find their putting partisanship over simple decorum galling.
You too?
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