2852061165_f7301f3db0_m.jpgYesterday a Texas-sized invader crashed Big Carbon’s Houston citadel and the coastal communities that lay between the Gulf and America’s Oilarchy. Homeland Security couldn’t divert the threat. Even the collective power of the Pentagon and the entire military-industrial complex couldn’t stop the invader. No surprise there. Though Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, and the corporatists they all serve have the power to harm and defile Mother Nature, they can’t stop her. Yesterday, the force of Nature we call Hurricane Ike reminded America’s Oilarchy that Nature bats last.

The Oilarchy is greedy, devious, and deluded. Like other mass-murderers, they’ve drawn lessons from their most notorious predecessors…kinda like interrogators in the Inquisition (or the Bushie Gulag) shared notes on how best to torture. Following in Big Tobacco’s funeral train, the Oilarchy has learned to play the doubt card really well. Big Carbon play the doubt so well that they’ve been able to stifle the urgent search for solutions to global warming with phony debates about whether global warming exists…or — if it does exist — whether human-produced greenhouse gases have caused it. [For those who have been watching too many commercials or hanging out with serial child-neglecter Sarah Palin, the respective answers are "yes" and "yes"].

Tonight we still don’t know how many died over the last twenty-four hours from the flood waters, shrapnel-like debris, electricity failures, and other mishaps Hurricane Ike brought to the Gulf Coast and the Texas counties where Ike swerved inland. We do know 1.2 million people evacuated their homes and five million will be without electric power for weeks. Tonight, over ninety percent of the homes under Ike’s path from Galveston to Houston have no electricity. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands will be without adequate running water. The cost of repairing just the insured non-flood damage (not the flood damage) for just those with insurance has been estimated at least six billion, and perhaps sixteen billion.

The victims — if they are like the Americans sampled in national opinion polls — are just as likely to believe global warming is real as to believe either that global warming is not real, or that human activity has not caused global warming.

Neat trick for the Oilarchy: fooling the same neighbors that Ike’s fear and flooding forced out of their homes. Good thing for the Oilarchs, too — if Ike’s victims ever learn how Big Carbon wrote them off, even Homeland Security couldn’t protect the Carbon Lords.

Why? The energy that drives hurricanes is heat energy. As the Fourth Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change expected and recent researchers have concluded, global warming pumps more heat into ocean waters, creating a heat pool which nourishes hurricanes to grow far larger than they would have done without the increased heat.

A 2006 study published in Geophysical Research Letters, relying not on storm track records but on global surface wind and temperature records between 1958 and 2001, confirmed the trends identified in the two 2005 studies above and found that a 0.45 °F (0.25 °C) increase in mean annual tropical sea surface temperature corresponded to a 60 percent increase in a tropical cyclone’s potential destructiveness.

The BBC reports on a more recent study:

The strongest tropical storms are becoming even stronger as the world’s oceans warm, scientists have confirmed.

Analysis of satellite data shows that in the last 25 years, strong cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons have become more frequent in most of the tropics.

Writing in the journal Nature, they say the number of weaker storms has not noticeably altered.

James Elsner from Florida State University in Tallahassee, US and colleagues believed the link might become clearer if they analysed data according to the strength of storms.

o.gif HOW TROPICAL STORMS FORM Sea surface temperatures above 26.5C (79.7F)A pre-existing weather disturbanceMoisture in the atmosphereFavourable conditions, such as light winds or weak wind shear inline_dashed_line.gifAnimated guide: Tropical storms

"We’re seeing a signal, and it’s telling us that the strongest effect (of rising ocean temperatures) is on the strongest storms," he told BBC News.

"At average or median wind speeds, about 40m/s, we don’t see a trend; but when we get up to 50 or 60m/s we do see a trend."

A hurricane featuring winds of 40m/s (89mph) is a Category One storm according to the often-used Saffir-Simpson scale.

At about 60m/s (134mph) it enters Category Four, the strength at which Hurricane Gustav recently hit Cuba before weakening to Category One over the US coast.

Another way of describing this is that global warming appears to help hurricanes grow into immense storms: like the Gulf-sized Katrina and the Texas-sized Ike.

The Texas Oilarchs, the other Carbon Lords, and the GOP / Beltway Village that serves them may slide by Ike’s destruction without taking the heat from Ike’s victims. Hey — the Oilarchy and the GOP got off pretty lightly when Katrina destroyed a city, and the Goopers goose-stepped in to destroy the community. Why wouldn’t they continue to get off so easily?

Perhaps they will: but the pool of victims will be growing with almost every passing year. You see, as our planet warms, the reserves of global warming gases locked away in what was once tundra and under the seas will at some point burp out into our atmosphere, starting an ever-increasing spiral of warming. The fancy scientific name for this spiral is "positive feedabck loop".

The positive feedback loop that begins our planet’s ever-increasing spiral of warming is estimated to kick off when Earth’s temperature rises by 2 degrees C. Neither McCain nor Obama’s climate plan will prevent that: not in the handful of years we have before it is too late to stop the positive feedback loop that will bring every child living today into a hellish future.

You see, by playing Big Tobacco’s doubt card, the Carbon Lords and Darth Cheney have squandered a decade over which we could have stopped the rise from going over 2 degrees C. We’ve lost that chance: 4 degees C looks like a certainty. Which means the positive feedback will carry us far beyond 4 degrees C.

What will that look like?

+3.4°: Rainforest turns to desert

The Amazonian rainforest burns in a firestorm of catastrophic ferocity, covering South America with ash and smoke. Once the smoke clears, the interior of Brazil has become desert, and huge amounts of extra carbon have entered the atmosphere, further boosting global warming. The entire Arctic ice-cap disappears in the summer months, leaving the North Pole ice-free for the first time in 3 million years. Polar bears, walruses and ringed seals all go extinct. Water supplies run short in California as the Sierra Nevada snowpack melts away. Tens of millions are displaced as the Kalahari desert expands across southern Africa

+4.4°: Melting ice caps displace millions

Rapidly-rising temperatures in the Arctic put Siberian permafrost in the melt zone, releasing vast quantities of methane and CO2. Global temperatures keep on rising rapidly in consequence. Melting ice-caps and sea level rises displace more than 100 million people, particularly in Bangladesh, the Nile Delta and Shanghai. Heatwaves and drought make much of the sub-tropics uninhabitable: large-scale migration even takes place within Europe, where deserts are growing in southern Spain, Italy and Greece. More than half of wild species are wiped out, in the worst mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs. Agriculture collapses in Australia

[snip]

+6.4°: Most of life is exterminated

Warming seas lead to the possible release of methane hydrates trapped in sub-oceanic sediments: methane fireballs tear across the sky, causing further warming. The oceans lose their oxygen and turn stagnant, releasing poisonous hydrogen sulphide gas and destroying the ozone layer. Deserts extend almost to the Arctic. "Hypercanes" (hurricanes of unimaginable ferocity) circumnavigate the globe, causing flash floods which strip the land of soil. Humanity reduced to a few survivors eking out a living in polar refuges. Most of life on Earth has been snuffed out, as temperatures rise higher than for hundreds of millions of years.

Hey? Who sez the Goopers are always wrong. Looks they’ll get that "End Of History" they’re so keen on.

All courtesy of their masters in the Houston Oilarchy and the global Carbon Lords.

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  4. “Whew, it’s a good thing George Will has no sense of shame”
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