Hurricane Ike Shows Futility of Building on Barrier Islands

FOXNews

By Clara Moskowitz

As Hurricane Ike pummeled the Texas coast this weekend, the only thing standing in the way was a thin stretch of land called Galveston Island... .

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What no major news organization in the United States--most especially FOXNews--elects to discuss or report in their hurricane coverage is the patently obvious:  World climate is changing and sea levels are rising because of man's ongoing destruction of his environment. Coastal cities are, in the final analysis, doomed.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported in February 2007 that world sea levels had risen 3.3mm a year between 1993 and 2006, and that mankind can expect an 88cm rise by the year 2100.

Clearly, no logical reason exists for men to continue to rebuild cities and towns that cling to life at or near sea level because the sea will inundate all such settlements in time. 

Each hurricane storm surge--each rout of men from their ultimately transitory little clusters of structures and ribbons of streets and highways along a coastline--will become more severe.

There is no reversing the polar ice and continental glacier meltdowns now underway.  Nature will inexorably claim her own again--along the Gulf Coast--along the Atlantic Seaboard--anywhere else on the surface of the earth where land and sea meet.

New Orleans should not have been rebuilt in its present location after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The battle to keep the Gulf of Mexico out of a city, parts of which are below sea level, is a futile one.

Texas' Galveston Island with its highly romanticized sea wall is living on borrowed time too. While the ravages of 2008's Hurricane Ike may be repaired in Galveston, the next major hurricane to strike Galveston in two years-or five years-or 20 years--will inevitably wreak more havoc than Ike did because tomorrow's unnamed storm will have a few more centimeters of Gulf water to his or her advantage.

Macabre cemeteries with flood water liberated caskets bobbing stygian-like, as in Orange, Texas, after Ike, will become commonplace along the Gulf Coast in other Septembers as the galloping disaster that is industrial man's climate folly diminishes our shores and options.

Meanwhile, another generation of young Americans whose caskets may someday be launched into the same Gulf waters, will bravely adopt the current Republican neocon mantra--that there is no proof climate change is related to man's activities. These young capitalists will aspire to establish careers and buy homes in Galveston or New Orleans, pretending all is well as they jostle for a few more years of greedy excess.

D. Grant Haynes

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