The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities

click here for more details, find new or used items	Mike Tidwell Our price £7.16 (£7.82) New from £2.03 Used from £1.92 Pages: 208 (Paperback) ISBN: 0743294718 Pub: Free Press Pub date: 2007-06-05 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 945412

Reader Reviews:

A Polemic and a Parable (0/0 people found this helpful)

No question about it: Mike Tidwell has an axe to grind. And after you read "The Ravaging Tide," you may have a few axes to grind as well. The book is partly about Hurricane Katrina, partly about global warming, and partly about what patriotic American citizens can do to fight global warming.

The first three chapters explain why Hurrican Katrina was a man-made disaster. New Orleans suffered an indirect hit from a high Category 3 storm--Mississippi bore the brunt of the storm's onslaught. But because of man-made canals and the wholesale destruction of barrier islands and marshes south of the city, there was little natural barrier left to absorb the impact of the hurricane's storm surge. The more powerful Camille (a huge Category 5 hurricane) struck in nearly the same spot in 1969 but did not flood New Orleans--the difference in 37 years is not the power of the storm, but the ongoing subsidence of New Orleans and the destruction of the surrounding landscape. The tragedy is that scientists and public officials knew that this day would come and were unable to do anything to stop it. The government was not willing to spend the $14 billion required to implement the 2050 plan, which would eventually restore the barrier islands and marshes in the Mississippi Delta. Instead, we'll spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding New Orleans--and it won't be a bit safer than it was before Katrina hit. By being penny wise and pound foolish, we've insured that our government will be a big, wasteful spender for decades to come.

So much for the polemic. The parable is that Katrina is a warning about what will happen throughout the United States and the world in the next few decades because of global warming. Scientists know what's coming and they have some good ideas of what to do about it, but few policy makers are willing to listen. That doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist: the insurance companies, who are not known for their sympathies with environmentalists, can read the writing on the wall. That's why they are withdrawing from insurance markets along the Gulf Coast and other extremely vulnerable places like New York state.

Tidwell's book isn't total doom and gloom, however. He spends the last several chapters of the book explaining how he changed his home and his life so that his family darstically reduced green house gas emissions. The result was a win-win arrangement for a lot of people and for the economy as well as for the environment. Tidwell hopes that his example will lead others to act before it is too late.

Still, if Tidwell and others are right, there's not much time to turn things around before global warming really starts to have a devastating impact. There's a lot of hope at the grass-roots level and at the local level--Portland, Oregon, for example, has reduced its green house gas emissions by 12.5% since 1993, while the rest of the United States has increased emissions by 15.8%. Business is also rallying--wind energy, solar power, ethanol, biodiesel, geothermal, distributed energy, conservation and other business sectors are burgeoning and attracting large influxes of capital. But the complete lack of leadership at the national level (with the noteworthy exception of Al Gore) makes me hope that some of the best scientists in the world are completely wrong and that we have more time to change our ways than we think.

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