Taxman Features
Global Warming: now we're all losing our cool
You ride into town on a speedboat,
Take the dog for a swim,
No window cleaners are required,
For your underwater dome.
Living in the Underwater City,
New Orleans in 2050,
Juxtaposed by a lake, the largest river in North America, and the Atlantic Ocean,
This is the city New Orleans will have to be,
In a 21st Century world,
Where climate extremes are the normality.
In time, New Orleans will go down in history as the first city to be claimed by global warming. Hurricane Katrina was no act of god. It was an act of nature - our planet is taking revenge. Revenge for the way six billion people abuse it and take it for granted. And this is just the beginning.
On its own this hurricane could be described as a one-off freak event, and no doubt those incompetent leaders in the White House have already labelled Katrina as such, but together with the other meteorological occurrences of the last month it adds up to one thing: climate change is happening now, not in the distant future, but now.
Severe drought in an already poor country has led to famine on a huge scale in Niger, West Africa. A months' rainfall fell in the space of a few hours in central Europe causing flash floods across three countries and taking dozens of lives. A similar number of casualties on the Iberian peninsular were victim to forest fires, which destroyed 180,000 hectares of land in Portugal, caused by drought. And a tornado in Birmingham - yes Birmingham - destroyed hundreds of British homes.
Hurricane Katrina comes in the middle of a hurricane season that began in July, which is almost unheard of. Hurricanes this year have been bigger and more intense than ever before, the result of ocean temperatures being higher than normal. It's hard evidence, as if it were needed, that global warming is having its effect on our climate.
Yet as long as governments continue to give greater importance to their economy than to human lives, these natural disasters will continue. An environmentalist recently compared the pollution of this planet and its consequences to the lung cancer you might expect a chain smoker to get after 20 years of nicotine fuelled self-harming mayhem. Cause and effect: action and reaction. It's a simple concept.
It's not so much a case of the Bush administration denying that climate change is happening, but more a case of them choosing to deny it because there aren't enough coppers left in the jar to spend on environmental causes. They'd rather spend the money on a good ol' American war; because that's what'll really get the testosterone flowing through their veins.
So the economy is more important is it? Is it Gordon Brown? What kind of economy do you think we'll have in 50 years time when a third of the British Isles is submerged because the polar ice caps have melted? How much longer can we go on relying on non-renewable sources of energy without developing ways to replace them? Not long. Planets live and die just like we do. This planet has a disease. It's called the human race.
