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Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities
Free Press
August 2006
On Sale: August 8, 2006
208 pages ISBN: 074329470X EAN: 9780743294706 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
If, like many Americans, you believe the ongoing tragedy of
Hurricane Katrina was a once-in-a-lifetime fluke, you need
to read this book. In the coming years and decades, the
safety of your region, your town, your home may depend on
the warnings you'll encounter on these pages. That's because
the exact same conditions that created the Katrina
catastrophe and destroyed New Orleans are being replicated
right now along virtually every inch of U.S.
coastline. In The Ravaging Tide, Mike Tidwell,
a renowned advocate for the environment and an award-winning
journalist, issues a call to arms and confronts us with some
unsettling facts. Consider: - In
the next seventy-five years, much of the Florida peninsula
could lie under ocean water.
- So could
much of Lower Manhattan, including all of the hallowed
ground zero area.
- Major hurricanes like
Katrina, scientists say, are becoming much more frequent and
more powerful.
- Glacier National Park in
Montana will have to change its name, as it is rapidly
losing all of its thirty-five remaining glaciers.
- The snows atop Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, so
memorably evoked in the Hemingway story, have already
disappeared.
The fault, Tidwell argues,
lies mostly with the U.S. government and the energy choices
it has encouraged Americans to make over the decades. Those
policies are now actively bringing rising seas and gigantic
hurricanes -- the lethal forces that killed the Big Easy --
crashing into every coastal city in the country and indeed
the world. The Bush administration's own reports and studies
(some of which it has tried to suppress) explicitly predict
more intense storms and up to three feet of sea-level rise
by 2100 due to planetary warming. The danger is clear:
Whether the land sinks three feet per century (as in New
Orleans over the past 100 years) or sea levels rise three
feet per century (as in the rest of the world over the next
100 years), the resulting calamity is the
same. Although Mike Tidwell sounds the clarion in
The Ravaging Tide, this is ultimately an optimistic
book, one that offers a clear path to a healthier and safer
world for us and our descendants. He writes of trend-setting
U.S. states like New York and California that are actively
cutting greenhouse gases. And he heeds his own words: In one
delightful personal chapter, he takes us on a tour of his
suburban Washington, D.C., home and demonstrates how he and
many of his neighbors have weaned themselves from the
fossil-fuel lifestyle. Even when the government is slow to
change, there are steps we as families can take to, yes,
change the world.
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