Gustav

Tulane just sent out the notice that the school will evacuate this weekend. There is no need to worry for my personal well-being; the school is really good at providing for it's students. Should you feel like worrying, you can follow my twitter stream here. Though this is my personal blog, this isn't a personal blog post per se. I'm not here to talk about how sucky it is to leave a campus less than a week after arriving.

What I am here to talk about is the fact that another hurricane threatens New Orleans, and that the city is nowhere near rebuilt enough to handle it. This is a tragedy, a failing of this government, and it is nothing shy of that. I joked earlier to a friend that this hurricane can't be as bad as Katrina, because the city hasn't been rebuilt enough for that level of damage to be possible. Read this list. Turns out, I'm not really joking - this is a true statement, and a terrifying one.

Rebuilding this city is a time-sensitive issue. It needs to be done quickly, done effectively, and done in such a way that the city can withstand multiple hurricanes in a given year. It will be tremendously expensive up front, but the alternative is a New Orleans that fades away, ceases to exist, and becomes a symbol of American failure to take care of it's own people. The stakes a high. Should Gustav miss New Orleans, the need will not go away. Should Gustav hit New Orleans, the city will need everything it possibly can to stand a second chance. Katrina hit New Orleans hard because people were ignorant. If Gustav hits hard, it will be because people knew the threat, and just didn't care.

Edit 8/29/2008: An acquaintance of mine summed up the feeling towards Gustav felt by many Katrina survivors:

For those of you who have no idea what this is like:

Imagine being in a horrifying car accident.

Now imagine that you think you're about to be in another one.

Now imagine the moment just before the potential impact.

Now imagine that moment lasting four or five days.

Edit 9/2/2008: Updating from a library in Arkansas. We survived, New Orleans survived, and and school starts again on Monday. I'll have more to say later from a better internet connection, but I'm fine and initial impressions of the aftermath are decent.

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I recommend the education posts, as they seem to be the most relevant. Or at least, I can act the most authoritative in them.

Lowell Wood and Geo-Engineering

Global warming itself is better discussed in the climate blogoshpere (check the climate sidebar), but geo-engineering seems to be an under-covered topic, which is unfortunate. Geo-engineering is an idea that has been around since at least the days of Edward Teller, who wanted to make harbors using thermonuclear detonations in Alaska. That was relatively small scale; move this piece of earth, here, and while the notion of using nukes to alter a small part of the earth's landscape is frightening, it is little compared to solutions designed for global warming.

Lowell Wood, a disciple of Edward Teller's, was featured prominently in an article in Rolling Stone, which stated out by describing him as Dr. Evil. Not Dr. Evil in the wacky "I'm a mad scientist teehee" sense, but Dr. Evil in the Dr. Strangelove sense; "I'm a mad scientist people take seriously, watch me say nuclear war is survivable teehee". Lowell Wood has a valid point in saying that all options should be considered. His opinion gets less merit when one looks at the ideas he tries to implement (with Edward Teller he worked on the Star Wars initiative), but when he says he has a cheap, temporary solution to global warming that will not require a lifestyle change, those in power could easily listen.

The solution being considered? Filling the atmosphere with particles to block out sunlight, in much the same way as volcanoes work. This will cool the earth for a bit, and then give us more time to develop a genuine solution to the problem. The particles will fall out of the atmosphere within a years time, and unless a solution has been developed, we can just shoot up more particles for the next year.

It's nutty, and it's out there, and while the potential to go wrong (the particles injected into the atmosphere are sulfur, which seems to be a direct trigger for acid rain) is huge, the idea is oddly fascinating. Not worth risking, of course, but certainly worth a look at.