41 comments on Mayor Bloomberg's Green Push
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41 comments on Mayor Bloomberg's Green Push
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An analogy to global warming: I don't think the mass public took it seriously until Katrina (in the US). Katrina allowed the general public to make the link between global warming and the possible consequences for individuals-- to (tele)visualise the problem.
London we had the combination of a radical (former Trotskyite), autocratic mayor, and West End traffic that was almost at a dead halt (conspiracy theorists in the leading newspapers claim that was designed by the Mayor's office to make Congestion Charging look better).
There is a part of me that thinks Mike Bloomberg will make the best President the US will never have: he does enough to seriously irritate both parties.
I would call the actual state a serious traffic crisis.
Average motorist speeds in cities hardly faster than a bicycle, gridlock whereever you look, commuter cars occupied by average 1.1 persons, almost half of driving time spent in search of parking space. And higher municipal deficits for sustaining individual motor traffic than those for mass transit.
This is Absurdistan.
Our traffic was slower than it was when it was horse-drawn, in 1911. About 9mph I think on average in the core of London.
I would say though that in the land of automobile and personal freedom, it has to get really bad (I sound like the Twilight Zone movie 'want to see something really scary? ;-) before something is done about it.
A big road repair programme might create the crisis eg shutting down the East or West Side Highways?
Yeap, and for the same reason after we got one year without hurricanes, for the American public GW no longer exists.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/07/its-different-in-europe/
if you follow the link and go to the middle of the page on that link, there is a fascinating discussion
http://www.sej.org/pub/index4.htm
of why European and American views of GW are so different.
The bottom line, our media just doesn't treat the climate change sceptics with the same level of respect.
( http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1875762,00.html might be a reason why ;-)
Here in the UK, we have just had the right wing political party spend 2 days at its conference discussing green taxes. Now in practice they voted not to have them and I am sceptical anything that really affected our freedom to go on weekend flights to Europe, etc., is really on the table.
But still, it is unimaginable that 'Republicans against Global Warming' would emerge and be a vibrant voice in the party.
(except your mayor Bloomberg. Since Republicans arguably invented the environmental movement in the USA (Theodore Roosevelt), there might be a buried momentum there).
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=140
(note the pre Katrina date on this latter).
My overall conclusion:
- frequency - no way of telling. A more unstable climatic world is likely to have more extreme climatic events
- intensity - intensity is directly correlated with surface temperature of the ocean, and that seems to be rising, albeit erratically
A third point:- one of the articles I referenced above points out the biggest danger to NYC is what I think they call 'North Atlantic Storms' rather than hurricanes. These have lower peak wind speeds, but last longer and dump more water.