come again tomorrow. Unfortunately, that isn't likely to happen. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to me that people are generally nor recognizing or playing down the catastrophe that is happening right now. The major news networks had reporters on the island yesterday evening, who presumably are still there since there were no flights out. The general prediction is that there will be a lot of damage and a lot of flooding and it will be a major bummer, but I don't think that captures the reality.
The mountains will wring 30 or 40 inches or more of rain out of the storm, which will blast down the canyons like Niagara Falls. When it gets near the south coast, including the capital Kingston and its airport and harbor, it will encounter a 19 foot storm surge and it will have nowhere to go. All of the crops will be wiped out, all of the boats will be gone and there will be no fishing industry, there will be no electricity or telecommunications anywhere on the island, all of the bridges will be gone and the roads will be impassable. There will be no airport or seaport, which means there will be no way to deliver substantial amounts of aid, assuming anyone even tries which believe me, the U.S. will not do. There will be no public services, no hospitals, no food. Don't think about it too hard.
Jamaica punches way above its weight in world culture, in music, cuisine, sports, cinema and literature. It's devastating to think that all of that will be gone, for how long I can't say but I'm also not sure how it's going to come back. But what is most important is why this is happening. It is not an act of God, it is an act of the human species. Because we have been spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for 150 years, the oceans have steadily gotten warmer and now an unprecedented storm can form, on that can destroy an entire nation. There have been multiple storms that underwent extremely rapid intensification this year, we've just had the luck that none of them has directly affected the continental U.S. We likely won't be so lucky next year.
Meanwhile, our government, and in fact one of the two major political parties in the U.S., continues to deny that this is happening. And people keep voting for them.
1 comment:
I guess that simply stating the facts has to suffice in lieu of finding words to describe the ineffable tragedy of a species that, as Jane Goodall said before she died, is not intelligent--because intelligent animals don't destroy their habitats. As she made clear, we are intellectual, yes; but we are not intelligent.
And if we can't find that intelligence--forget about artificial intelligence, it's not going to solve shit, because it's pnly programmed with the intelligence that we possess--then we will pay for our deficit with our very existence.
Why some of us have the intelligence and the willingness to respect the world and ourselves, and others don't, I can't say it. But those of us who are truly intelligent don't seem to want to run the world. And that is a problem.
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