Earth Equity News

Lessons from An Angry Planet. Posted by Bill Becker, ClimateProgress.org, June 17, 2008. "As of June 13, 1,577 tornadoes had been reported in the U.S., with 118 fatalities. The season started in January, unusually early, with more than 130 reported tornadoes in the upper Midwest. As if to send voters a reminder... 84 tornadoes broke out the week of Super Tuesday in Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee. As I write this post, record floods are inundating communities in the Mississippi River Valley at a level of intensity that may make the Great Flood of 1993 seem like an 'ankle tickler'... On June 9 in Wisconsin, a breach in its dam emptied [245-acre] Lake Delton... into the Wisconsin River. My old stomping grounds in Wisconsin's Kickapoo River Valley suffered record flooding for the second time in a year. Among the inundated communities was Gays Mills, now threatened with extinction... By June 15, nine rivers in Iowa were at or above historic flood levels and 83 of the state's 99 counties had been declared in a state of emergency. In Cedar Rapids, the Cedar River crested at 32 feet... Floodwaters are making their way down the Mississippi River... Meantime, a heat wave has been baking the East Coast from North Carolina to New Hampshire, wildfires have been destroying homes in California and, as if to reassure us that nature is not picking on America, 1.3 million people were fleeing flooding in China... Our sense of community now must come not from sharing disaster, but from the common effort to evolve past the carbon era. We need to pay attention to what scientists tell us we can expect from climate change, including extreme weather events. It should be obvious by now that we ignore their warnings at our own peril." [To view an interactive flood map of the Midwest, click here.] Bill Becker is director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.