Global Warming and Anarchy

People who are in the know say that as global warming advances, severe storms like Katrina are going to be more frequent. We're taking the resiliency out of the system. The extremes are just going to batter us - in fact they'll become the norm. It worries me to think about experiencing more than one disaster a year on the scale of Katrina, or the tsunami last winter. Katrina really strained our resources and capacity for organization - despite our affluence, our foreknowledge of the hurricane, and an emergency-response system that should have been primed after 9-11. People starved in their attics and died in droves at the Superdome. Diabetics went without insulin. A woman in the throes of a life-threatening breech birth labor was alone, without help. Survivors were raped, rescuers were shot. I think it's the anarchy that scares me most of all.

The whole thing just seems to be a wake-up call that when things get bad, they are going to get really bad. The horror stories that we are used to hearing about in impoverished, politically volatile countries could happen here, to Americans. Our children might grow up in a society that's very different from the one we have known - much more primitive, dangerous, and unstable.

This is another reason I wish I was husky and strong. If I find myself in a kind of martial-law anarchy riot situation, I don't want to be a victim.