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Gulf Coast Should Worry About Global Warning, Environmental Leaders Say

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 December 2005, 00:00 CST

By Dave Flessner, Chattanooga Times/Free Press, Tenn.

Dec. 5--The record damages caused by hurricanes along the Gulf Coast this year underscore the economic and biological threats to the region from global warming, Southern environmental leaders said Monday.

"The Southeast will be disproportionately hurt by global warming and we need our senators and congressmen to stand up and lead the fight against this threat," said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Dr. Smith led an environmental delegation this week to the United Nation's Climate Change Conference in Montreal. The environmentalist claim that rising worldwide temperatures are melting polar ice caps and are creating more tropical storms and heat-related problems.

But industry groups and other scientists dismiss the link between the record number of named hurricanes this year and any long-term increase in global temperatures generated by man-made causes.

"The record damages (estimated at $47.2 billion) reflects the fact that more people are building on our coasts," said Frank Maisano, a spokesman for the energy industry. "You can try to blame anything on global warming, but the science just doesn't support the fact that the frequency of the hurricanes this year is somehow linked to any global warming caused by man."

But those pushing to limit carbon emissions linked with greenhouse gases and global warming insist more must be done before the evidence is irrefutable.

"We may be the last generation that has the opportunity to foresee and forestall the destabilization of our climate system," Miami Clerk Harvey Ruvin said during a teleconference from Montreal. "Sea-level rise could one-day reduce Florida to an island somewhere around Jacksonville if we don't stop fossilizing the atmosphere."

Even in Tennessee located hundreds of miles from the hurricane-hit coastal areas, global warming could cut the forests in the Great Smoky Mountains by at least 5 percent and increase the number of deaths from heat stroke and exhaustion, according to estimates prepared by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy in Knoxville.

The environmentalist want the United States, which opted out of the Kyota agreement on global warming in the 1990s, to support new international efforts to promote more renewable energy and reduce the burning of coal, oil and other carbons.

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Source: Chattanooga Times/Free Press

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