Explaining a Concept

Tens of thousands of refugees flood the overcrowded Superdome in

downtown New Orleans. The roof is beginning to peel off; the situation

grows more and more grim as time passes. By now the city is flooding. Each

passing minute brings with it more water. The people inside managed to

survive the storm but were now stranded with no food or water in

increasingly deteriorating living conditions.

Day long lines formed as people awaited evacuation to nearby

Texas. Food and water are among main concerns. The unmistakable sound

of an army of helicopters flying over head will never be forgotten by many.

The entire city seemed to be lost.

As we all know by now, the Louisiana, Mississippi, and surrounding

areas was completely devastated by a category five hurricane. Hurricane

Katrina; with winds in excess of over 140mph made landfall directly on New

Orleans. The wall of water carried along with the storm, forced the levees

surrounding the city to break. Since New Orleans is completely under sea

level, the city flooded. More then 10 feet of rubble, debris, and disease rich

water, engulfed the city. The roads became rivers, instead of buses, boats

filled the streets. As the drama unfolds and a nation struggles to save their

own, another disaster is brewing in the gulf.

Hurricane Rita, another category five, is slowly inching towards the

Texas coast. Is this a phenomenon of nature? Is it be possible that two of

these deadly natural disasters to happen within days of each other? Are

these storms a result of decades of ozone depletion and global warming? A

highly debatable concept in nature, global warming, has been blamed by

many. The more frequent and severe hurricanes in the last few years has

kept many scientists busy hypothesizing.

Hurricanes, an intense oceanic weather system that possesses

minimum sustainable winds of 74mph (Crutsinger 1), have devastated costal

comminutes before documented history. In recent years, researchers have

been trying to figure out a correlation between global warming and an

increase of these natural disasters. In society today, global warming seems

to be an accepted belief. In other words, one either believes that global

warming is taking place and is a severe problem, or they believe that it is

just part of the earth?s natural cycle. Regardless, global warming does have

an affect on hurricanes.

Hurricanes form when severe thunderstorms along the west coast

of Africa drift out over warm ocean waters that are at least 80 degrees

Fahrenheit where they meet converging winds around the equator. Warm

humid ocean air begins to rise and cause warm vapor which turn into storm

clouds and drops of rain. The continuous formation of vapor from the warm

ocean air below causes a wind pattern that rotates around a relatively calm

center, the eye, like water swirling down a drain (West 3). Global warming

can affect this process in many ways.

Due to greater fuel emissions and forest clearing, the carbon

dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased dramatically. Carbon Dioxide

levels are currently higher then they have ever been in the past 400,000

years. The Carbon Dioxide acts like a blanket