TODAY NEW ORLEANS, TOMORROW THE PLANET
The disgusting New Orleans saga sums up why we are staring down the barrel of a global-overheating catastrophe and the hammer has fallen. We think we can live any way we please and ignore the way the planet functions, then when it knocks our stupidity for a loop all we can talk of doing it picking ourselves up and getting back to the same old stupidity ASAP. As Winston Churchill neatly put it: 'Men often stumble over the truth, but most of them manage to pick themselves up and carry on as if nothing had happened.'

So now they are planning to rebuild New Orleans. NO! Let it slid back into the swamp where it belongs. Only monumental insanity lives below sea-level in hurricane alley. And when the inevitable happens, and it gets flattened and drowned, only stark raving hubristic lunacy wants to rebuild it.

There are going to be many parts of the earth that global-overheating will make uninhabitable. With the ice melting and thermal expansion getting steadily worse, the sea will be rising for thousands of years, even if we stopped the greenhouse-gas emissions right now, so we will just have to get used to the sight of big coastal cities being hacked out of civilisation. It is nicely ironic that America, where the internal combustion engine is king, and which is thus responsible for a large chunk of the lethal problem, should have been the first to cop a Grade A1 climatic smack in the head.

And it IS global-overheating, not 'global-warming.' 'Global warming' sounds so safe and comfy. Everyone likes being warm. But the term is scientifically inaccurate, because the earth has been warm, it has on average been at a good human temperature for 10,000 years. 'Global warming' is also dangerous, because its comfortable sound lulls us into a false sense of security; we see no cause for urgency. So then we get smacked right in the middle of our Big Easy. And it becomes bog easy, in nothing flat.