Billmon

Billmon:

As a living, functioning city, then, New Orleans has ceased to exist. Even if it can eventually be resuscitated, the patient's long-term prognosis is grim. Just as yesterday was a catastrophe in slow motion, the future of the Crescent City is likely to be a slow, lingering death by drowning: the environmental equivalent of pulmonary edema. In that sense, New Orleans is the canary -- peacock might be the more appropriate bird -- in the mine of global climate change. If melting ice caps continue to push sea levels rapidly higher, its death may also await many of the world's other low-lying cities.

For years, meterologists, hydraulic engineers and environmentalists have predicted something like this would happen. Not long after Hurricane Andrew erased Homestead, Fla. from the map, I interviewed an insurance industry disaster expert who told me that if a storm like that ever hit New Orleans, it would blow most of the city into Lake Pontchartrain. (Of course, he was wrong in the end: Instead it blew most of Lake Pontchartrain into the city.)