Letters to the Editor: Concrete channels won’t save L.A. in a mega-flood. What was paved over might be a nice park: “You are too young to know the significance of L.A. as a flood control and defense system,” he wrote in an Op-Ed. “We would not exist in the world as we do now if it were not for the concrete channels,” he pointed out. The city needed more money for flood control, he said, and “concrete channels are not much more than drainage ditches.”
More money is needed for city services, of course, so it is good L.A., with its high cost of living and large number of its residents living paycheck to paycheck, has the money he was talking about, and it’s good that the city is prepared to spend it, though it has done a lousy job of making the city livable for its residents.
“Concrete channels won’t save L.A. in a mega-flood” is the argument that the most powerful and influential media- and education-dependent city in America, the city that, in effect, is the public square of the world because it has the largest number of television stations, is offering to the rest of us, the rest of the people of California, the rest of the country, and the rest of the world.
To get rid of that argument, we need to know how it came to be written in the LA Times, and how it will go down with the rest of us.
In order to know this, we need to come up with an idea of what exactly the mega-flood is.
A mega-flood is a natural disaster that is the result of massive climate and environmental change.
The science of climate change and environmental damage to the planet is indisputable. The science clearly shows that the global climate, like all the Earth’s ecosystems (and therefore human communities), has been changed by human activities.
A recent report out of the U.N. says we are halfway through the global heating of the 20th century and have passed the point where the changes we have made to the earth’s atmosphere will be reversible.
In 2001, there was a great deal of scientific analysis predicting that the climate’s changing. A 2005 report from President Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency said that “climate change has begun in some