Haiti – A Premonition of What is to Come

The earthquake in Haiti reminds us that, although we are very sophisticated and intelligent and have marvelous machines, we are essentially powerless in regard to geological events of that magnitude. All we can do is to build better buildings and wait for the movements of the plates.
        The catastrophe in Haiti is terrible but is, I believe, merely a premonition of what is to come with the climatic changes we have wrought. It is clear by now that countries today do not have the political will or foresight to accomplish the lowering of greenhouse gases required to ameliorate the coming disasters before the point of no return is reached. The consequences are horrific. Flooding of the major Eastern river deltas from the inevitable rise in ocean level will displace, if not outright kill, millions of people in the poorest countries in the world, resulting in vast migrations of refugees and putting tremendous pressure on neighboring countries if not causing open warfare. At the same time, the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas will lead to major decreases in the Indus River in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, the Mekong in Southeast Asia, the Irrawaddy in Myanmar and the Yellow and Yangtze rivers of China, all of which supply water for billions of people. In the United States, severe droughts in the Southwest will result in the drying of the Colorado River and the loss of this key water supply for the major cities of Arizona and Southern California. The drought in the California Central Valley, which has already begun, will essentially cause all agriculture in that breadbasket of the country to come to a halt. People will begin to migrate away from Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas into the Northwest and Midwest. But cities in the Midwest will have their own problems and soon will begin to limit immigration. The corn and wheat fields will dry up, forcing farming to move north where there is still enough water. Inevitably Canada will also be blocking immigration from the United States leading to inevitable conflict between the United States and its northern neighbor. Major coastal cities throughout the world will be flooded by the increase in ocean levels and no system of dikes will realistically be economically or physically able to prevent this. The loss of New York will be a major blow to the entire economic system of the United States from which it will never recover. The flooding of Washington will force a migration of the American government to higher ground, and inevitably lead to increasing chaos with the result being martial law. Florida will essentially cease to exist as a functioning state. The European countries will begin to limit immigration of the refugees from the east, initially by laws and then by force. Piece by piece, what we know as civilization will begin to break down. Trains will stop running, highways and bridges will not be repaired and the entire system of supply begin to fail.
          Sadly, we will look back on the Haitian disaster with horror and sadness as the beginning of the end.

Kabuki Seating

Every time I enter an airplane to go on a trip, I wonder why the passenger seats do not face towards the back. It is so very obvious that in a crash, one’s body goes forward, so that the well constructed seats with their impressive (and uncomfortable) headrests serve no purpose except to act as a hard barrier to the person behind. I am reminded of this absurdity every time the Stewardess goes through the Kabuki theater of telling passengers to bring their seats to an upright position and make sure the seats are fully in the upright position. They in fact do a walk through the cabin to see if these rules are being followed. I often feel like asking the Stewardess what is the purpose of this ritual but then remember what happens to anyone who complains on an airliner these days. The same situation occurs on a train (of course in Europe where passenger trains really exist), except that on trains some people actually have backward facing seats and will probably survive a crash.
If you do a simple Google search on “airline seats facing forward” you can easily obtain multiple articles on this problem. Turns out that I am not the first to recognize this. There is a long history. In fact, all military airplanes have seats facing towards the back. Obviously the military wants its soldiers to have the best chance of surviving a crash whereas domestic airlines clearly do not care about the safety of the passengers. It seems that one strong reason for this lack of concern is economic, in that backward facing seats would have to be greatly reinforced since most of the impact force is higher on the seat and this would involve substantial costs to the airline! Another economic reason is that the airlines think that passengers prefer facing forward. And yet another is that most passengers have never thought of this problem at all and airlines prefer to keep it a secret.Substantial research has been performed on this safety issue with the universal conclusion that survival is better in rear-facing seats. For example, Richard Snyder, a scientist studying airplane crash protection published a paper in 1983 with the title” Impact protection in Air Transport Seat Design” which had this conclusion.
Of course it is irrational to except that any profit-making company would on its own increase passenger safety when money is involved and when most people do not even know the problem exists. Just look at the history of seat belts and air bags in cars. But I am an optimist (except in the case of human-caused climatic warming!) and hope that this will happen in my lifetime.