The end of the world as we know it...

After last weeks downgrading of the predicted severity of the 2006 hurricane season, you just had to know that weather "scientists", desperate to remain relevant, would offer dire warnings for the future...

Hurricane chief: Megadisaster 'is coming'
Tragedy worse than Katrina is not a question of if, but when, he says

"I don't know whether that's going to be this year or five years from now or a hundred years from now. But as long as we continue to develop the coastline like we are, we're setting up for disaster."

So coastal development is responsible for mega-hurricanes. And all this time I thought it was George Bush and man-made global warming.

Isn't this sort of like breathlessly warning that at some point, possibly a million years from now, a mega-asteroid may hit and destroy Earth, or that a mega-tsunami will hit the coast of the U.S. sometime in the next 5,000 years, or that Ben Affleck may, in the next 50 years or so, make a successful movie?

Seriously, this bureaucrat idiot is counseling us not to develop the coastline because of the possibility, however remote, that a mega-hurricane might, at some point in the future, strike? Preposterous!

We already have a system for developing the coastline. We dont' need the nanny-state dictating private land development policy...it's called the free market. If a land owner judges that the rewards of developing his coastal land outweigh the risks of destruction by a hurricane, then let him develop it. The timing of the next mega-hurricane will be the judge of his wisdom.