Tornado Alley (PROG)

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What Are You Gonna Do Now, Wackos?

January 13, 2005




BEGIN TRANSCRIPT



Do you remember how I started the program yesterday? I went for a full hour making a point. Let me just offer a brief recap. For the past number of I don't know how many years and generations, we've all been told a whole bunch of things that have become what I call conventional wisdom. We've been told these things by people we don't know. We've been told we should trust these people despite the fact that we have no knowledge of them personally. They are people that have been buoyed and trumped and held up and been given credibility by people in the mainstream press. These people have said either that global warming is happening and that the United States technological advance is responsible for it. They have said that diet and rigorous exercise go together, and that you will live longer, just a whole bunch of these things, and over the years they have contradicted themselves and made mistakes. They said oat bran was good for you. Then they said it was bad for you. Now it's back to being good for you, according to yesterday. Same thing with coffee. Caffeine was going to kill you, now it won't kill you, now it's going to kill you again. They keep going in cycles, and people who have literally no knowledge of the people making these claims, no ability to doubt what they're saying -- well, I guess some ability to doubt, but apparently with little reason -- just accept all this stuff, and so trends are born as experts we don't even know are named and made credible by the mainstream press, and we all begin living our lives in ways that we otherwise would not.

We're all trying to accomplish things that people we don't even know, we can't possibly trust, are suggesting that we do, and they're all suggesting we all do the same thing. We all exercise. We all do this, whatever it is: We should have a shot at whiskey at night before going to bed. We shouldn't have a shot of whiskey. Take some aspirin every day you'll never get a heart attack. Don't take aspirin; it will thin your blood too much. The list is endless and everybody is out there trying to keep track of all these things instead of what? Just getting up, going about their day and living their life, following their own instincts and making their choices for themselves based on what they want, based on what's best for them as they define it. Why do you turn over what's best for you to so many other people, people you don't even know?


This has a political linkage because what has been over the years the success of liberalism: convincing more and more people that they're incapable themselves of running their own lives and we need liberals to do it for us. We need liberals to make us wealthy, liberals to make us solvent, liberals to keep us from getting sick, liberals to make sure we get educated, liberals to make sure the government is big enough to take care of all of us. And people have over a long period of time simply evolved to the notion that government knows best and whatever comes from government must be authentic, nobody questions it. Well, a lot of us have questioned it for a number of years. Now we've got Kofi Annan out there who is suggesting that... I'll find it here. It's some inane, senseless thing, if you just stop and think about it, absolutely worthless point about global warming. Oh, it is the tsunami is a forerunner of what will happen. We've got to look at a tsunami as an example of what global warming will cause, particularly to small islands out there in the middle of oceans. A tsunami is not anything to do with the climate.

In fact, folks, let me give you two recent explanations for the tsunami: A bunch of wacko Islamic people are claiming that Israel and the United States set off nuclear detonations underneath the sea, testing various developments that we've made in nuke weapons and this caused the tsunami. Other Islamists clerics are out there saying that this was Allah punishing Islamic people for getting too close to Christians in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and wherever else, and then of course we have the scientific explanation which is a shift of plates in the earth's crust underneath that caused this massive wave. Since it didn't destroy Diego Garcia, islands on which we have military bases near India, that it is said that we knew it was coming, but because we have sensitive detection equipment, we knew it was coming, but we want Muslims to die so we didn't tell them about it. Another excuse is that we knew it was coming because we caused it and we caused the waves to go away from Diego Garcia.

The scientific explanation is that the waves were radiated in such a way from this crust plate shift that Diego Garcia was naturally kept out of the tidal wave flow. So you have all of these mass conspiracy theories -- junk science, real science, all these things out there competing for reality. Here's all I want you to think about as you listen to some of these wacko theories, "Yeah, the US and Israel set it off." Israel has to be in there for this to work, folks, because these are Islamic people. "US and Israel set off a nuclear test underneath the sea out there in the Indian Ocean and this caused the tsunami." Now you probably say, "Oh, that's a joke. Who could possibly believe that?" I could say the same thing to you about global warming. "What a crock. Who could possibly believe that, if you stop and think about it?" All of this is a prelude to this story. I am holding it here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. Headline, details to follow the break: (story) "Fossil Fuel Curbs May Speed Global Warming, Say Scientists." In other words, folks, if you stop driving your SUV, if you stop polluting the atmosphere, we're going to have global warming.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

For 20 years now, starting in 1984, we have been told that we are destroying the planet because of our high-tech, because of our air-conditioners, our automobiles, our use of fossil fuels, our raping of the planet, our desire to eat hamburgers is resulting in the destruction of the rain forests, which is all going to cause more global warming. It's all over for us, folks, unless we go back to the horse and buggy. And for 20 years, as this tripe has mounted in intensity and has been supplied by people we don't even know whose credibility we are not even sure to trust, whose credentials we can only assume are truthfully presented to us by a media we now know we cannot trust. For 20 years people have bought into this more and more and more and more, and as time has gone on, an actual segment of our population has lost its mind over this. They have gone to the tops of Mount Shasta, and they have engaged in what is called Harmonic convergence, where they shout "Oooohm!" to try to ward off global warming and other things. Now, the original Harmonic convergence was to try to send a message to Gorbachev to please understand that Ronald Reagan probably is a nut and do what you can to keep him from hitting the nuclear button. I kid you not.


That was all in the '80s as well, and it's sad to say, but more and more people have bought into this. So here comes this story today, and all throughout this period I have been consistent. For the last 20 years, I've been "I don't believe this," and I don't believe it because I believe in God and I don't believe we have this kind of power – and I certainly don't believe the cleanest and the most prosperous and the most generous nation on earth is capable, by our very own existence, of this kind of destruction. The two don't go hand in hand. I simply do not believe that we have the power over climate. We don't know what the weather's going to be Saturday for certain. None of it has made intellectual sense to me ever. It's all been based on a whole bunch of different emotions and genuine personal weakness on the part of people to stand up for themselves, to be confident in what their own common sense tells them. Most people don't trust their own common sense. Got to trust some other idiot expert. Well, what are we to do now?

"Cutting down on fossil fuel pollution could accelerate global warming and help turn parts of Europe into desert by 2100," nearly 95 years from now. This according to research to be aired on the BBC Tomorrow. Actually, it's going to air tonight on the BBC. It may be airing even as we speak. "'Global Dimming', a BBC Horizon documentary, will describe research suggesting fossil fuel by-products like sulphur dioxide particles reflect the sun's rays, 'dimming' temperatures and almost cancelling out the greenhouse effect. We are to conclude from this report that were it not for your SUVs, and not for our fossil fuel use, we would have burnt to a crisp already. "Researchers say cutting down on the burning of coal and oil will drastically heat, rather than cool, the climate." What are you going to do now, if you have been an acolyte of global warming for the past years? I'll tell you, unless you hear this from me, you probably will not hear this. This goes such against the grain, so against the grain that's out there amongst the mainstream media liberal scientific-political axis, that they probably won't report this even though it's coming from one of their own, the BBC. But I'm telling you about it, and I'm asking you what you're going to do now, and I don't care whether you believe it or not. That's not my point.

I'm not aiming this at you environmentalist wackos who are convinced global warming is happening and that we're all causing it and that we're all going to die; we're all going to suffer these rising sea levels and we're all going to have no beaches and we're all going to be flooded and all this stuff in California and all this snow and all this stuff is because of global warming. I know who you are. You know who you are. I'd be embarrassed to be you, because I don't think that the weather patterns have a damn thing to do with the way we're living our lives and I never have thought that and nobody's ever going to convince me that it's the case, because odd weather patterns have been going on in the world since before we were here -- and it's been colder than this and hotter than this during periods of time where we were not producing greenhouse gases. The idea that we have any influence over this to cause such a dramatic shift is absolute intellectual vapidity. It is sophistry. It is embarrassing ignorance. But in this case, I don't care whether you're an acolyte of global warming or not. I just want to know what you're going to do with the information.

For 20 years, we've been told and you know how people buy into it anecdotally. Gets hot one day in January, "Oh, wow, global warming! Oh, it must be happening!" What are you going to do now? What are you going to do now, with this information? "The researchers say that cutting down on fossil fuels..." getting rid of automobiles, going to these hybrid cars, driving these little electric cars that nobody wants in the first place, not even the kooks that drive them. They don't really want them. They just think they're doing good, but they don't want them either. Nobody wants this garbage. Nobody wants to take technological steps backwards. Nobody wants to have to pull into a power plant every 30 miles and recharge before you can head on down the highway at your speedy 40 miles an hour. Who the hell wants that? The only people that buy it are the weak-kneed, gutless, yellow-belly, spiny, linguine-spined people who believe everybody but themselves -- and of course those who have this interest in saving the planet and doing good for the country and giving something back and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, unless you've robbed somebody, I don't know why the hell you have to give anybody back anyway, folks?

That's another thing that bugs me. What is this notion of "giving something back"? Bill Gates, he deserves to give something back? He's only empowered and employed how many people? Made wealthy how many? What the hell does he owe anybody? But I'm getting off on a tangent here, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to stick with the global warming story because I want to know what you're going to do now. I want to know what you're going to think. I'm not asking you to call me on this. I don't even want any calls on this because when I finish talking about this, there's nothing anybody else can say that's going to add to what I've said because I'm going to say it all. So I don't want any calls on this. That's not what I'm doing. I just want you to ask yourself: What are you going to do now? Temperatures could increase, in the worst case, by up to 10 degrees by the end of this century if we stop driving automobiles, if we stop burning coal and oil and other fossil fuels. "Scientists differ as to whether global warming is caused by man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, by natural climate cycles, or if it exists at all."

Well scientists may differ, but I don't. It doesn't exist, not as it's defined. Yes, the climate gets warmer over periods of time and it gets colder. We've had ice ages. It doesn't take a scientist to tell us this. It just takes a seventh grade history textbook or chemistry textbook or biology textbook from 30 years ago and you could know this and this wouldn't even be a question in people's mind. Those textbooks don't exist anymore. Those textbooks are replaced by how great Bill Clinton was, and the fact that we got global warming, and your father is just a paycheck away from being homeless and it's all Ronald Reagan and George Bush's fault, and that's what is being taught in schools today. "Scientists differ as to all this, but now say these new scientists, take away fossil fuel bi-products like sulfur dioxide without tackling greenhouse gas emissions and the extra heat is going to speed warming, irreversibly melting ice sheets and rendering the rain forests unsustainable within decades." This is from Dr. Peter Cox. "The climate will warm more in the future, but the ability of the land to store carbon dioxide will be compromised."

Ladies and gentlemen, science may end up proving George W. Bush to be one of the greatest environmental heroes in world history, and provide me with one of the greatest See, I Told You So's known to man. We are not destroying the earth, my friends. It is, as I have always maintained: The United States is saving it. The United States is saving the poor peoples of the world by developing new technologies to clean up the messes that we make. What I want to know is: Why do so many people -- well, I know -- but what I want to throw out there for your consideration is: Why do so many Americans want to believe the worst, just because a bunch of people you don't even know, whose credibility is established by people you don't even trust, why do you accept what they say? Why do you accept this whole global warming garbage anyway? The only people who promote it are the mainstream media which, in a presidential election, you wouldn't trust as far as you could throw them, or any other period. If Dan Rather tells you about global warming, knowing what you know about Dan Rather, are you going to believe it? If he puts on a scientist who says something about global warming, which he does three or four times a month, are you going to believe it? You shouldn't. But somehow, if it involves the evil of America, the doom and gloom of the earth, the fact that we're all corrupting our planet. Why, this is somehow easily acceptable to those people. It shouldn't be. Quick time-out, my friends. We'll be back after this. We will roll no calls on this. I'm telling you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT


I just want to say one more thing about this global warming business, a couple more things actually. This latest report -- because I don't believe it either; I mean, let me just... I'm not saying, "Oh, here's finally proof I'm right." I don't believe this garbage. I do not believe any of this. I do not believe that if we stop driving our cars, we're going to destroy ourselves, and I don't believe it if we keep driving our cars we're going to destroy ourselves, and that's the choice we have now. Now, I tell you what's going to happen on this story. Since this story stands as a threat to future financial gain of the existing environmental wacko caucus which goes out and secures government grants to study all this rotgut and then advance a bunch of rot-gut papers to so-called prove it, what we're going to end up with is the existing environmental wacko caucus trashing the researchers and the research here, and they will tie them to big polluters. They will say that big polluters, oil and gas, BP, Exxon Mobil, Texaco Chevron, whatever the companies are these days, are all behind this as a means to convince people to keep polluting the planet, keep driving cars because these corporate leaders do not care what condition the planet's in.

They can survive with polluted water and polluted air because they're wealthy, but you can't. That's what's going to be said. You know, Eisenhower once warned us when he left "orifice," of the military industrial complex. You know what? We don't have to worry about that anymore. It has a genuine purpose. You know what you need to be worried about here? What I call the environmental no-growth complex. Thousands of tax-exempt groups and universities and international organizations are committed to false science and they will not allow even evidence to deter them, and it is all oriented toward no growth, economics, and the ultimate, shall we say, neutering, if not defeat of capitalism. It is an environmentalist no-growth complex. That's what all this global warming stuff is about, up until this story today, but I just could not, in good conscience, not lead with this story today since it dovetails so well with what I was discussing yesterday. Stamford, Connecticut, this is Thomas. Welcome, sir. Great to have you up first on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, great to speak to you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Long, longtime listener. I know you saw it because you know everything but I was speaking to your screener and we were talking and I said I couldn't believe yesterday, I'm reading this article on the Internet about the vice president of Indonesia saying that Americans basically had to scale back their relief effort because they didn't want us to set up a base there, and that Americans couldn't be armed, and I'm just sitting here saying, "How ungrateful?" Here we are bringing billions of dollars, our military's bringing it over to them, and they're sitting there saying, "You know what? You can't do this," and you know what? Actually I'm mad at Bush. I'm mad at Bush because if I was Bush and I heard that, and obviously he had to hear the comment, I would say, "You know what, guys? Turn the ships around. Go to Thailand. Go to someone else who is a little bit more grateful." I am so tired of us taking crap. Everything we're blamed for in the world is the U.S. I'm reading today, there's some nut who is a meteorologist in Thailand blaming the U.S. because we didn't warn them that the tsunami was coming and he's saying that Hawaii should have notified all these countries and we tried to. Guess what, no one was answering the phones, Rush!


RUSH: Well, that's true. But the same people are also accusing us of causing the tsunami with a nuclear blast in conjunction with the Israelis.

CALLER: Well, you know what Rush, maybe we should --

RUSH: There was a warning, Thomas. There was a huge warning out there. Everybody was warned. We all heard about this. You know what it was? It's called an earthquake!

CALLER: Yeah, of course.

RUSH: It's called a 9.0 earthquake. What the hell do we think is going to happen with a 9.0 earthquake?

CALLER: And Rush, you're dealing with these third world countries and I'm tired of it.

RUSH: I understand that.

CALLER: I'm tired of the U.N. I'm telling you -- and I voted for Bush, I voted for his father. My brother's a colonel in the Air Force. He's been overseas the last two and a half years constantly, okay? He's down at your favorite place, I know, because he's at CENTCOM, so you know what he does.

RUSH: Yeah, yeah.

CALLER: Okay? And, you know, hey, he's getting taken away from his family all the time and if these people are that ungrateful, you know what? The hell with them. You know, this is a great thing. And you know what? The relief that we're sending is the same people that eventually will be coming over in hoards to attack us in a year or two.

RUSH: Yeah. I read the story and it's important to put something in the story. It doesn't lessen it much, but they're not against the aid. They want the aid to keep coming. They just don't want military troops on the scene.

CALLER: Oh, please.

RUSH: They don't want any military troops. They don't want any western military distributing the stuff.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Now, wait. Now, wait. Now, wait.

CALLER: I know.

RUSH: Understand who these people are. These are a bunch of paranoid religious zealots, and if they think that we started this tsunami by conducting an underground nuclear test with the Israelis, they're then going to assume that we are there to take over the country with the military. If they're that nuts, if they're that wacko -- and believe me, we have people as nuts as this in this country. We have as many wackos in this country who believe that as there are over there on a per capita percentage basis. And so if you just consider what they think for a minute -- don't judge what they think for a minute; just consider what they think -- it would be understandable. To me, it's almost a miracle they're giving us three months to get our military out of there. I had the same reaction you did. These ingrates! These ungrateful little slobs. They've just been destroyed. There's one nation on earth leading all the others who can save them and they don't care, and at some point, say, "If you don't want to be saved, fine, then go handle it yourself," but that's not who we are, because we do care about our fellow man and we do care about the planet and we do care about rebuilding things.

Besides that, there's going to be all kinds of economic opportunity over there to rebuild. It's going to be an investment panacea, just as Iraq is becoming. It's a little-known secret. The whole Middle East, Iraq has started... There's a huge series of investment opportunities over there. You probably don't believe me on this. There's a piece at OpinionJournal.com today, which is the free commentary side of the Wall Street Journal and it's all about how there's massive investment opportunity that has arisen since Saddam, in the post-Saddam era. I'll give you the details of it, if you want. We can link to it at RushLimbaugh.com later on, but just within the universe these people operate, if they really believe that we set off a nuclear blast with the Israelis to destroy their country and the next thing they see is our military, who cares that they're bringing food and water, they've also got guns and ammo, at least offshore and the Navy does. So you got to understand how these people think. It's their country. This is the kind of thing that Bush wanted to address. They should do it on the phone behind closed doors or send an emissary over there but this is something you shouldn't say publicly, but it is time.

It really is time that all these wackos, you know, be sat down in a room and say, "You know, you got to stop being wacko. You people are nuts. You're just total Looney Tunes," for all the good it would do. But it still would be an exciting thing to see. Anyway, I'm glad you called, Thomas. Thanks so much. You know, I forgot this was in the stack. I got to go back here. Sorry. From Scientific American: "Climate Change Desiccating the Planet, Researchers Conclude." We just shared with you a story that we got to keep driving the SUVs and keep driving the fossil fuels because if we stop, we're going to cause global warming to just go out of control. "The portion of our planet affected by serious drought has doubled in the last three decades, a new study suggests. Findings to be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in San Diego, Calif., indicate that the fraction of global land characterized as 'very dry' has increased from 10 to 15 percent in the 1970s to nearly 30 percent in 2002. Dry conditions in the U.S. are classified according to the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which compares the amount of moisture in the soil to that in the air closest to the surface. Using long-term temperature and precipitation records from 1870 to 2002, Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and colleagues calculated the Palmer index for locations around the world in which it is not routinely used. 'Droughts and floods are extreme climate events that are likely to change more rapidly than the average climate,' says Dai. 'Because they are among the world's costliest natural disasters and affect a very large number of people each year, it is important to monitor them and perhaps predict their variability.'"

So climate change is desiccating the planet. Of course we're causing climate change. No, we're not calling climate change. We do this; we don't do that. Live your life, folks! Just live your life and leave these people alone. Let them present their papers to themselves and when it costs you money, you know you got a problem. When they want to raise your taxes, when they want to tell you, "You can't drive a car," you know you got a problem. Tell them to go to hell. It's just that simple. All right. One more on this. This is from The Scotsman, and it is from Scotland, Scottish newspaper columnist George Kerevan.


"I'm [old] enough to remember the hurricane that hit Glasgow back in January 1968. Winds of over 100mph slammed into the west of Scotland, damaging 250,000 houses and killing 20 people." Yes, folks, a hurricane hit Scotland in 1968. Back in 1968, they were worried about, if anything, global cooling. A hurricane got that far north. Not a tropical storm, not a depression, not a "former" hurricane: A hurricane hit Glasgow, Scotland. If you find out where Glasgow is latitudinally, it's north of Ontario. When's the last time a hurricane hit Canada? At any rate, the man says that 20 people were killed, 250,000 houses damaged. "I awoke in Drumchapel to find a whole side of the local primary school ripped off like tin foil and chimneys littering the street. Frankly, it was all very exciting. The memory came back to me on Wednesday morning, as I walked round the outside of my house to check if any slates had been ripped off during Tuesday night’s gale - none, thankfully. Sadly, people were killed in this latest storm, but still it was not on a par with the 1968 event. Which makes me highly suspicious of the fashionable view that extreme weather events are getting more numerous, or are worse than they used to be. Rather, it is a case of Mother Nature’s random temper being recruited by some politically-motivated NGOs and some naive eco-warriors, to dramatise their ideological view that free-market, consumer economies are somehow evil. Once capitalism was denounced for making everyone unemployed and poor. Now, with most folk in the West getting obese sitting in front of their television watching Big Brother, and former Chinese peasants building computers and motor cars, that story no longer rings true. So the intellectual malcontents have changed their line of attack and decided that capitalism is evil because it produces bad weather. It is this kind of political hysteria that annoys me, not reasonable worries regarding how to protect the environment."

So the basic thrust of his piece is: Enough of this global warming hysteria. Capitalism was going to cause all this destruction; capitalism was going to cause all this unemployment and poverty. You can't say that anymore so I guess we got to blame capitalism for the weather. What have I been telling you? Twenty years, folks. It's all about anti-capitalism and here's a Brit liberal who has finally had his eyes opened. I'll share with you just the last paragraph. "On Wednesday morning, Scotland’s entire train system was simply closed down. Why? I thought the environmental thought-police were in favour of public transport? But the rail company, First ScotRail, is now so politically correct that fears that it could not guarantee that every last line was free of fallen branches led it to play safe. It wasn’t like that in Glasgow in 1968. Back then, we didn’t assume the world was ending, so we got on with solving the problem."

So simple. So easy to believe it can't possibly be true, right?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

I'm getting bombarded in the e-mail: "All right, Rush, explain the weather we're having now." What do you mean? Explain the weather in terms of what? "It's worse. It's bad. It's horrible." Oh, come on, folks! This is exactly what I mean. Do you know the winter of 1931 was worse than this? The winter of 1931, I think it snowed in Disneyland. It snowed in Orange County. They had more snow in southern California and in the mountains than they've had this year, records that have not been broken. I just think one of the factors here is that back in 1931, it wasn't reported as widely how bad the weather was because we didn't have CNN. We didn't have television. We didn't have pictures of it. We didn't see all the pictures. We see all this and, "Oh, my God, this is horrible! I've never seen anything like it!" It's true, and then the next thing: "Well, why, but Rush, you take a look at the year we've had. I mean, look at the hurricanes in Florida."

Well, where do you start measuring the year? If we're going to measure the year from January, we haven't had any hurricanes yet. This is the first month of the year. You want to measure the year starting from August, yeah, but it hasn't been a year yet. I mean, there's any number of things. Just get sane on this, folks. Will you just get sane, it's weather. "Yeah, Rush, but it's really a lot of weather." There's weather every day. I promise I'm going to get off of this. I just want you to remember one thing, folks. Here's the way to understand this. This is the simplest form I can make it: Anytime anything in the world is blamed on America or blamed on capitalism, the critics are liberals or socialists or communists. Now, if you want to agree with them, you are free to, but don't call here and try to convince me of it because I'm not going to waste time on sophistry on this program. I'm not going to listen to how this country's destroying the planet, the world, its own people or any of that rot-gut. From the BBC, by the way, get this: "Violations of human rights by the U.S. are undermining international law and eroding its role on the world stage, a leading campaign group says." Human Rights Watch, which is nothing. It's not a "leading group" of anything.

It's a bunch of kooks propped up by the left-wing media around the world because they're anti-American. (interruption) What, Mr. Snerdley? (interruption) Yeah. I know I told you this yesterday. He was doing a show on extreme weather and I said yesterday, "I hope that somebody tells him that a tsunami is not climate, that a tsunami is not weather." Remember I gave him the hint that polar bears are waking up two months early over there in Russia because the winter is so warm? They're being fooled. They not hibernating as long. Some of them haven't even fallen asleep. I hope he gets all the horrible news. At any rate, "Human Rights Watch says that the U.S. can no longer claim to defend human rights abroad if it practices abuses itself." This is all about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. So you apply the formula here. Anti-America, anticapitalists equals liberals. A bunch of liberals. How in the world are we eroding the role of international law on the world stage? We are the last outpost to guard against international abuses of the civil rights of Americans -- and that's what we're doing.

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(Reuters: Tsunami damage gives clues