You think climate change spurred by global warming is real? It’s all just a figment of your imagination. Just ask a farmer in the Southeastern United States. Or, then again, maybe not:
TONEY, Ala., July 2 — Northern Alabama has become acre after acre of shriveled cornstalks, cracked red dirt for miles and days of unrelenting white heat. The region’s most severe drought in over a century has farmers here averting their gaze from a future that looks as bleak as their fields.
The drought is worst here, but it is wilting much of the Southeast, causing watering restrictions and curtailed crops in Georgia, premature cattle sales in Mississippi and Tennessee, and rivers so low that power companies in the region are scrambling and barges are unable to navigate. Fourth of July fireworks are out of the question in many tinderbox areas. Hay to feed livestock is in increasingly short supply, watermelons are coming in small and some places have not had good rain since the start of the year.
Now I know some “junk” scientists have claimed that an increase of severe droughts would be a consequence of global warming. And, yes, Australia is in the throes of one of its worst droughts in years half a century or more. And I know that droughts in Africa have been linked to global warming, and have been predicted to double within the next 100 years (and that’s a so-called conservative estimate).
But I don’t see that as any reason to stop buring coal, oil or gasoline for our big SUV and trucks, do you? Who cares if a lot of Africans die, or a few farmers in the South go under, financially speaking:
Struggling to pay their bills, farmers here in the Tennessee Valley say they are burning through cash reserves and staring at bankruptcy, as last year’s dry weather turned into a singeing drought this year. Gleaming steel grain bins that should be full of corn ready to become ethanol are virtually empty. Cattle sales are several times normal; the farmers have nothing to feed them. Harvest day’s expected small returns will be make-or-break time, farmers here say.
It’s all caused by cosmic rays anyway, so that means it’s an act of God, not man. Right?
According to Sloan and Wolfendale, the 2000 paper highlighting the connection between cosmic rays and low-level clouds completely avoids clouds at other altitudes. This is surprising because cosmic ray ionization should increase with altitude. Cosmic rays should be intercepted earlier by the atmosphere and turned into clouds, not down at the lowest altitudes. If cosmic rays were to blame, you would expect the exact opposite, with more high-altitude clouds.
It can’t be ruled out, but it’s pretty unlikely.
The next piece of skeptical evidence is the likelihood that cosmic rays will create ions that turn into water droplets. The researchers estimated the density of cloud droplets that could be produced by cosmic rays at the lowest altitudes. They found that the rate of ion production was too low generate the number of water droplets required to create clouds. […]
“There is no connection between global warming and cosmic rays. That’s because there’s no trend in cosmic rays. It’s completely bogus,” remarked Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt, a NASA researcher and contributor to Realclimate.org.
Well, who you gonna believe? The good people funded by Exxon Mobil or some twerp scientist working for NASA? My guess? It’s all the fault of homosexuals and slutty girls gone wild, just like with Katrina and New Orleans. Couldn’t possibly be burning all that wonderful crude oil and coal God left for us to use as we saw fit. Those folks in Alabama and elsewhere in the South just need to pray more, that’s all. We all know what slackers they are in that department.
As one of my right leaning acquaintances says whenever I bring up anything to do with climate crisis stories: “it’s just a cycle.” Now, don’t you feel better?
Must be a unicycle because it sounds like he/she has a one track mind.
Interesting that things are so bad in Alabama. I read a whole transcript of their Ag commissioner giving an appearance in northern Alabama and he didn’t sound all that alarmed.
I was told every church in town had asked it people to pray for rain and even the Gov. had asked the people of the state to pray for rain.
I’ve been doing rain dances, and waiting for some guy in a wagon to come along and blow up silver nitrate in the air. Ya gotta keep with those tried an true ways, or at least that’s how it worked in the movies.
That must explain this punishment. Let’s see, Governor Siegelman got 7 tears. Sending him straight to prison should have brought a gully washer. Huh. Maybe if Tony Snow apologizes again?
This is just one more thing we’re supposed to ignore. Keep shopping. Rain follows the plow. Pray hard.
Too bad the Alabama God genocided all the Indians — their rain dance might have some credibility.
But as you point out it doesn’t really matter as long as the Potomac doesn’t dry up and Israel doesn’t blow away before Jesus comes to scoop up all the psychos.
…sound of grinding teeth…yes that’s a bumper sticker I just saw on my way back from town.
My God simply says, “THINK DAMNIT!”
A post over on Chris Mooney’s Intersection that the National Hurricane Ctr Direction may be on his way out, nice touch to be rudderless in Hurricane season ’07.
Out here in the somewhat West, the July 4th weekend is when we normally get out thunderstorms, not to mention our silly weekend outdoorsmen, translating into a holding breath to pray our tinderbox forests aren’t lit this weekend like they were last summer. Because wildfires are big business, it’s simply too quaint to try and put out a fire immediately, no, better to let it explode into 10,000 acres, then 50, then 250,000. Then you can bring in the BIG contractors to supply to firelines. As I sat last year penned inside because the smoke lay like heavy fog for 2 months, I often wondered just what that massive amount of smoke was doing to not only our atmosphere but to the places it settled, as in the remaining important snowpacks.
On this I admire Arnold S’s approach to the CA wildfires. He seems to throw everything he has at them immediately. None of this wait and see for him and the skies are better for it.
Sorry for rant. Global warming is always personal
From the Georgia/Florida fires of last month we were getting a good bit of smoke here, and we even had some idiot set a forest fire about 20 miles from my house. Luckily it was put out in plenty of time. I grew up in the Southeast and recently moved back. This is the first time I or my family can remember it being this dry and so prone to fires.
I had always seen on the news about the fires out west, but I never understood how on edge everyone could be, waiting for the next one to start. Now I do.
I have never traveled to your part of the state.
I would have thought it had tropical showers on a regular basis. How far down do those stop?
I’m about mid-state western side. We’re included in the “extreme drought” condition now, although we’re just at the edge of it. Those tropical showers have been staying close to the coast.
Oh I misread your post. I thought you were in the southeast.
I remember you saying you went to N.O. once, and I don’t know if you drove or flew. If you drove the interstate, you probably came through the area around me.
yes, I was nearly killed in tornadoes in Tuscaloosa.
I didn’t see much of Alabama because it was pouring the whole time.
Tuscaloosa, about an hour from me. That’s the weather I’m more used to living here.
My late father often used an expression that I think is quite apropos with respect to this issue: Fact The Dictator. Which I would more or less define as the specific point in any ongoing debate or controversy when the feel-good, don’t-worry-be-happy magic bus of wishful thinking and self-delusion smashes head-on into the brick wall of stark, uncompromising reality.
It’s just too bad that our little pint-size Napoleon wannabe can’t simply banish reality with one of his famous signing statements. But sadly for all his die-hard, true believer supporters in Alabama and elsewhere, it turns out there is one despot who’s even more powerful and omnipotent than The Mighty Chimp. Who’d a thunk it?