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Drought conditions does not mean climate change

Here is an example of one of my biggest pet peeves.

The record drought plaguing California isn’t limited by lines on a map. Arid conditions caused by dwindling rainfall and snowpack are stretching across the West.

In Washington’s Yakima Valley, popular for growing wine grapes and beer hops, officials are cutting off water to about 1,700 farmers for three weeks starting today. At Lake Mead, east of Las Vegas, a 130-foot white band lines canyon walls as water sinks to the lowest since the reservoir was filled in 1937.

“California has gotten the attention, and rightly so,” said Roger Pulwarty, director of the National Integrated Drought Information System at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. “Across most of the West, dry conditions are expected to persist.”

While droughts are common in the western U.S., climate change has led to longer and more frequent water shortages in recent years. Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have been since 2000, according to NASA, diminishing mountain snowpacks -- including in California and Nevada’s Sierra Nevada range -- that supply most of the water in the western U.S.

It took exactly four paragraphs to introduce “climate change,” link it to the drought, and give a range of 150 years.

I live in Arizona. There are deserts here that have been deserts for ten thousand years. The same is true of Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico. According to McFiach my MacBook Air, 150 years is 1.5% of ten thousand years. A drop in the bucket.

It’s not dryer because of what humans have done. It’s dry because the American Southwest has deserts.

I’ve been saying for decades that the Western U.S. has a huge water problem. Ever since I read Cadillac Desert in the early 80’s.

Tho Cult of Climate Change has subverted every environmental issue. That’s why environmentalism is a colossal failure. Better to use ecology, that means considering the connections and the trade-offs.

You want to blame humans, blame humans for doing almost nothing for the last fifty years when it comes to reservoirs and water management while adding millions in population.

Yes, it’s a human screwup but it is not “climate change.”



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